May 30 2008
Agnostic about atheism
[Guardian]
The strident secularism of Dawkins and Hitchens misses a bigger point. God doesn’t have to be great for religion to be worthwhile. Albert Einstein’s letter, containing a short rant about God and the Bible, sold recently for 25 times its expected price - thanks, in part, to professional atheist Richard Dawkins being one of the unsuccessful bidders. It’s long been said that religion is a racket. Sales figures of other anti-God rants - much longer than Einstein’s letter to Eric Gutkind - suggest that atheism may be catching up. But is it good for the atheists?
As we know, it helps to have a book in circulation. Dawkins’ recent work The God Delusion is nowhere near as big as the Bible, but shifting 1.5m copies is more than respectable. Book sales have a legitimizing effect. It’s not just the growing number of readers who may be converted by a polemic. Monetary success confers an impressive, almost magical, aura.
If atheism’s a commercial success, associated with a certain kind of high-flying, worldly proselytizer, we may yet see the advent of an atheist sect - reclusive ascetics who wish to distance themselves from the more ostentatious non-believers. Atheist sects? Not as crazy a concept as you might think. In New York, there has even been talk of a “church” - a physical house of non-worship - for atheists. Start a church and, even if you remove all mention of God, a schism seems inevitable.
Christopher Hitchens, declaring that “god is not great,” seems to have designed this phrase expressly to piss off the worshipful. Religion may be childish but so is a show of disrespect. If we’re so comfortable in our non-belief, do we need to go around nettling the believers?
While finishing my third novel, I faced a dilemma: whether to capitalise the G in God when referring to the Christian deity. God is more of a concept than a being to me, but the lower case “god” suggested by Hitchens just didn’t look right. If Nancy, Allison, and Jasmine (fictional prostitutes in my novel) require the upper case treatment, it seems democratic to do likewise for God, who is also a product of the imagination.
As a central character in so many other stories, God has legs, but I am not here to defend God’s greatness. Or legs. I prefer to say that God … is just OK.
Read the whole story here.
[From me]
I like what Ms. Quan has to say. I guess an Atheist can say what I’ve been asking for years better than me. If a person wants to be an atheist, agnostic, Mormon, Muslim, or whatever that is up to them. I will still pray and share my faith but I will respect their rights to believe what they want. A3 reminds me of Ms. Quan.
What do you think?
6 responses so far
Kevin,
I think Ms. Quan is much cuter. :^D
(I know what you meant - and thanks)
I disagree. Saying people can have whatever religious beliefs they want is akin to saying they can have any political beliefs they want. Some of them happen to be wrong (or, in the case of religion, all).
I’m not Voltaire- I won’t defend your right to believe anything. You must prove it. Otherwise it is just nonsense.
There wouldn’t be an atheist schizm. Atheism is the simple lack of belief. It is impossilbe for there to be a split. It would be like those who don’t believe in Santa to have a split.
re: Samuel Skinner’s comment “You must prove it. Otherwise it is just nonsense.”
Evolution (as an agent of speciation) remains unproved; Darwin’s whimsey has been stuck on the same theoretical plateau for a hundred years because it cannot be duplicated (proven) in controlled experiments.
Likewise, science has yet to demonstrate, miuch less”prove,” how dirt can morph to life … regardless of how many eons are attached.
joe d. hall’s last blog post..SD zen
What- is ignorance your shield?
Evolution has been shown to be valid repeatedly. Best example? Flu season. They can’t make a single vaccine to protect you because the flu mutates and evolves in less than a year!
There is also a huge fossil record for humans tracing back our origin to 200000 years ago and our break from the rest of the family 6 million years ago.
You stunning failure to understand evolution is also evident with your next statement.
1) Evolution is not about the origin of life.
2) Abiogenisis does not claim life came from dirt.
3) Life can’t possibly come from dirt due to the fact dirt is the remains of living creatures!
4) The current theories for the origins of life are 1 primordial soup, 2 volcanic vents and 3 trapped in the ice. They haven’t been shown to be valid yet… but so far they have been tested and NOT been shown to be wanting (except the organic soup model- it has some problems)
In short, don’t talk about things you fail to understand- you show your true colors as an idiot.
joe d. hall,
Would you be willing to accept that evolution occurs if there there were some examples of observed speciation?
Of the top of my head humanity counts as an example of speciation. We solit of from the chimps 6-7 million years ago.
More recent examples would be modern domestic animals and plants- some of them are truely seperate species from their wild kin. Corn definately is- its wild form is almost unrecognizable.