— Voltaire on his deathbed after a parish priest
asked him if he renounced Satan.
Too little God is worse than too much, when it comes to gay rights — but no God is best. This is the opinion of Sam Harris, a leading American atheist and comparative religions scholar. Gay men have more to fear from religious moderates than fundamentalists, he argues in a provocative online essay, An Atheist Manifesto.
Moderates, in fact, make extremism more tolerable. By softening their beliefs, by making them no more than feel-good self-help mechanisms, religious moderates allow superstition to wear the garments of reason, to be touted as social goods (Harris argues they are just the opposite) and to enable the worst abuses against gay men and women — in fact against humanity, in general.
“Any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that,” observes Harris, a winner of the 2005 PEN award for non-fiction. ” If he exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.”
The claim that God’s ways are unknowable is a dodge, Harris contends. It’s the way moderates duck the emotional impact of events like Hurricane Katrina or the massacres in Rwanda. If God is not responsible for human suffering, he wonders, “how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this … If God exists, either he can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities or he does not care to.”
As a recent example of this disconnect, he brings us back to the national embarrassment of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. “What was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend.”
Which brings us to the war on homosexuals. In keeping with what Harris cites as “religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions and religious diversions of scarce resources,” the current war on homosexuals is simply the latest in an awful history of religious manias. But even here, religious moderates will give their wrathful co-religionists a pass by looking elsewhere for the reasons behind the contempt, anywhere but in religion:
“Religious moderates tend to imagine that human conflict is always reducible to a lack of education, to poverty or to political grievances. This is one of the many delusions of liberal piety.
“To dispel it, we need only reflect on the fact that the Sept. 11 hijackers were college educated and middle class and had no discernible history of political oppression. They did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time at their local mosque talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not a matter of education, poverty or politics?
“The truth, astonishingly enough, is this: A person can be so well educated that he can build a nuclear bomb while still believing that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise.”
For many of our readers, the litany of religious wrongs, especially those against gay people (the word “faggot” comes from the kindling wood used when heretics were burned at the stake) is too well known to need repeating. What is extraordinary about Harris’ essay is the case he makes against even the gentlest forms of religion. His unsparing critique of religious moderates strikes us as the most original thinking in the piece:
Although it is easy enough for smart people to criticize religious fundamentalism, something called “religious moderation” still enjoys immense prestige in our society, even in the ivory tower. This is ironic, as fundamentalists tend to make a more principled use of their brains than “moderates” do.
While fundamentalists justify their religious beliefs with extraordinarily poor evidence and arguments, they at least make an attempt at rational justification. Moderates, on the other hand, generally do nothing more than cite the good consequences of religious belief. Rather than say that they believe in God because certain biblical prophecies have come true, moderates will say that they believe in God because this belief “gives their lives meaning.”
When a tsunami killed a few hundred thousand people on the day after Christmas, fundamentalists readily interpreted this cataclysm as evidence of God’s wrath. As it turns out, God was sending humanity another oblique message about the evils of abortion, idolatry and homosexuality. While morally obscene, this interpretation of events is actually reasonable, given certain (ludicrous) assumptions.
Moderates, on the other hand, refuse to draw any conclusions whatsoever about God from his works. God remains a perfect mystery … In the face of disasters like the Asian tsunami, liberal piety is apt to produce the most unctuous and stupefying nonsense imaginable. And yet, men and women of goodwill naturally prefer such vacuities to the odious moralizing and prophesizing of true believers.
Between catastrophes, it is surely a virtue of liberal theology that it emphasizes mercy over wrath. It is worth noting, however, that it is human mercy on display — not God’s — when the bloated bodies of the dead are pulled from the sea. On days when thousands of children are simultaneously torn from their mothers’ arms and casually drowned, liberal theology must stand revealed for what it is — the sheerest of moral pretenses.
Even the theology of wrath has more intellectual merit.
If God exists, his will is not inscrutable. The only thing inscrutable in these terrible events is that so many neurologically healthy men and women can believe the unbelievable and think this the height of moral wisdom.”
We are sure our readers will have a variety of opinions on this matter.
Nightcharmers, discuss.
Sam Harris was awarded the 2005 PEN Award for non-fiction for his international best-seller,
The End of Faith, available through Amazon
You can find An Atheist Manifesto online
at the Truthdig website
Video of Sam Harris on the deadly union of
religion, technology and government
Oh dear, I dare not get started on this theme it is too much for this small space. I consider religion the source of most of the evils that have ever plagued humanity especially the 3 monotheistic religions. As a former Catholic I am always enraged and amused at how backward the Church has always been and continues to be. They forgave themselves and poor Galileo after 500 years. Apologised for the Crusades, nearly 1000 years too late for the tens of thousands of misguided fools and victims who suffered and died beyond comprehension.
Made feeble comments and regrets regarding the Church’s actions and non actions in relation to the 6 million Jews who were persecuted, tortured and murdered, not to mention the millions during the previous 1900 centuries, a bit too late. And now all hail the dead actor pope who was a bigoted, narrow minded ass and played the role of his life and the poor ignorant audience bought the act and his successor who continues with the ignorant, irresponsible statements about homosexuals. No one has apologised for the past sufferings, tortures and deaths of homosexual men inspired and instigated by Christianity among others not to mention every time the pope opens his big mouth more homosexual are bashed, discriminated against and murdered. Religions give license and permission to the ignorant and brutal mindless of this world to go out and torment and murder us. Ah, be consoled, maybe in about 500 years some enlightened religious leader will apologize, too late to alleviate the miseries of millions of boys and men who suffered and died throughout the previous 2+ millennia.
Let’s take England and the former Soviet Union as our models. Where churches are now museums and showspaces and everyone is a tacit atheist.
Well yes, it may be that moderate believers make the extremists more palatable, thereby obscuring the real dangers of religion. On the other hand, and by the same token, it can be argued that fundamentalism makes the moderates look bad. If you view religion as a mechanism for dealing with the unexplained intricacies of reality and the existential questions most people think they need some kind of answer to, then okay: what’s wrong with that?
Contemporary religion is based on the same fears and uncertainties that made the cavemen huddle together in a thunderstorm, conjecturing about some animated force of nature they might have angered, and who is now taking it out on them: a form of abstraction that is essential to the kind of analytic thinking which homo sapiens has made so specifically his own.
Maybe, in a few more millennia, humans as a species will have learned to think beyond that stage. For now, Harris is probably too ‘extreme’ himself in his atheism, which is unpalatable in its own right to those people who do indeed experience religion as nothing more than a friendly cushion against the harsh everyday.
Let me weight in with all my sodomight:
Faggot (slang)
You will find a pro-gay atheist blog here
Now I am a great anti-religious person. I don’t think it is bad to put faith in religion, but I believe it is better to have faith in yourself, instead of kneeling to pray every night just to wake up the next day. The hard truth is that more than 80% of the worlds population, is dedicatingly praying, blessing or wathever, to their own fantasy. I don’t scrutinise religion, I just think it is a bit silly. I put my faith in other people in myself, and yes, people let me down sometimes. I even let myself down every now and then, but doesn’t god? As said in the story, Katrina, and the Bird’splague, as we call it here, aren’t they signs of lacking divinity?
Well I’m gonna stop now. I don’t have much faith nor hope in any god’s existence. But good religions make people to be a better person, which is perfectly fine to me. D.A. Becker
I made a post about religion here
It gives people false hope. Religion acts like a crutch to help people handle reality, but most never learn to walk without it. It’s hard when you realize that we have no indication of an intelligent creator leaving a mark on this world. When I denounced my faith I became a hopeful agnostic first, but as I began to see how incompetent the human race really is I unwillingly became an atheist.
I find it mind boggeling that all existence has no beginning and perhaps no end. I try to wrap my head around it. Sometimes I think I can almost get it, but the thoughts dissolve into incoherent forms of witch I cant say if are images, sounds, ideas, or vibration of some sort.
Then there’s life. Life is a strong indication of something working in a complicated way. Because primitive man did not understand the concept of evolution, they found the most logical explanation was that something higher must have made it all.
Even though evolution is obviously where advanced life came from it still seems insane that life could have become so cunning. Gravity is what makes planets round just as survival is what makes life smart.
If we did know a god of some sort made life here, it would seem evident that the god didn’t care what happens to us after it left. It would seem evident that it left long before we ever evolved into man.
Humans are naturally selfish. We are that way for a reason. Selfish animals survive best. People often see themselves as the star of their life. People care more about their families than others. People care about their country more than others. As long as its other people being murdered in some distant country and not us, we will bitch a little but we won’t all collectively take action to stop it, just as a group of concerned people may run to help a victim from a mugger. So unless it’s happening before us, we don’t care. The world revolves around us, and the closer something is the more is matters.
This is the mind frame that leads us to think we must have been carefully created by god himself. And any mortality fearing person will desperately want the hope that comes from knowing, god acknowledges you.
I wish god did exist, and I wish he would find us and help us in that case. And if he did exist and said that being gay was wrong and don’t eat carrots on Thursday, I would agree as long as he made me immortal, so I could spend eternity demanding an explanation for his dumb ass rules.
Maybe I should just write a book.
PS:
“Why am I banned? You may have left a message in the past that
solicited sex, money, or religious conversion.”
This thread is a religious topic inherently. So either the rule about religious conversations dont apply here, or that rules where never enforced. Abolished perhaps? Hope so.
Out of all the reasons one can be banned, religous conversation is the only one of them that actualy has no negitive effect. To squech them would be backwards progress IMO.
Discussion of religion, or atheism, does not result in a ban on Nightcharm. We draw the line at proselytizing, which is not only inappropriate here but is usually coupled with fire and brimstone rhetoric against gay people. That’s when we shit-can your ass.
if only religion was this pretty: (link)