The wolf does not need every sheep to trust him. He needs them to distrust the sheep who can smell him.
Popular folklore tells us that the flock is protected by the "sheepdog"—the rare, fierce guardian who keeps the predator at bay. But the wolf’s most effective strategy is not to outfight the sheepdog; it is to convince the flock that the dog's bark is actually a conspiracy against them.
A lighthouse is an odd place to escape responsibility. Its keeper may never meet the people using its beam, never see their ships, never learn whether tonight’s work saved a life. The keeper tends the lamp without expecting a report from every ship that passes. The light travels farther than the keeper’s knowledge of its consequences.
The Matrix gets one thing exactly right: if you are going to imprison humanity forever, at least have the decency to give us good restaurants.
"Nothing can produce more disastrous effects on human progress, as regards the destiny of individuals, than the very prevalent notion that one religion followed out in a pious spirit, is as good as another, and that if such and such doctrines are perhaps absurd when you look into them, the great majority of good people will never think of their absurdity, but will recite them in a blamelessly devoted attitude of mind." (Sinnett 1885, pp. 194–195; Guénon 2004, p. 126.)Sinnett, A. P. (1885) [1883]. Esoteric Buddhism (5th ed.). London: Chapman and Hall Ltd
"It is priestly imposture that rendered these gods so terrible to man; it is religion that makes of him the selfish bigot, the fanatic that hates all mankind out of his own sect without rendering him any better or more moral for it. It is the belief in God and gods that makes two-thirds of humanity the slaves of a handful of those who deceive them under the false pretence of saving them." (Barker 1924, Letter 10.)Kuthumi; et al. (1924). Barker, A. T. (ed.). The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett from the Mahatmas M. & K. H. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers
On those who say religion is unnecessary, given humanity's growing scientific knowledgeThat last part rings true to me. Honestly I think that fear and emotion cloud these discussions so much on the part of religious people that they can't really talk about God in a grown-up way. They are too afraid they'll go to hell for doubting. That's the pathetic part of religion: mind control.
I think science and religion are at some point both about big questions of origin and wonder. And I think, for me, I've always felt that it's important for religious people to have the same kind of philosophical stance they use in their religious life as they do in the rest of their life. And a lot of times I think religion — religions — ask people to sort of turn off the scientific part of their lives and just go and kind of think about God kind of pre-scientifically.
I don't think we can do that. We've got to have a faith that is, in some sense, consonant with the way we think about the world scientifically. And again, I think one of the things the Pew study suggests to us is that if the church can get over its anxiety about talking about God in a grown-up way, we would actually reach out to and speak to more people than we do right now. [emphasis added]
A serious but startling statistical analysis by researcher Greg S. Paul suggests that if we include the unborn, more than 98 percent of Heaven’s inhabitants, some 350 billion, would be those who died before maturing to the point that they could voluntarily “accept the gift of salvation.” The vast majority of the heavenly host would be moral automatons or robots, meaning they never had moral autonomy and never chose to be there. Christian believers, ironically, would be a 1 to 2 percent minority even if all 30,000+ denominations of believers actually made it in.So...what's the point of this life, again? If we have these immortal souls that live eternally, why clothe them in physical form in this world at all? It seems that the vast populace of Hell is anyone who lives past the age of accountability (if there is such a thing), while the vast populace of Heaven is anyone who didn't make it that far.
The theological implications are huge. Christian theologians typically explain evil by arguing that this was the best of all possible worlds, the only way to create free will and to develop moral virtues (like courage, compassion, forgiveness and so forth), to make us more Christ-like and prepare us for Heaven. But if we run the numbers, it appears that God didn’t need the whole free will—sin—redemption thing to fill his paradise with perfect beings because no suffering, evil, or moral freedom is actually required as a prelude to glory.
But love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion’s knowledge claims. We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection. I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines —and other believers have similar doubts. They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.He presents such agnosticism as a sort of "middle way" between "no arguments" atheism, which is the presumption that the burden of proof lies on the religious, and the presumption by religion that faith justifies knowledge.
It may well be that physical science will ultimately give us a complete account of reality. It may, that is, give us causal laws that allow us to predict (up to the limits of any quantum or similar uncertainty) everything that happens in the universe. This would allow us to entirely explain the universe as a causal system. But there are aspects of our experience (consciousness, personality, moral obligation, beauty) that may not be merely parts of the causal system. They may, for example, have meanings that are not reducible to causal interactions.I would wager all my earthly goods that many people believe in religious knowledge claims because of these aspects of our experience. Religion has done a great job of packaging together some really hard-to-swallow claims about history and science with a much easier-to-swallow sense of appreciation for these aspects of our experience, and insisting they be taken together or not at all. Many believers I know have pointed this exact thing out to me before after a long dialog in which they may see that I have some good points/arguments in favor of rejecting some of their knowledge claims about history and science.
The Case Against Resurrection (Prof. Arif Ahmed)
All the arguments assume that we have evidence far stronger than what is available in the Bible: in particular we assume that we have contemporary testimony from witnesses who are known to be both independent of one another and highly educated; and we assume that the testimony states directly that a corpse came back to life after three days as a solid body able to pass through rock (John 20:19, 20:26).
First argument
(1) If two hypotheses are compatible with the evidence we should prefer the one that we expect to be more frequent given evidence of that type.
(2) We have frequently observed and verified beyond doubt cases of independent and educated witnesses testifying at the time to something that didn’t happen.
(3) We have never observed and verified cases of bodily reanimation after three days or of solid bodies passing through rock.
(4) Therefore, it is more likely that the witnesses got it wrong.
Second argument
(1) If two hypotheses are compatible with the evidence then we should prefer the one that we expect to be more frequent given evidence of that type.
(2) We have frequently verified cases of an apparent miracle turning out to have an initially unknown natural explanation.
(3) We have never verified cases (except possibly that in dispute) of an apparent miracle having no natural explanation (known or unknown).
(4) Therefore, a presently unknown natural explanation is more likely than a supernatural Resurrection.
Third Argument
(1) If the evidence gives us no reason to prefer one hypothesis to another we should give them equal weight
(2) The evidence gives no reason to prefer Resurrection to any other supernatural explanation.
(3) Therefore a supernatural Resurrection is no more likely than a supernatural hallucination (or Satan, or Baal, or…)
“Was there one thing in particular that caused you to lose your faith in God?” I asked at the outset.I've always been interested in finding this photo.
He thought for a moment. “It was a photograph in Life magazine,” he said finally.
“Really?” I said. “A photograph? How so?”
He narrowed his eyes a bit and looked off to the side, as if he were viewing the photo afresh and reliving the moment. “It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa,” he explained. “They were experiencing a devastating drought. And she was holding her dead baby in her arms and looking up to heaven with the most forlorn expression. I looked at it and I thought, ‘Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain?’” As he emphasized the word rain, his bushy gray eyebrows shot up and his arms gestured toward heaven as if beckoning for a response.
“How could a loving God do this to that woman?” he implored as he got more animated, moving to the edge of his chair. “Who runs the rain? I don’t; you don’t. He does – or that’s what I thought. But when I saw that photograph, I immediately knew it is not possible for this to happen and for there to be a loving God. There was no way. Who else but a fiend could destroy a baby and virtually kill its mother with agony – when all that was needed was rain?”
He paused, letting the question hang heavily in the air. Then he settled back into his chair. “That was the climactic moment,” he said. “And then I began to think further about the world being the creation of God. I started considering the plagues that sweep across parts of the planet and indiscriminately kill – more often than not, painfully – all kinds of people, the ordinary, the decent, and the rotten. And it just became crystal clear to me that it is not possible for an intelligent person to believe that there is a deity who loves.”
Templeton was tapping into an issue that had vexed me for years. In my career as a newspaper reporter, I hadn’t merely seen photos of intense suffering; I was a frequent first-hand observer of the underbelly of life where tragedy and suffering festered – the rotting inner cities of the United States, the filthy slums of India, Cook County Jail and the major penitentiaries, the hospice wards for the hopeless, disaster sites. More than once, my mind reeled at trying to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the depravity and heartache and anguish before my eyes.
But Templeton wasn’t done. “My mind then went to the whole concept of hell. My goodness,” he said, his voice rising in astonishment, “I couldn’t hold someone’s hand to a fire for a moment. Not an instant! How could a loving God, just because you don’t obey him and do what he wants, torture you forever – not allowing you to die, but to continue in that pain for eternity? There is no criminal who would do this!”
“So these were the first doubts you had?” I asked.
“Prior to that, I had been having more and more questions about things like, for instance, unanswered prayer. I had preached to hundreds of thousands of people the antithetical message, and then I found to my dismay that I could no longer believe it. To believe it would be to deny the brain I had been given. It became quite clear that I had been wrong. So I made up my mind that I would leave the ministry. That’s essentially how I came to be agnostic.”
According to their study 51.5 percent of professors, responding to the question of whether they believe in God, chose the response, "While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God," or the statement, "I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it." While atheists and agnostics in the United States make up about 3 and 4.1 percent of the population, respectively, the prevalence of atheism and agnosticism was much higher among professors: 9.8 percent of professors chose the statement, "I don't believe in God," while another 13.1 percent chose, "I don't know whether there is a God." In other words, religious skepticism is much more common among professors than in the general American population. However, the majority are still believers.
How do these numbers break down by discipline? Gross and Simmons explore how belief in God is distributed among the 20 largest disciplinary fields. In terms of atheists, professors of psychology and mechanical engineering lead the pack with 50 percent and 44.1 percent respectively. Amongst biologists, 33.3 percent were agnostic and 27.5 percent were atheist. Interestingly, 21.6 percent of biologists say that they have no doubt that God exists. In contrast, 63 percent of accounting professors, 56.8 percent of elementary education professors, 48.6 percent of finance professors, 46.5 percent of marketing professors, 45 percent of art professors, and 44.4 percent of both nursing professors and criminal justice professors stated that they know God exists.
Gross and Simmons also attempted to discover the proportion of professors who think of themselves as religiously progressive, moderate, or traditional. They found that professors in the social sciences and humanities are more than twice as likely identify themselves as religiously progressive (32.5 percent and 35 percent, respectively), while a larger number of physical and biological scientists see themselves as moderate (32.2 percent) as opposed to progressive or traditionalist.
The research also describes the religious affiliation of professors in the United States: 37.9 percent can be classified as Protestant, 15.9 percent identify themselves as Roman Catholic, and 9 percent as "Other Christian." Jewish professors make up about 5.4 percent of the sample, and 2.6 percent are Muslim. Overall, 18.6 percent stated that they were "born-again Christians." Around 46 percent of professors who identified themselves as "traditionalist" were also born-again Christians. Although, as noted above, 51.5 percent of professors say they believe in God, 31.2 percent claim to have no religious affiliation. In other words, they don't belong to any particular religion, but still believe in a higher power.
"The hard-core atheist," Prothero writes, "once a stock figure in American life, has gone the way of the freak show."This time he sounds a little better:
Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University and author of "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't," served as an advisor on the survey. "I think in general the survey confirms what I argued in the book, which is that we know almost nothing about our own religions and even less about the religions of other people," he said.But Alan Cooperman, of Pew Forum, nails it:
"[Atheists and agnostics] are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."And that's why we don't buy it anymore.
It's a long way from admitting that atheists deserve equal rights and lobbying that Christians do (I know, try not to laugh). But it's a hell of a lot better than the last guy who lived at the White House did. Also, check out this column from Kristof on the role of faith-based organizations in doing actual humanitarian work. It caused me to re-examine some of my prejudices.THIS WEEK IN GOD.... First up from the God Machine this week was a rare White House meeting, between Obama administration officials and prominent atheists. (via Ron Chusid)
President Barack Obama has burnished his Christian credentials, courted Jewish support and preached outreach toward Muslims. On Friday, his administration will host a group that fits none of the above: America's nonbelievers.
The president isn't expected to make an appearance at the meeting with the Secular Coalition for America or to unveil any new policy as a result of it.
Instead, several administration officials will sit down quietly for a morning meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus with about 60 workhorses from the coalition's 10 member groups, including the American Atheists and the Council for Secular Humanism. Tina Tchen, the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, and representatives from the Justice and Health and Human Services departments will participate.
Coalition leaders are billing their visit as an important meeting between a presidential administration and the "nontheist" community.
The Secular Coalition for America called the meeting "the first time in history a presidential administration has met for a policy briefing with the American nontheist community."
The Catholic League, which is offended for a living, condemned the gathering. "People of faith, especially Christians, have good reason to wonder exactly where their interests lie with the Obama administration," professional complainer Bill Donohue said. "Now we have the definitive answer." Donohue described attendees as "anti-religious activists" who would like to "crush Christianity if they could."
