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God is not responsible for war and suffering
by John Heard, The Australian
Thanks to Lee Holmes (Atheist Foundation of Australia) for the link.
Reposted from:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21861447-7583,00.html
A recent spate of books and films from atheists have incorrectly blamed religion for humankind's misery, but the true culprit is much closer to home
June 07, 2007
WE live in curious, irritating times. We are oppressed by superstition and absurd ideologies. We must understand at the root of much that is wrong with the world is a single, common, insidious factor: religion. At least according to public atheists and anti-theists, a remarkable number of whom have devoted large amounts of air time and ink lately to bashing Christians in particular and religious believers in general.
In television series after book, from Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion to Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, a cacophony of historical, philosophical, political or more obviously silly reasons are advanced for why religion, religious faith or religious adherents are infantile, irrational, dangerous or otherwise contemptible.
The terror wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories link up across the world with al-Qa'ida bombings and lend such a view some currency. Other ethnic and religion-related battles of the recent past, particularly in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, contribute to a sense of millenarian madness.
Sometimes it seems like AD1000 all over again.
Militant atheists are right, then, to see religious believers in or behind many of the great struggles of our time. They are wrong, however, to then conclude that humankind must therefore scrap religion.
Examples of bad behaviour perpetrated by religious believers simply don't tell us anything definitive about religions themselves and certainly nothing necessarily negative about the gods they posit.
This shows the central claim of many of the recent crop of atheistic books relies on a belief less tenable than the relatively well-documented resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and a hypothesis that wouldn't get past a first-year science student. For if the atheist authors bothered to investigate anything other than the most apparently bizarre topics of religious interest, they'd discover that only a belief that God directly controls the actions of believers - in other words, the kind of determinism that Christians and others long ago rejected - would make God somehow culpable for the violent actions of his followers.
Similarly, only scientific proof that a man's religious affiliation predicts his behaviour, a hypothesis long ago rejected by psychologists, would make religion an obviously poisonous thing.
Rather, those tragedies, these examples of war and violence seem to favour an interpretation more common to the great Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism and Islam): namely that we live in a degraded reality and that man, left to his own devices, is a fairly despicable creature.
In the absence of a divinely endorsed militia, the most obvious explanation for war and chaos is that humans take up arms and nations of humans continually declare war, and for many reasons. Sometimes we use religious claims to justify our actions, but these are most certainly human reasons, human interpretations of religious claims and human actions.
The responsibility for strife rests with humanity. To paraphrase a well-known slogan, religion doesn't kill people, people kill people.
Indeed, most religious believers, certainly a Christian looking for empirical support for his interior convictions, could reasonably conclude from the misery of the present context and the long history of human strife that there might just be something to a religion that looks beyond human weakness for inspiration.
Certainly, in many cases the appeal to God as a restorer of divine balance, as the creator of a serene and charitable community, particularly in the Western political and legal systems, is the only thing that moderates nationalism, greed, vengeance, victor's justice and other examples of excess.
Similarly, there have been great crimes committed in the name of religion, but it is wild to claim, as some atheists have, that bad fruit fills the religion basket.
On the contrary, the gifts of Christianity alone to culture, Islam to early medicine, Roman Stoicism to philosophy and Judaism to the legal order are priceless. It is also impossible to think of anti-theist print journalists without the Gutenberg printing press invented by Christians to make mass copies of the Bible. Similarly, various atheists' positions as academics would be inconceivable if the Christian monastic tradition hadn't preserved ancient knowledge during the Dark Ages, then shared it again in newly created universities from the Middle Ages onwards.
Indeed, the only reason religion rejecters can tally the apparently long list of religious errors is because religious believers invented the intellectual disciplines and furnished the academic tools that are used today to attack religion. And it was a Christian, Pope Gregory XIII, who divided time into units - days, months and years - to tell monks and priests when to pray and atheists when to launch their books. Similarly, atheists too often forget that, while they're tallying the lists of death and destruction apparently wrought by believers, they'd better add the most egregious numbers, the most horrendous crimes - the Holocaust, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Stalin's famines, gulags and secret police - to the column reserved for totalitarian regimes of a decidedly anti-religious and often officially atheistic bent.
Competing universalising urges within various religions may throw up extremist Christians, militant Muslims and the kind of fanatical Jews who carried out the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, but none of these criminals, no fanatical movement in the eons of religious history, not even modern Islamofascism or the whole miserable chapter of the Crusades, has wreaked the sort of havoc the Jew and Christian-hating Nazi regime achieved in one brief decade.
On the contrary, time and time again religious faith has applied the brakes to monstrous human excess.
It is also true that no religious nation on earth, not even theocratic Shi'ite Iran, offends against basic human rights on the scale of officially atheist China.
It is a big leap then, a leap of blind faith perhaps, to look to selected examples of violence or chaos linked to religious believers and conclude that God doesn't exist or isn't great, that religion poisons everything or that those who believe in God are somehow deluded.
No, the responsibility for mass suffering, for warfare and violence, the secret to the strife humanity has always endured appears to rest within, God help us, the human heart.
John Heard is a Melbourne writer.
Reposted from:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21861447-7583,00.html
A recent spate of books and films from atheists have incorrectly blamed religion for humankind's misery, but the true culprit is much closer to home
June 07, 2007
WE live in curious, irritating times. We are oppressed by superstition and absurd ideologies. We must understand at the root of much that is wrong with the world is a single, common, insidious factor: religion. At least according to public atheists and anti-theists, a remarkable number of whom have devoted large amounts of air time and ink lately to bashing Christians in particular and religious believers in general.
In television series after book, from Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion to Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, a cacophony of historical, philosophical, political or more obviously silly reasons are advanced for why religion, religious faith or religious adherents are infantile, irrational, dangerous or otherwise contemptible.
The terror wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and the Palestinian territories link up across the world with al-Qa'ida bombings and lend such a view some currency. Other ethnic and religion-related battles of the recent past, particularly in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, contribute to a sense of millenarian madness.
Sometimes it seems like AD1000 all over again.
Militant atheists are right, then, to see religious believers in or behind many of the great struggles of our time. They are wrong, however, to then conclude that humankind must therefore scrap religion.
Examples of bad behaviour perpetrated by religious believers simply don't tell us anything definitive about religions themselves and certainly nothing necessarily negative about the gods they posit.
This shows the central claim of many of the recent crop of atheistic books relies on a belief less tenable than the relatively well-documented resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and a hypothesis that wouldn't get past a first-year science student. For if the atheist authors bothered to investigate anything other than the most apparently bizarre topics of religious interest, they'd discover that only a belief that God directly controls the actions of believers - in other words, the kind of determinism that Christians and others long ago rejected - would make God somehow culpable for the violent actions of his followers.
Similarly, only scientific proof that a man's religious affiliation predicts his behaviour, a hypothesis long ago rejected by psychologists, would make religion an obviously poisonous thing.
Rather, those tragedies, these examples of war and violence seem to favour an interpretation more common to the great Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism and Islam): namely that we live in a degraded reality and that man, left to his own devices, is a fairly despicable creature.
In the absence of a divinely endorsed militia, the most obvious explanation for war and chaos is that humans take up arms and nations of humans continually declare war, and for many reasons. Sometimes we use religious claims to justify our actions, but these are most certainly human reasons, human interpretations of religious claims and human actions.
The responsibility for strife rests with humanity. To paraphrase a well-known slogan, religion doesn't kill people, people kill people.
Indeed, most religious believers, certainly a Christian looking for empirical support for his interior convictions, could reasonably conclude from the misery of the present context and the long history of human strife that there might just be something to a religion that looks beyond human weakness for inspiration.
Certainly, in many cases the appeal to God as a restorer of divine balance, as the creator of a serene and charitable community, particularly in the Western political and legal systems, is the only thing that moderates nationalism, greed, vengeance, victor's justice and other examples of excess.
Similarly, there have been great crimes committed in the name of religion, but it is wild to claim, as some atheists have, that bad fruit fills the religion basket.
On the contrary, the gifts of Christianity alone to culture, Islam to early medicine, Roman Stoicism to philosophy and Judaism to the legal order are priceless. It is also impossible to think of anti-theist print journalists without the Gutenberg printing press invented by Christians to make mass copies of the Bible. Similarly, various atheists' positions as academics would be inconceivable if the Christian monastic tradition hadn't preserved ancient knowledge during the Dark Ages, then shared it again in newly created universities from the Middle Ages onwards.
Indeed, the only reason religion rejecters can tally the apparently long list of religious errors is because religious believers invented the intellectual disciplines and furnished the academic tools that are used today to attack religion. And it was a Christian, Pope Gregory XIII, who divided time into units - days, months and years - to tell monks and priests when to pray and atheists when to launch their books. Similarly, atheists too often forget that, while they're tallying the lists of death and destruction apparently wrought by believers, they'd better add the most egregious numbers, the most horrendous crimes - the Holocaust, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Stalin's famines, gulags and secret police - to the column reserved for totalitarian regimes of a decidedly anti-religious and often officially atheistic bent.
Competing universalising urges within various religions may throw up extremist Christians, militant Muslims and the kind of fanatical Jews who carried out the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, but none of these criminals, no fanatical movement in the eons of religious history, not even modern Islamofascism or the whole miserable chapter of the Crusades, has wreaked the sort of havoc the Jew and Christian-hating Nazi regime achieved in one brief decade.
On the contrary, time and time again religious faith has applied the brakes to monstrous human excess.
It is also true that no religious nation on earth, not even theocratic Shi'ite Iran, offends against basic human rights on the scale of officially atheist China.
It is a big leap then, a leap of blind faith perhaps, to look to selected examples of violence or chaos linked to religious believers and conclude that God doesn't exist or isn't great, that religion poisons everything or that those who believe in God are somehow deluded.
No, the responsibility for mass suffering, for warfare and violence, the secret to the strife humanity has always endured appears to rest within, God help us, the human heart.
John Heard is a Melbourne writer.
Comments 1 - 38 of 38 |
Reload Comments | Back to Top | Page Numbers2. Comment #48126 by carnitine on June 6, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Congratulation John Heard! You've won this year's "ya think?" prize. He dethrones last year's winner, the guy who explained that tornadoes are not caused by margarine.Other Comments by carnitine
3. Comment #48127 by Logicel on June 6, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Celandine, You captured the inanity of this author's slant. Heard is very ignorant about what atheism is criticizing. Atheists are criticizing the belief in God, not the non-existent sky daddy. And as theists claim that their religious beliefs point to a merciful and loving God, atheists can only see how their belief conflicts with reality.Do humans make earthquakes, tidal waves, mud slides, disease, etc.?
Gutenberg was an inventor who happened to be a Christian. Is this author implying that it was Gutenberg's Christianity which allowed him to create movable type? In addition, the Christian church consistently tried to censure what could be printed.
Other Comments by Logicel
4. Comment #48128 by GodlessHeathen on June 6, 2007 at 5:51 pm
On the contrary, time and time again religious faith has applied the brakes to monstrous human excess.Yes, as exemplified in the case of the inquisition.
Religion did jack all in every case - it was folks' morality that did the work, and we all know that morality is separate from (though incorporated into) religion.
Other Comments by GodlessHeathen
5. Comment #48130 by Logicel on June 6, 2007 at 5:55 pm
On the contrary, time and time again religious faith has applied the brakes to monstrous human excess._____
Heard does not give any specific examples. But I can give an example how belief in belief allowed children to be sexually abused by priests. Such abused children were reluctant to ask for help from other adults, because they would not be believed that priests could do such a terrible act, as priests are men of faith, and thusly, such monstrous human excess would not manifest in them.
Other Comments by Logicel
6. Comment #48131 by Fouad Boussetta on June 6, 2007 at 5:58 pm
What an idiot. Other Comments by Fouad Boussetta
7. Comment #48132 by heathen2 on June 6, 2007 at 6:01 pm
It gets tiring being constantly inundated with this bullcrap. Same old garbage not even worth responding to. What newspapers sanction this sort of biased writing? Are you all tired of repeated articles of this nature? I don't come across this kind of stuff in the local newspaper except for in the Letters to the Editor section. Other Comments by heathen2
8. Comment #48133 by Logicel on June 6, 2007 at 6:02 pm
It is also true that no religious nation on earth, not even theocratic Shi'ite Iran, offends against basic human rights on the scale of officially atheist China.______
Russia violates human rights, America violates human rights, South Asian countries, South American countries, so many countries do, that NGO's have their hands full exposing and challenging such violations.
Also China is now allowing religious practice, especially the ancient forms of folk religion in the countryside.
Other Comments by Logicel
9. Comment #48136 by ? on June 6, 2007 at 6:13 pm
All right, I could sort of handle his argument for the cultural value of religion, but he really should have explained how the Resurrection is "relatively well-documented." How is it well-documented?! Claims of miracles or supernatural events were often taken at face value back then; even more so than today. The Gospels refer to many witnesses of the alleged event, but they are the only semi-contemporary documents which actually report it. And they are by definition biased.
It would be different if there were letters or historical records by contemporary unaffiliated individuals saying things like "I met Jesus on the street today and talked to him and was surprised to hear that many people claim he was crucified the week before." Then there would at least be an issue to debate.
Other Comments by ?
10. Comment #48140 by Gadren on June 6, 2007 at 6:28 pm
the relatively well-documented resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth
Uh... give me a non-Biblical source, please?
On the contrary, the gifts of Christianity alone to culture, Islam to early medicine, Roman Stoicism to philosophy and Judaism to the legal order are priceless. It is also impossible to think of anti-theist print journalists without the Gutenberg printing press invented by Christians to make mass copies of the Bible. Similarly, various atheists' positions as academics would be inconceivable if the Christian monastic tradition hadn't preserved ancient knowledge during the Dark Ages, then shared it again in newly created universities from the Middle Ages onwards.
You mean the supremacy of Western Christian culture at the expense of all others due to conversion by the sword?
Or the fact that Islamic medicine didn't really draw anything from Islam itself, but was advanced by people who happened to be Muslims?
Or the Stoicism that had little to do with the gods until it was hijacked by the early Christian Church?
Or the xenophobic Judaic laws that had people put to death for the slightest of infractions?
Not to mention how Gutenberg's printing press brought vernacular Bibles because the Church had been preventing the people from learning about their religion, or how rampant censorship by the Church made monastic preservation of knowledge needed in the Dark Ages (assuming that it was really "dark")?
Indeed, the only reason religion rejecters can tally the apparently long list of religious errors is because religious believers invented the intellectual disciplines and furnished the academic tools that are used today to attack religion. And it was a Christian, Pope Gregory XIII, who divided time into units - days, months and years - to tell monks and priests when to pray and atheists when to launch their books. Similarly, atheists too often forget that, while they're tallying the lists of death and destruction apparently wrought by believers, they'd better add the most egregious numbers, the most horrendous crimes - the Holocaust, Mao's Cultural Revolution, Stalin's famines, gulags and secret police - to the column reserved for totalitarian regimes of a decidedly anti-religious and often officially atheistic bent.
I'm not finding evidence about that Pope dividing time into days/hours/minutes... The division of time is something ancient, and the second wasn't determined by the Pope; rather, secular or humanist intellectuals came up with that division in the 1600s. All Gregory did was adjust the calendar by a few days... and there's nothing there to indicate that his religion was what made that possible. Also, Hitler's fascism was strongly of a fundamentalist Christian bent, and as for the others? They didn't commit their evils in the name of atheism, which can hardly be said for the various "warrior popes" throughout history.
IS religion the sole and greatest cause of evil in the world? I don't think so. But it offers an all-too-ready weapon for evil, as it amplifies the potential to do evil in the world without really offering a good reason for its existence.
If you're going to say "that religion doesn't kill people, people kill people," then maybe you should give atheism the same benefit of the doubt instead of bringing up false Godwins.
Other Comments by Gadren
11. Comment #48141 by wprinced on June 6, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Heard has not read or does not understand what he has read from any of the books he glosses over.The bit that lets us humans think in abstract is also the source of religion. Human nature is human nature.
Other Comments by wprinced
12. Comment #48149 by alovrin on June 6, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I though the saying was,guns dont kill people etc.
It could be hamburgers dont kill people, oh wait they do in excess
Other Comments by alovrin
13. Comment #48150 by dydx62 on June 6, 2007 at 8:15 pm
I think he misses the point of what Professor Dawkins has been saying altogether. The problems in the Middle East, northern Africa, parts of Asia, and even much conflict in the U.S. can be traced back to indoctrination, and division along religious lines. Communism can even be seen as a religion in it's own right, with an unimpeachable dogma taken as holy writ by it's adherents. Other Comments by dydx62
14. Comment #48154 by Robert Maynard on June 6, 2007 at 8:51 pm
..the gifts of Christianity alone to culture, Islam to early medicine, Roman Stoicism to philosophy and Judaism to the legal order are priceless. It is also impossible to think of anti-theist print journalists without the Gutenberg printing press invented by Christians to make mass copies of the Bible.Let's distill the logic here by substituting some terms and paraphrasing..
Indeed, the only reason religion rejecters can tally the apparently long list of religious errors is because religious believers invented the intellectual disciplines and furnished the academic tools that are used today to attack religion.
"Modern anthropologists are always taking subtle jabs at the primitive stature of our ancient stooped ancestors, measuring their cranial capacity and making comparitive analogies to our own brains which are nothing short of derogatory and belittling. Yet our caveman forefathers invented many of the basic tools which have led to the current prosperity these arrogant scientists enjoy. Fire, the wheel, clothing. It's hard to imagine how these rude anthropologists could even write about their gifted ancestors without the knowledge of mark making that cavemen stumbled upon, and used to make humbling art about everyday life."
Therefore.. what?
Could we expect John Heard to pen an article which ran along the lines of -
Back off the cavemen, you jerks!
..maybe he already has?
We are absolutely indebted to Gutenberg, just as we are indebted to our barbaric hominid ancestors, and our parents for that matter. But are we to suppose, then, that an idea is worthy of protection from criticism so long as you can enumerate sufficient examples of accomplishments by people who incidentally carried it in their head, alongside their intellect? I think we should rather marvel at what some of the individuals of our past achieved in spite of what they were willing to believe.
"Sectarian beliefs don't kill people, people kill people! (over ..sectarian beliefs)"
Other Comments by Robert Maynard
15. Comment #48156 by cal_mertes on June 6, 2007 at 9:06 pm
What a load of bullshit!Heard lies about Nazism. Hitler was a catholic and all the top Nazis were believers. Nazism arose in Christian Germany and the Churches supported Nazism as well as the churches being on the take from the government. Antisemiticism was church doctrine and the Genocide was the fulfillment of christian preaching. And most of the Nazi army was also christian. Where was Christian opposition to Nazism in Germany??
WW! was fought mostly between Christian nations. Same for WW2 in European; just add in some of the Muslims in Africa.
Finally, after almost 2000 years (supposedly) since Christ, the world is still plagued by wars and terrorism. If the Abrahamic faiths (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) were effective why do we still have wars?
The faiths have failed to achieve the peace Heard claims they bring.
Other Comments by cal_mertes
16. Comment #48157 by alovrin on June 6, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Examples of bad behaviour perpetrated by religious believers simply don't tell us anything definitive about religions themselves and certainly nothing necessarily negative about the gods they posit.
Here's a big problem the sectioning off of religion from people. So the cycle of religiously inspired violence is able to start again every few generations.. As C Hitchens has reiterated man made god not the other way round.
Other Comments by alovrin
17. Comment #48160 by briancoughlanworldcitizen on June 6, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Is there anything more absurd than an all powerful, all knowing, all loving God not being responsible? Is the writer some kind of Republican?!It's not as if theology has squared this particular circle, and the rather poor effort at this represented by the whole free will business looks more ludicrous with every passing moment. Thats completely ignoring natural disasters.
Sure from our perspective we have free will, because we don't have all the inputs, but hardly from the perspective of a God who can see everything, and in advance to boot!!
Nudge a synapse here, reduce a hormone level there and Eve would never have eaten that apple. Wouldn't that have been easier, more humane and simply better planning?
Other Comments by briancoughlanworldcitizen
18. Comment #48163 by mmurray on June 6, 2007 at 11:02 pm
It took a bit of googling but here he ishttp://johnheard.blogspot.com/2007/06/dreadpublishing-john-heard-in.html
For those not familiar with life in Melbourne I think `Newmaniac' refers to Newman College at Melbourne University a residential college run by the Jesuits.
Michael
Other Comments by mmurray
19. Comment #48170 by Logicel on June 7, 2007 at 12:24 am
mmurray, Thanks for your sleuthing. Heard is a young, gay conservative, like Andrew Sullivan is.When I read his article, before knowing that about him, I had suspected that he, unlike me, uses and bases a large part of his morality on tradition--one of the five bases of morality (see link below) that some researchers have come up with and whose 'test' on morality I recently took. I scored very low on that aspect of morality, but very high on identifying harm and pain as factors in determining morality.
If morality is hard-wired, based on empathy for others as other research in neuroscience has shown, and if the researchers from Morality.org are correct in stating that respect for tradition contributes to morality, then what evolutionary role does respect for tradition accomplish?
Also, how do such gay people, who are apparently departing from tradition by being gay, reconcile that departure with their embracing of tradition? The brain hurts.
http://www.yourmorals.org/
Other Comments by Logicel
20. Comment #48176 by Quetzalcoatl on June 7, 2007 at 12:54 am
Another author trots out the "Hitler, Mao Stalin" cant. Heard it all before, still not any truer than it was the first time. Examples of bad behaviour perpetrated by religious believers simply don't tell us anything definitive about religions themselves and certainly nothing necessarily negative about the gods they posit.
It does when suicide bombers blow themselves up in the name of their god. When Christians revile and persecute homosexuals according to the word of their god. Obviously this guy has never read the Old Testament.
Other Comments by Quetzalcoatl
21. Comment #48180 by alovrin on June 7, 2007 at 1:22 am
It is also true that no religious nation on earth, not even theocratic Shi'ite Iran, offends against basic human rights on the scale of officially atheist China.
China's history is very long and probably more complete than that of almost any other country in the world. Probably only India is the only other country continuously occupied by large populations for as long. Both have also had long long histories of mass poverty and heirachical(almost god like) power structures for most of that history. Maybe John Heard should take this into consideration before blithely laying all the blame for human's rights abuses on the latest power elite's communistic atheism, which is morphing into capitalism.
The problem of human rights in China are much deeper than Mr Heard seems to be able to comprehend. I would say it is virtually part of their culture, no matter what the politics at any time. How this problem is addressed I have no idea.
A side note to this is Tibet(now under Chinese rule) has the highest rate of cretinism in the world due to an iodine deficiency during pregnancy. This problem was in the past just put down to karma, I suppose by the ruling theocracy, the Lama's. Anyway the problem is being addressed by the Chinese administration by giving iodised salt to the Tibetans.
Other Comments by alovrin
22. Comment #48183 by Russell Blackford on June 7, 2007 at 1:52 am
I don't know how long the Oz keeps its responses open, so I'll place here the same comment as I made over there:======
Couldn't The Australian have come up with something better than this pile of cliches? How many times do we have to read the same tired arguments about Hitler, etc., as if Hitler was any sort of rationalist?
Nazism was an irrational, quasi-religious belief system, with a strange mix of links to both Christianity and the old pagan gods. It thrived in an environment prepared for it by hundreds of years of vicious Christian anti-Semitism. Stalinist communism, with its Lysenkoist pseudoscience and its rationalised eschatology, was almost as loopy. All such crazed, authoritarian systems, whether or not they are explicitly supernaturalist, are dangerous. In their attempt to control our lives, and our very thoughts, they expel ordinary, decent human values, such as kindness and compassion. They want us to live in accordance with their tunnel-visioned, yet all-too-comprehensive, theories of how the world is supposed to work ... and what human beings are supposed to be like.
With the defeat of Nazism and Stalinism, it's the explicitly supernaturalist totalitarianisms - hardline Catholicism such as we've seen from the Vatican's most recent clowns-in-chief; egregious American fundamentalism in the style of Jerry Falwell or Ted Haggard; and blood-soaked radical Islam, with its genital mutilations, burkhas, and suicide bombs - that are now the biggest danger to any life of freedom and reason.
There's a high priority in rejecting - with all due contempt - the specious claims to moral authority of pontiffs, puritans, preachers, and arrogant pulpiteers. Kudos to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others, for getting the process started. You can bet that there's a lot more to come. The current high-profile revolt against religious bullying, and its associated moral charlatanry, was long, long overdue.
Other Comments by Russell Blackford
23. Comment #48201 by gibodean on June 7, 2007 at 3:08 am
Similarly, various atheists' positions as academics would be inconceivable if the Christian monastic tradition hadn't preserved ancient knowledge during the Dark Ages, then shared it again in newly created universities from the Middle Ages onwards.
I can't believe he dares to use this as an example of the goodness of religion!
The dark ages were dark exactly because of the dominance of religion ! The guy's a moron.
Other Comments by gibodean
24. Comment #48209 by pewkatchoo on June 7, 2007 at 3:49 am
A truly awful article. How is it possible that a journal calling itself The Australian can carry something like this? Stuff like this demeans Oz! Other Comments by pewkatchoo
25. Comment #48215 by jonecc on June 7, 2007 at 4:21 am
By the time I got to this you'd all shredded it so finely I couldn't find anything worth dissecting, so I'm just going to highlight his self-description as"a Christian looking for empirical support for his interior convictions"
Which is perhaps a little more revealing that he'd meant to be. The rest of us at least try to use empirical evidence to test our convictions rather than cherry pick to shore them up.
Other Comments by jonecc
26. Comment #48217 by leaping.judas on June 7, 2007 at 4:32 am
Sadly Heard seems to strive to define himself via means of the more extreme of suppositions available to him.As a gay Catholic who seems to strongly defend and support his chosen religions persecution of homosexuals, he probably isn't someone that anyone of sound mind would even consider taking seriously.
Heard seems to go to great lengths to confirm the complete (and unintentionally comic) stereotype of the theistic apologist (as perpetuated by those evil athiesits and anti-thesists) in his emotional and fallacious article of 06/06/07 (if only it were 2006...)
The argument of Dawkins and his ilk is not that "God" is responsible for the ills mentioned in Heard's article, rather that the belief in such a figure is often used to justify such ills.
Heard essentially misses the point and indulges in a diatribe of obfuscation not too dissimilar to that employed across the "great Abrahamic faiths" in order to continually muddy waters of the minds of their followers.
It was interesting to note that Heard was credited as a "Melbourne writer" at the base of his article - presumably because little to no research actually went into the piece.
Whilst beginning his "argument" reasonably, he quickly falls victim to his own thinly veiled sense of outrage at those who dare to presuppose an opinion or belief that differs to his own.
Heard has either not read or completely disregarded the content of one of the texts upon which he casts his criticism.
Dawkins' "The God Delusion" at no point hypothesises that there is in fact a god.
Part of Heard's central argument is that atheists and anti-thesists hold "God somehow culpable for the violent actions of his followers" as a means of constructing an agrument against religion yet this is fallacious on so many levels - not the least of which being that atheists do not believe in a god let alone the influence of one.
Heard, in his attempt to distract people from the real issue, has done no more than argue strongly for a point of view that would accuse him of many logical fallacies, not the least of which being "argumentum ad ignorantiam"
Sadly the furore generated by his fallacious article will probably fuel his hungry ego :(
Other Comments by leaping.judas
27. Comment #48234 by BillySands on June 7, 2007 at 6:39 am
Examples of bad behaviour perpetrated by religious believers simply don't tell us anything definitive about religions themselves and certainly nothing necessarily negative about the gods they posit.
Try reading the book of joshua then - mean, unforgiving infanticidal god!
Of course, god is not responsible, because he does not exist. if he did, the god of the bible would be responible, because he is an evil cu*t!
Other Comments by BillySands
28. Comment #48257 by Benjamin Michael on June 7, 2007 at 7:50 am
Can someone help explain something to me. What I want to know is how anyone can even attempt to claim that the holocaust was related to athiestic philosophy. Some background on me. I am Jewish. My parents are very religious and live in Jerusalem (my Father is a Rabbi and a professor of medical science(go figure!)). I have family who perished in the Holocaust. I spent my entire childhood education (kindergarten through High School) in a Jewish school. I was sent by my parents to Yeshiva (Ultra orthodox Jewish educational institution) for summer camps most years growing up which were run by ultra orthodox hassidic Jews. It is of constant amazement (and grief) to most who knew me when I was growing up that I was never religious and rejected strongly every but of crap that was sent my way. People on here can imagine (some wont have to imagine) the conflicts with my family and educators. Somehow through all of this I never once was convinced by anything other than science, common sense and things that were backed up by evidence. Call me lucky. My grandfather was exactly the same with a strikingly similar story regarding his education and his persistent rejection of the dogma. I must have some of his DNA in me. Anyway, I digress... back to the holocaust issue:
What sort of moron can even try and make the claim that the most obvious case of antisemitism in recent history was based on athiesm? Are they trying to claim that Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews because they believed in a deity? This is insanity. Of course the Holocaust was religiously motivated. Even the most cursory reading of Mein Kampf demonstrates this. Although I can see why the mistake can be made with regards to Stalin or Mao by blaming athiesm (a mistake, but an understandable one) to frame the Holocaust as motivated by athiesm is flat out retarded. It hardly warrants refutation it is so obviously wrong on its face. And yet it constantly gets invoked by morons such as Heard, even though it has about as much credibility as Holocaust denial.
Furiously,
Benjamin.
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29. Comment #48266 by konquererz on June 7, 2007 at 8:26 am
sorry, this is going to be long!It is also impossible to think of anti-theist print journalists without the Gutenberg printing press invented by Christians to make mass copies of the Bible
One Christian, one man, and he would have done it with or without religion.
Similarly, various atheists' positions as academics would be inconceivable if the Christian monastic tradition hadn't preserved ancient knowledge during the Dark Ages, then shared it again in newly created universities from the Middle Ages onwards.
What? In the middle ages, Christianity prevent the advancement of all sciences, like Galen. Sure, they shared what they had horded and kept from the world. Good show?
Indeed, the only reason religion rejecter's can tally the apparently long list of religious errors is because religious believers invented the intellectual disciplines and furnished the academic tools that are used today to attack religion.
The church built on beating the average joe into blind faith. What part of my intellect should I credit Christianity with?
And it was a Christian, Pope Gregory XIII, who divided time into units - days, months and years - to tell monks and priests when to pray and atheists when to launch their books.
NO! He created a new date and time system based on when christ lived! The days and time units still circulate around astrology to this day!
Similarly, atheists too often forget that, while they're tallying the lists of death....
Blah Blah Blah, same misinformed argument, lack of belief isn't a cause and Hitler wasn't an atheist or a Christian hater thats why the Vatican back him and he killed Jews.
Competing universalizing urges within various religions may throw up extremist Christians, militant Muslims and the kind of fanatical Jews who carried out the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, but none of these criminals, no fanatical movement in the eons of religious history, not even modern Islamofascism or the whole miserable chapter of the Crusades, has wreaked the sort of havoc the Jew and Christian-hating Nazi regime achieved in one brief decade.
Again, Jew hating, not Christian hating, and Islam can't even be fascist.
It is also true that no religious nation on earth, not even theocratic Shi'ite Iran, offends against basic human rights on the scale of officially atheist China.
Yeah, I'm sure the young girls forced to be circumcised, and that get killed for being raped buy into that. I'm sure those involved in the genocide of Bosnia agree with that. Such uninformed ignorance.
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30. Comment #48285 by humperdinck on June 7, 2007 at 10:10 am
a belief less tenable than the relatively well-documented resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth
This is where I stopped reading.
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31. Comment #48290 by Pixie on June 7, 2007 at 10:39 am
[quote]What sort of moron can even try and make the claim that the most obvious case of antisemitism in recent history was based on athiesm? Are they trying to claim that Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews because they believed in a deity? This is insanity. Of course the Holocaust was religiously motivated. Even the most cursory reading of Mein Kampf demonstrates this. Although I can see why the mistake can be made with regards to Stalin or Mao by blaming athiesm (a mistake, but an understandable one) to frame the Holocaust as motivated by athiesm is flat out retarded.[/quote]Fabulous point. Thanks for pointing that out! =o)
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32. Comment #48357 by alnitak on June 7, 2007 at 2:59 pm
The claim that the printing press was invented for the devout replication of the Bible is risible. Gutenberg printed several things, and hit upon the Bible project as one likely to make him some money, along with a Latin grammar and some poetry. If you are a devout Christian, it could only be for the glory of the divine one that the press was invented and used--faith is blind to the facts.Other Comments by alnitak
33. Comment #48374 by Ubik on June 7, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Is there already a form you can fill out for those reviews? Like the one for Spam solutions (http://www.craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt)I just made one up:
You are:
(X) Indoctrinated Theist
( ) Educated Theist
( ) Biblethumper/Taliban
( ) Crackpot
You say you believe in:
( ) A Omnipotent Benevolent God
( ) A Designer
( ) The Bible
(X) Fairytales
(X) Belief
Atheism is bad because:
( ) Its wrong
( ) All Evil people are Athists
( ) All Atheists are evil
( ) Most Atheists are evil
(X) Some Atheists are evil
Religion is good because:
( ) Its true
(X) There are good theists
You are a:
( ) Honest Believer
( ) Interesting
You show that:
( ) God made Man
(X) Men made God
That should cover 90% of the theist responses
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34. Comment #48848 by babelfish on June 9, 2007 at 7:24 am
My personal contender for the most absurd statement in the above article is this:Similarly, only scientific proof that a man's religious affiliation predicts his behaviour, a hypothesis long ago rejected by psychologists, would make religion an obviously poisonous thing.
In other words, psychologists allegedly have proven (references, please!) that religious affiliations have no effect whatsoever on a person's behaviour. If this was true, surely there would be nothing to discuss about (discussing itself being a form of behaviour).
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35. Comment #48879 by Dr Benway on June 9, 2007 at 10:11 am
Very naughty queer Catholic SWM slaveboy seeks powerful Master for LTR. Slaveboy suffers because he's a worm of a man into public self-abasement. Master's firm discipline needed to apply brakes to slaveboy's monstrous excesses. Other Comments by Dr Benway
36. Comment #53857 by orlanth on July 3, 2007 at 3:41 pm
I also have to love the parts about how the christian scribes did help keep the dark ages less dark. As if there where any other power strusture at the times that would have been able to do it - The question on that subject should be why they did not manage to save MORE or how much that did not fit with their limited world view where lost due to that ?Or is the suggestion that we should give up all knowledge that have come after the dark ages do not agree with the old man in the sky.
As the ealier comment said God can not be responsible for anything as it is a part of a collective delution.
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37. Comment #53863 by NoLongerHaveBelief on July 3, 2007 at 4:21 pm
....very good Orlanth.Or we could just go straight to the ol' tried n tested.
God ---> Creator of all things ---> Creator of evil ----> Why call him good?
If the delusion existed, then the ULTIMATE reason for all things, suffering, death et cetera, lies in the hands of the creator.
Oh! You theists say! 'We have FREE WILL'. Yeah, right. I am going to use my free will then. I've decided I don't need to eat, sleep, go to the toilet, fall ill or ever die.
Hmmm. I can't seem to do it for some reason? I don't understand the believers mind. I'm ashamed I used to believe, but delighted that I found the works of great Atheists like Professor Dawkins. I've found it truly liberating.
And let's PRETEND that Hitler was an Atheist. So what? All the millions of men on BOTH sides of the 2nd World War, likely believed... and all ignored the command 'thou shalt not kill'. So is it okay to kill then, or not?
Religion in my mind, should be defunct. I'm disgusted that my 13 year old daughter came home with some stupid poem spouting off about God from school, this week. What a disgrace. Religion should be personal. I can't see why this rubbish is even on a school curriculum. I'd much rather she was reading a book by Professor Dawkins, Stephen Hawking or a bit of Darwin.
Truth is better than fiction.
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38. Comment #157618 by Birdie on April 9, 2008 at 10:45 am
The resurrection is well documented..?Only in the Bible.
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1. Comment #48120 by Celandine on June 6, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Of course not. A non-existent being can't be responsible for anything.
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