There seems to have been a recent surge in polemical attacks on religion by various influential commentators and authors. I mentioned quite a while ago that the author Sam Harris had penned a fierce attack on faith-based religion in The End of Faith. A while later he released another slim volume entitled Letter to a Christian Nation, in which he deals with criticisms raised by many of his countrymen about his first book. He also goes on to point out some fairly amazing and disturbing facts and figures about belief in America. For instance, nearly half the population of the U.S. apparently think that the universe began less than 10,000 years ago, some time after the domestication of the dog, a while after the ancient Babylonians learned to brew beer.

The religiosity and willful ignorance of 135 million Americans (some 45% of the population) shocks many people in Western Europe, and many more are just oblivious to what a hotbed of Bible-waving fundamentalism parts of the country are.

The well-known biologist Richard Dawkins recently released his own attack on organized superstition in his book The God Delusion. Like Harris, he has an excellent writing style that is as lucid and penetrating as his intellect. In The God Delusion he systematically dismantles all the major philosophical arguments in favour of belief in a deity (argument from First Cause, argument from Design, etc...) before bringing to bear an argument of his own that demonstrates why "God almost certainly does not exist".

In Dawkins's view, impartial agnosticism implies that we can say almost nothing about the likelihood of gods existing. However, as Bertrand Russell showed decades ago, we cannot actually disprove the existence of celestial teapots and other strange fancies like hobgoblins, but that does not mean we have to take seriously the likelihood of hobgoblins and flying teapots. Yet, even to this day, there are people who find the mere inability to disprove God's existence to be a convincing argument that he must exist.

The God Delusion draws somewhat on a two-part television documentary by Dawkins called The Root of all Evil? If you have a broadband connection, you can watch the documentary for free at the following website:

The Root of all Evil?

It is streaming video, so if you are relying on a dial-up connection to the internet, forget about it - you'd end up tearing your hair out as it stops and starts and sputters.

If you prefer, you could download the video at the following location instead:

Part 1 ... Part 2

Again, with dial-up, it will probably take about a week to download, so begin at your peril...

Both Harris and Dawkins stress that it is impossible to understand the actions of people like the 9/11 hijackers or the 7/7 London bombers without understanding what they specifically believe about the universe and their place in it. Religion is the elephant in the room that nobody ever mentions, due to the taboo of criticizing what people hold as their highest ideals (one of which is martyrdom for heavenly rewards, in this case).

Another recent book on the theme, although less strident in tone than Dawkins's book, this time by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, is Breaking the Spell. Dennett is another author with a meticulous and lucid style of writing, although, on balance, I prefer the rapier wit of Professor Dawkins.

And, finally, I see that veteran author and journalist Christopher Hitchens has a book in the pipeline with the intentionally controversial title God is not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything.

Christopher Hitchens is responsible for one of my favourite quotes, one that neatly sums up what many people are unable or unwilling to grasp in our discourse about religion:

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

In other words, if you assert that Poseidon exists, you cannot expect to be taken seriously unless you have compelling evidence. And if you don't have any evidence, remember that it is not the job of the infidel/nonbeliever to somehow disprove Poseidon's reality and divinity. It is impossible to absolutely disprove anything that can be asserted. This doesn't mean that every assertion is true.

The above applies as much to Poseidon as it does to Allah or the mysterious 1-in-3/3-in-1, or Jehovah or Yahweh.

As Sam Harris points out, one of the biggest problems facing our world is that the majority of human beings on this planet think that the creator of the universe wrote a book. And unfortunately, each major faith has a different book and a tenet that all other faiths are, at best, misguided; at worst, heretical enough to justify holy violence.

Of course, this means I am arrogantly suggesting that billions of my fellow human beings are deluding themselves and keeping our species in a state of backwardness that nourishes intolerance.

Well, yes. 100% of humans once firmly believed the world to be flat. They were deluded and backward without realizing it. Everyone once believed in witches, and burned a good many of them in accordance with this belief. What makes anyone think that the popularity of a belief makes it any more likely to be true?

More and more notable commentators seem to be coming to the conclusion that the worlds of reason and faith are at war, and that reason must win this war for humanity to have much of a future.

Time will tell which side will win the war of words.









PS,

Hello to everyone I haven't contacted for a long time.

Be peaceful and happy.