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Oor ongeloof en geloof (Torreke) [boodskap #111915]

Vr, 05 Januarie 2007 18:46

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Torreke, hier is iets wat ek nogal interessant gevind het. Dalk wil
jy so bietjie daaraan kou, en jou gedagtes plaas? As jy lus is :)

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sam_harris/2006/1 2/gods_enemies_are_m\
ore_honest_t_1.html

O.a hierdie 3 aspekte van sy artikel. Ek pos nou maar die gedeelte,
net ingeval jy nie die skakel kan lees nie:

"As someone who has spent the last few years publicly
criticizing religion, I have become quite familiar
with how people of faith rise to the defense of God.
As it turns out, there aren't a hundred ways of doing
this. There appear to be just three: either a person
argues that a specific religion is true, or he argues
that religion is useful, or he simply attacks atheism
as intolerant, elitist, irrational, or otherwise
worthy of contempt. Any conversation between atheists
and believers is liable to fall into one or more of
these ruts, or lurch back and forth between them:

1. Religion is true:
There are two problems with arguing that any one of the world's
religions is true. First, as Bertrand Russell pointed out a century
ago, the major religions make incompatible claims about God and about
what human beings must believe in order to escape the fires of hell.

> Given the sheer diversity of these claims, every believer should expect damnation on mere, probabilistic grounds.

The second problem with arguing for the truth of
religion is that the evidence for the most common
religious doctrines is terrible or nonexistentÂand
this subsumes all claims about the existence of a
personal God, the divine origin of certain books, the
virgin birth of certain people, the veracity of
ancient miracles, etc.

For thousands of years, religion has been a haven for
dogmatism and false certainty, and it remains so.
There is not a person on this earth who has sufficient
reason to be certain that Jesus rose from the dead or
that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in his cave.
And yet, billions of people profess such certainty.
This is embarrassing. It is also dangerousÂand we
should stop making apologies for it.

2. Religion is useful:
The argument that religion is useful is also problematicÂand many of
its problems are enunciated daily by bomb-blasts. Can anyone
seriously argue that it is a good thing that millions
of Muslims currently believe in the metaphysics of
martyrdom? Is it really so useful that many Jews
imagine that the Creator of the universe gave them a
patch of desert on the Mediterranean? How
psychologically beneficial has Christianity's anxiety
about sex been these last seventy generations?

The worst problem with arguing for religion's
usefulness, however, is that it is utterly irrelevant
to the question at hand: the fact that a belief might
be useful is no argument that it is true. While there
are many ways to illustrate this, here is how I
recently made the point in an online debate:

> The fact that certain religious beliefs might be
> useful in no way suggests their legitimacy. I can
> guarantee, for instance, that the following religion,
> invented by me in the last ten seconds, would be
> extraordinarily useful. It is called ÂScientismo.Â
> Here is its creed: Be kind to others; do not lie,
> steal, or murder; and oblige your children to master
> mathematics and science to the best of their abilities
> or 17 demons will torture you with hot tongs for
> eternity after death. If I could spread this faith to
> billions, I have little doubt that we would live in a
> better world than we do at present. Would this suggest
> that the 17 demons of Scientismo exist? Useful
> delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs.
>
3. Atheism is bad:
Rather than argue for the truth of
their religious beliefs, or produce evidence that
religion is useful, apologists for God often attack
atheism as though it were another religion. We are
told that atheism is dogmatic, intolerant, irrational,
etc. This homily has the virtue of being easy to
remember and reproduceÂand it now reverberates
ceaselessly within the echo-chamber of American
religious discourse.

It relies, however, on a many false ideas about
atheism. On Christmas eve of this year, I published an
essay in the Los Angeles Times entitled Â10 Myths Â
and 10 Truths Â about AtheismÂ in which I attempted to
set the record straight. I won't repeat these points
here. Those interested can find this article on my
website.