Atheist Manifesto by Sam Harris
Translated by: JC Álvarez
Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a child. Soon will rape, torture and murder. If an atrocity of this kind does not occur precisely at this moment, will occur within hours or at most a few days. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that parents of these girls believe at this very moment that an omnipotent and infinitely loving God cares for them and their families. Do you have any reason to believe this? Moreover, is it okay to believe?
The answer to both questions is very clear: NO.
All atheism is contained in the previous answer. Atheism is not a philosophy, not even an opinion about the world, is simply the refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which, in principle, the obvious is overlooked. The obvious must be observed and defended again observed. It is a thankless job. Carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is also a job that the atheist does not needs.
It should be noted that no one needs identified as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Therefore, we have no name to identify people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, atheism is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the protest voiced by reasonable people in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87% of the population) who claim not ever doubt the existence of God are those who are required to submit evidence of their existence and, indeed, kindness , given the relentless destruction innocent human beings that we witness daily in the world. Only the atheist appreciates how mysterious is our present situation: the majority of humans believe in a God who, in all respects, is as great as the gods of Olympus, any person, regardless of their merits and abilities, can access to public office in the United States but says he is fully convinced that God exists and much of the public policy of our country responds to religious taboos and superstitions peculiar to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible and terrifying. It might even be funny if what was at stake was not so important.
live in a world where everything, good and bad, are eventually destroyed by the change. Parents lose their children and their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, not ever meet again. Friends move away from each other quickly, without knowing that they will not be seen. This life, when inspecting a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss. Most people in this world, however, imagine that there is a cure for all this. If you live properly - not necessarily ethically, but within the framework of certain ancient beliefs and stereotyped behaviors - we'll get everything you want after death. When our bodies finally fail us, only we'll get rid of our corporeal ballast to travel to a land where we will meet all the people who loved where we lived. Of course, overly rational people and other rabble will be excluded from that happy place, and those who have suspended their disbelief while alive will be free to enjoy this place for eternity.
We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that makes the sun shine, to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this dance of light on the Earth over the eons - and, despite However, Paradise is in conformity with our more superficial interests with the same comfort as a Caribbean cruise. This is extremely curious. If you did not know anything about it, think the man in fear of losing everything that you like, had created heaven, with God's goalkeeper, in his own image and likeness.
Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina brought upon New Orleans. Over a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and nearly a million were displaced. It is almost certain that virtually everyone who lived in New Orleans at the time of the tragedy of Katrina believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate. But what was God as a hurricane swept the city? Surely heard the prayers of the elderly and women fleeing the rising waters for the safety of their roofs, only to slowly drown in them. They were people of faith. They 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.
course, there were clear signs that a storm of biblical proportions would strike New Orleans, and therefore the human response to disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only in the light of science. The signs of the advance of Katrina were extracted from the silent nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God did not speak to one of their projects. If residents of New Orleans had been content to rely on the charity of the Lord, would not have known that a murderer hurricane struck them to feel in their faces the first gusts of wind. However, a survey by the Washington Post found that 80% of Katrina survivors claimed that the event had strengthened their faith in God.
devoured As Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There is no doubt that these pilgrims believed strongly in the God of the Koran: Their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of their existence: their women walked veiled before him, his men were killing each other regularly by rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable that a single survivor of this tragedy to lose his faith. It is more likely that survivors imagine that they were saved by the grace of God.
Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deception who is believed "saved by God." Only the atheist understands what is morally objectionable that the survivors of a catastrophe created saved by the love of God while this same God drowned children in their cribs. Since the atheist refuses to disguise the reality of suffering in the world with a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones how precious life is and how terrible misfortune --- it's really that millions of human beings suffer the most terrible detriment of their happiness for no reason at all.
inevitable question is how large and free to be a disaster to shake the faith of the world. The Nazi Holocaust did not. Neither the Rwandan genocide, although armed with machetes were no priests among the authors. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the twentieth century, many of them children. God's ways are indeed inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how wretched , can be compatible with religious faith. In matters of faith, we have lost all contact with reality.
course, people of faith regularly claim that God is not responsible for human suffering. But what else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way to understand the issue, and it is time that sane human beings to cover it. This is the old problem of theodicy, which should be considered solved. If God exists, can not do anything to stop the most terrible calamities and not worry about it. God, therefore, is impotent or evil. Pious readers now made following pirouette: God can not be judged by mere human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful used primarily to establish the goodness of God. And any God who cares about something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which the faithful turn to him during prayer, is not as inscrutable as it seems. If present, the God of Abraham would be quite negligible, not only would be unworthy of the immensity of creation, but it would be unworthy even of man himself.
There is another possibility, of course, and is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As noted Richard Dawkins, we're all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical God is not at all different from Zeus or Thor. Therefore, only the atheist is compassionate enough to consider the depth of human suffering in all its overwhelming reality. It is terrible to die and lose everything we love, it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while living. That much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion - to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious illusions and religious struggles for scarce resources - is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual. Is a need, however, which places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, just to keep in touch with reality, appears shamefully away from the fantasy life of their own neighbors.
The nature of belief
According to recent surveys, 22% of Americans are fully convinced that Jesus will return to Earth sometime during the next 50 years. Another 22% believe that this is quite likely. Probably the same 44% of Americans are those who attend church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to ban the teaching of biological fact of evolution our children. As you know President George W. Bush, believers in this category are the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Therefore, their opinions and prejudices influence almost every decision of national importance. Liberal politicians seem to have drawn a wrong lesson from these events and have turned their eyes to the scripture, wondering how they could curry favor with the legions of men and women of our country who vote largely based on religious dogma. Over 50% of Americans have an opinion "negative" or "extremely negative" people who do not believe in God, 70% think it is very important that presidential candidates are "deeply religious." The irrationality is now rising in the United States - in our schools, our courts and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution, 68% believe in Satan. An ignorance of this caliber, focused both on the head as in the belly of a superpower without rival, is now a problem for the world.
Although it is rather easy for people of good taste to criticize religious fundamentalism, the so-called "religious moderation" still enjoys great prestige in our society, even within the ivory tower. This is ironic, as fundamentalists tend to make use of their brains more based on principles that the "moderates." While fundamentalists justify their religious beliefs with extraordinarily poor evidence and arguments, at least try to give a rational justification. The moderates, however, generally do better than quote the beneficial consequences of religious belief. Instead of saying they believe in God because certain biblical prophecies have been fulfilled, the moderates say they believe in God because this belief "gives meaning to their lives."
When a tsunami killed a hundred thousand people the day after Christmas, fundamentalists readily interpreted this cataclysm as evidence of God's wrath. Apparently, God had sent another oblique message to humanity about the evils of abortion, idolatry and homosexuality. While morally obscene, this interpretation of events is certainly reasonable, given certain assumptions (absurd). The moderates, however, refuse to draw any conclusions about God from his works. God remains a perfect mystery, a mere source of consolation that is compatible with the existence of evil more devastating. Disasters like the Asian tsunami, liberal piety is apt to produce the most affected and appalling nonsense imaginable. Still, men and women of good will usually prefer to such vacuous moralizing Prophethood and hateful of true believers. Disaster, it is certainly a virtue of liberal theology that it emphasizes mercy over wrath. It is worth noting, however, that human compassion is what is revealed - not God - when the bloated bodies of the dead are thrown into the sea. For days, when thousands of children are simultaneously torn from the arms of their mothers at sea and drowned, liberal theology must be revealed for what it is - the more empty and barren of mortal 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 men and neurologically healthy women to believe the unbelievable and think that is the height of moral wisdom.
is completely absurd to suggest, as do the religious moderates that a rational human being can believe in God simply because this belief makes him happy, because it relieves their fear of death or because it gives meaning to his life. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we change the notion of God for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for example, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in your backyard, and that diamond is the size of a refrigerator. No doubt you will feel extremely good to believe this. Imagine what would happen then if that man should follow the example of religious moderates and maintained this belief as pragmatic lines: When asked why he thinks there is a diamond in your backyard and also the diamond is thousands of times greater than any yet discovered, man says things like: "This belief gives my life meaning," or "My family and I enjoyed digging to find it on Sundays," or "I do not want to live in a universe where there was a diamond buried in my backyard and that was the size of a refrigerator. " Clearly these responses are inadequate. But worse than this. Are the responses of a madman or a fool.
Here's why Pascal's wager, the leap of faith and other schemes epistemological Kiergegaard fideists not have any sense. Believing that God exists is to believe that one is in a relationship with their existence, such that the existence is itself the reason for one's belief. There must be some causal connection, or at least the appearance thereof, between the act in question and the acceptance of that fact by the person. Thus, we can see that religious beliefs to be beliefs about how the world should be as proof in the realm of spirit as any other field. Despite all their sins against reason, religious fundamentalists understand this; the moderates - Almost by definition - do not understand at all.
incompatibility between reason and faith has been an obvious feature of human cognition and public discourse for centuries. A person has good reason to believe firmly what you believe or not believe. People of all faiths generally recognize the primacy of reason and resort to reasoning and evidence wherever they can. When rational inquiry supports the creed it is always defended, as a threat, it is ridiculed, sometimes in the same sentence. Only when the evidence in favor of a religious doctrine are scarce or nonexistent, or there is overwhelming evidence against him, his supporters allege "Faith." In other words, the faithful simply cite the reasons for their beliefs (for example, "the New Testament confirms the Old Testament prophecies," "I saw the face of Jesus in a window," we pray, and cancer our daughter began to subside. ") Such reasons are generally inadequate, but better than no reason at all. Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. In a world that has been divided by mutually incompatible religious beliefs in a nation that is increasingly subject to their own conceptions of the Iron Age about God, the end of history and immortality the soul, this lazy division of our discourse in matters of reason and faith issues is simply unacceptable.
faith and good society
People of faith regularly says that atheism is responsible for some of the most horrific crimes of the twentieth century. While it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, were not particularly rational. In fact, his public statements were little more than litanies of illusions - illusions about race, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many ways, religion was directly culpable even in these cases. Consider the Holocaust: anti-Semitism that built piece by piece the Nazi crematoria was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics, and had all the social ills attributed to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular, the religious demonization of the Jews continued to exist in Europe. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its publications, as late as 1914.)
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical with unjustified beliefs, on the contrary, these horrors are a testament to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. It goes without saying that a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for blindly embrace atheism as a dogma. The problem posed by the atheist is none other than the problem of dogma itself - of which every religion is involved in an extreme degree. There is no society in recorded history that has suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Although most Americans believe that getting rid of religion is an impossible goal, most of the developed world has already achieved. Any story on a supposed "religious gene" that makes most Americans helplessly organize their lives around ancient works of religious fiction must explain why so many people in other First World societies apparently lack this gene. The level of atheism in the rest of the developed world refutes any argument that religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries such as Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on Earth. According to the Human Development Report 23005 from the United Nations, said countries are also healthier, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational development, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 nations that are now in the ranks lowest in terms of human development are strongly religious. Other tests indicate the same situation: the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious fundamentalism and opposition to evolutionary theory, are also unique because of the high homicide rates, abortions, teenage pregnancies, AIDS cases and infant mortality. The same comparison is true within the territory of the United States: States South and Midwest, characterized by higher levels of religious superstition and hostility to evolutionary theory, are particularly affected by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European standards more . Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve issues of causality - belief in God can lead to social dysfunction, social dysfunction can lead to belief in God and each factor can promote the other, or both factors may arise from some deeper source of dysfunction. Leaving aside the question of cause and effect, these facts show that atheism is quite compatible with the basic aspirations of civil society, they also demonstrate, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure the health and welfare of society.
Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in terms of providing foreign aid to developing world. The dubious link between Christian fundamentalism and Christian values \u200b\u200bis also refuted by other indices of charity. Consider the ratio of salaries of top executives and average employees: in Britain is 24 to 1, in France, from 15 to 1, in Sweden, 13 to 1, in the United States, where 83% of the population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, is 475 to 1. It seems that many expect to easily get camels through the eye of the needle.
Religion as a source of violence
One of the biggest challenges faced by civilization in the twenty-first century is that human beings learn to talk about their deepest interests - about ethics, spiritual experience and the inevitability of human suffering - in a way that is not flagrantly irrational. Nothing more hinders the path of this project that we give respect to religious faith. Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into moral communities separated - Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc .-- and these disagreements have become a continuous source of human conflict. Certainly, religion is now an active source of violence, much as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbs against Croats Catholics, Orthodox Serbs against Bosnian Muslims and Albanians), Northern Ireland (Protestants against Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims against Hindus), Sudan (Muslims against Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims against Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims against Christians), Sri Lanka (Buddhist Sinhalese against Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims against Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite Muslims against Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians against Chechen Muslims, Muslim Azerbaijanis against Catholics and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few examples. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.
In a world divided by ignorance, only the atheist refuses to deny the obvious: Religious faith promotes human violence to an astonishing level. Religion inspires violence in at least two ways: (1) People often kill other human beings because they believe that the Creator of the Universe wants to do so (the inevitable psychopathic corollary is that such an act will ensure them an eternity of happiness after death). Examples of such behavior are practically innumerable, the most prominent of jihadist suicide bombers. (2) A growing number of people are inclined toward religious conflict simply because their religion constitutes the core of their moral identities. One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to educate children in the fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religion. Many religious conflicts that seem driven by terrestrial interests are therefore, of religious origin. (Just ask the Irish.) Despite all these undeniable facts, religious moderates tend to imagine that human conflict is always reducible to a lack of education, poverty or political grievances. This is one of the many delusions of liberal piety. To resolve it, we just have to think about the fact that the hijackers were college educated 11-S upper-middle class who had no known history of political oppression. However, they had spent an inordinate amount of time at their local mosque, hearing of the depravity of infidels and the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many architects and mechanical engineers must go back to crashing into a wall at 400 miles per hour, before we admit that jihadist violence is not a matter of education, politics or poverty? Really, quite amazing, is this: a person can be so educated to be able to build a nuclear bomb, and yet believe that will get 72 virgins in Paradise for all eternity. Such is the ease with which the human mind can be alienated by faith, and such is the degree of accommodation of our intellectual discourse of religious illusion. Only the atheist has observed what should now be obvious to every thinking human being: if we want to uproot the causes of violence We must uproot the false religious certainties of religion.
why religion is so powerful source of human violence?
Our religions are intrinsically incompatible. Jesus rose from the dead and return to Earth as a superhero, or not, the Koran is the inerrant word of God or not. Every religion makes explicit claims about the way the world is, and the overwhelming profusion of these incompatible claims - which are also compulsory dogmas of faith for all believers - creates an enduring basis for conflict.
No other sphere of discourse in which human beings articulate so clearly their mutual differences, or to express these differences in terms of eternal rewards and punishments. Religion is the only human reality in which us-them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If a person really believes that calling God by his right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat rather badly to the heretics and unbelievers. So it may be reasonable to kill them. If a person thinks that something else may tell their children that could put their souls in jeopardy for all eternity, then the heretic neighbor is actually much more dangerous than the most sadistic child rapist. The stigmas of our religious differences are vastly more pronounced than those born of mere tribalism, racism or politics.
Religious faith is a powerful obstacle to dialogue. Religion is only area of \u200b\u200bour discourse in which people are systematically protected from the requirement to provide evidence supporting their firmly held beliefs. And yet, these people's beliefs often determine what they live, die, and - too often - what will kill. This is a very serious problem, because when the stigmas are very pronounced differential humans only have a choice between dialogue and violence. Only a fundamental willingness to be reasonable - so that our beliefs about the world to be revised by new evidence and new arguments - can guarantee that we keep talking to us. Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing. Although there is no guarantee that rational people will always disagree, no doubt always be irrational people divided by their dogmas. It seems highly unlikely that we can cure the disagreements existing in our world simply by multiplying the chances for dialogue.
The aim of civilization can not be mutual tolerance or manifest irrationality. Although all supporters liberal religious discourse have agreed to tiptoe through those points where their worldviews collide head on, these very points remain perpetual sources of conflict for their coreligionists. Political correctness, therefore, does not provide a durable basis for human cooperation. If religious war should be inconceivable for us, just as they already are slavery and cannibalism, it will be possible only if we disregard all the dogmas of faith.
When we have reason to believe what we believe, we have no need for faith, when we have no reason, or just have bad reasons, we have lost our connection to the world and beings human. Atheism is not only a commitment to the most basic level of intellectual honesty: a person's convictions should be proportional to their evidence. Pretending to be sure of anything when you are not - indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence even conceivable - is both intellectual and moral defect. Only the atheist has realized this. An atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and has refused to become a lie itself.
sindioses.org
Translated by: JC Álvarez
Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a child. Soon will rape, torture and murder. If an atrocity of this kind does not occur precisely at this moment, will occur within hours or at most a few days. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that parents of these girls believe at this very moment that an omnipotent and infinitely loving God cares for them and their families. Do you have any reason to believe this? Moreover, is it okay to believe?
The answer to both questions is very clear: NO.
All atheism is contained in the previous answer. Atheism is not a philosophy, not even an opinion about the world, is simply the refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which, in principle, the obvious is overlooked. The obvious must be observed and defended again observed. It is a thankless job. Carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is also a job that the atheist does not needs.
It should be noted that no one needs identified as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Therefore, we have no name to identify people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, atheism is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the protest voiced by reasonable people in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87% of the population) who claim not ever doubt the existence of God are those who are required to submit evidence of their existence and, indeed, kindness , given the relentless destruction innocent human beings that we witness daily in the world. Only the atheist appreciates how mysterious is our present situation: the majority of humans believe in a God who, in all respects, is as great as the gods of Olympus, any person, regardless of their merits and abilities, can access to public office in the United States but says he is fully convinced that God exists and much of the public policy of our country responds to religious taboos and superstitions peculiar to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible and terrifying. It might even be funny if what was at stake was not so important.
live in a world where everything, good and bad, are eventually destroyed by the change. Parents lose their children and their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, not ever meet again. Friends move away from each other quickly, without knowing that they will not be seen. This life, when inspecting a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss. Most people in this world, however, imagine that there is a cure for all this. If you live properly - not necessarily ethically, but within the framework of certain ancient beliefs and stereotyped behaviors - we'll get everything you want after death. When our bodies finally fail us, only we'll get rid of our corporeal ballast to travel to a land where we will meet all the people who loved where we lived. Of course, overly rational people and other rabble will be excluded from that happy place, and those who have suspended their disbelief while alive will be free to enjoy this place for eternity.
We live in a world of unimaginable surprises - from the fusion energy that makes the sun shine, to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this dance of light on the Earth over the eons - and, despite However, Paradise is in conformity with our more superficial interests with the same comfort as a Caribbean cruise. This is extremely curious. If you did not know anything about it, think the man in fear of losing everything that you like, had created heaven, with God's goalkeeper, in his own image and likeness.
Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina brought upon New Orleans. Over a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and nearly a million were displaced. It is almost certain that virtually everyone who lived in New Orleans at the time of the tragedy of Katrina believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate. But what was God as a hurricane swept the city? Surely heard the prayers of the elderly and women fleeing the rising waters for the safety of their roofs, only to slowly drown in them. They were people of faith. They 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.
course, there were clear signs that a storm of biblical proportions would strike New Orleans, and therefore the human response to disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only in the light of science. The signs of the advance of Katrina were extracted from the silent nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God did not speak to one of their projects. If residents of New Orleans had been content to rely on the charity of the Lord, would not have known that a murderer hurricane struck them to feel in their faces the first gusts of wind. However, a survey by the Washington Post found that 80% of Katrina survivors claimed that the event had strengthened their faith in God.
devoured As Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There is no doubt that these pilgrims believed strongly in the God of the Koran: Their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of their existence: their women walked veiled before him, his men were killing each other regularly by rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable that a single survivor of this tragedy to lose his faith. It is more likely that survivors imagine that they were saved by the grace of God.
Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deception who is believed "saved by God." Only the atheist understands what is morally objectionable that the survivors of a catastrophe created saved by the love of God while this same God drowned children in their cribs. Since the atheist refuses to disguise the reality of suffering in the world with a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones how precious life is and how terrible misfortune --- it's really that millions of human beings suffer the most terrible detriment of their happiness for no reason at all.
inevitable question is how large and free to be a disaster to shake the faith of the world. The Nazi Holocaust did not. Neither the Rwandan genocide, although armed with machetes were no priests among the authors. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the twentieth century, many of them children. God's ways are indeed inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how wretched , can be compatible with religious faith. In matters of faith, we have lost all contact with reality.
course, people of faith regularly claim that God is not responsible for human suffering. But what else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way to understand the issue, and it is time that sane human beings to cover it. This is the old problem of theodicy, which should be considered solved. If God exists, can not do anything to stop the most terrible calamities and not worry about it. God, therefore, is impotent or evil. Pious readers now made following pirouette: God can not be judged by mere human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful used primarily to establish the goodness of God. And any God who cares about something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which the faithful turn to him during prayer, is not as inscrutable as it seems. If present, the God of Abraham would be quite negligible, not only would be unworthy of the immensity of creation, but it would be unworthy even of man himself.
There is another possibility, of course, and is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As noted Richard Dawkins, we're all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical God is not at all different from Zeus or Thor. Therefore, only the atheist is compassionate enough to consider the depth of human suffering in all its overwhelming reality. It is terrible to die and lose everything we love, it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while living. That much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion - to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious illusions and religious struggles for scarce resources - is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual. Is a need, however, which places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, just to keep in touch with reality, appears shamefully away from the fantasy life of their own neighbors.
The nature of belief
According to recent surveys, 22% of Americans are fully convinced that Jesus will return to Earth sometime during the next 50 years. Another 22% believe that this is quite likely. Probably the same 44% of Americans are those who attend church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to ban the teaching of biological fact of evolution our children. As you know President George W. Bush, believers in this category are the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Therefore, their opinions and prejudices influence almost every decision of national importance. Liberal politicians seem to have drawn a wrong lesson from these events and have turned their eyes to the scripture, wondering how they could curry favor with the legions of men and women of our country who vote largely based on religious dogma. Over 50% of Americans have an opinion "negative" or "extremely negative" people who do not believe in God, 70% think it is very important that presidential candidates are "deeply religious." The irrationality is now rising in the United States - in our schools, our courts and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28% of Americans believe in evolution, 68% believe in Satan. An ignorance of this caliber, focused both on the head as in the belly of a superpower without rival, is now a problem for the world.
Although it is rather easy for people of good taste to criticize religious fundamentalism, the so-called "religious moderation" still enjoys great prestige in our society, even within the ivory tower. This is ironic, as fundamentalists tend to make use of their brains more based on principles that the "moderates." While fundamentalists justify their religious beliefs with extraordinarily poor evidence and arguments, at least try to give a rational justification. The moderates, however, generally do better than quote the beneficial consequences of religious belief. Instead of saying they believe in God because certain biblical prophecies have been fulfilled, the moderates say they believe in God because this belief "gives meaning to their lives."
When a tsunami killed a hundred thousand people the day after Christmas, fundamentalists readily interpreted this cataclysm as evidence of God's wrath. Apparently, God had sent another oblique message to humanity about the evils of abortion, idolatry and homosexuality. While morally obscene, this interpretation of events is certainly reasonable, given certain assumptions (absurd). The moderates, however, refuse to draw any conclusions about God from his works. God remains a perfect mystery, a mere source of consolation that is compatible with the existence of evil more devastating. Disasters like the Asian tsunami, liberal piety is apt to produce the most affected and appalling nonsense imaginable. Still, men and women of good will usually prefer to such vacuous moralizing Prophethood and hateful of true believers. Disaster, it is certainly a virtue of liberal theology that it emphasizes mercy over wrath. It is worth noting, however, that human compassion is what is revealed - not God - when the bloated bodies of the dead are thrown into the sea. For days, when thousands of children are simultaneously torn from the arms of their mothers at sea and drowned, liberal theology must be revealed for what it is - the more empty and barren of mortal 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 men and neurologically healthy women to believe the unbelievable and think that is the height of moral wisdom.
is completely absurd to suggest, as do the religious moderates that a rational human being can believe in God simply because this belief makes him happy, because it relieves their fear of death or because it gives meaning to his life. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we change the notion of God for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for example, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in your backyard, and that diamond is the size of a refrigerator. No doubt you will feel extremely good to believe this. Imagine what would happen then if that man should follow the example of religious moderates and maintained this belief as pragmatic lines: When asked why he thinks there is a diamond in your backyard and also the diamond is thousands of times greater than any yet discovered, man says things like: "This belief gives my life meaning," or "My family and I enjoyed digging to find it on Sundays," or "I do not want to live in a universe where there was a diamond buried in my backyard and that was the size of a refrigerator. " Clearly these responses are inadequate. But worse than this. Are the responses of a madman or a fool.
Here's why Pascal's wager, the leap of faith and other schemes epistemological Kiergegaard fideists not have any sense. Believing that God exists is to believe that one is in a relationship with their existence, such that the existence is itself the reason for one's belief. There must be some causal connection, or at least the appearance thereof, between the act in question and the acceptance of that fact by the person. Thus, we can see that religious beliefs to be beliefs about how the world should be as proof in the realm of spirit as any other field. Despite all their sins against reason, religious fundamentalists understand this; the moderates - Almost by definition - do not understand at all.
incompatibility between reason and faith has been an obvious feature of human cognition and public discourse for centuries. A person has good reason to believe firmly what you believe or not believe. People of all faiths generally recognize the primacy of reason and resort to reasoning and evidence wherever they can. When rational inquiry supports the creed it is always defended, as a threat, it is ridiculed, sometimes in the same sentence. Only when the evidence in favor of a religious doctrine are scarce or nonexistent, or there is overwhelming evidence against him, his supporters allege "Faith." In other words, the faithful simply cite the reasons for their beliefs (for example, "the New Testament confirms the Old Testament prophecies," "I saw the face of Jesus in a window," we pray, and cancer our daughter began to subside. ") Such reasons are generally inadequate, but better than no reason at all. Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give themselves to keep believing when reasons fail. In a world that has been divided by mutually incompatible religious beliefs in a nation that is increasingly subject to their own conceptions of the Iron Age about God, the end of history and immortality the soul, this lazy division of our discourse in matters of reason and faith issues is simply unacceptable.
faith and good society
People of faith regularly says that atheism is responsible for some of the most horrific crimes of the twentieth century. While it is true that the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were irreligious to varying degrees, were not particularly rational. In fact, his public statements were little more than litanies of illusions - illusions about race, national identity, the march of history or the moral dangers of intellectualism. In many ways, religion was directly culpable even in these cases. Consider the Holocaust: anti-Semitism that built piece by piece the Nazi crematoria was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, religious Germans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics, and had all the social ills attributed to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular, the religious demonization of the Jews continued to exist in Europe. (The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its publications, as late as 1914.)
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical with unjustified beliefs, on the contrary, these horrors are a testament to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. It goes without saying that a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for blindly embrace atheism as a dogma. The problem posed by the atheist is none other than the problem of dogma itself - of which every religion is involved in an extreme degree. There is no society in recorded history that has suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Although most Americans believe that getting rid of religion is an impossible goal, most of the developed world has already achieved. Any story on a supposed "religious gene" that makes most Americans helplessly organize their lives around ancient works of religious fiction must explain why so many people in other First World societies apparently lack this gene. The level of atheism in the rest of the developed world refutes any argument that religion is somehow a moral necessity. Countries such as Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on Earth. According to the Human Development Report 23005 from the United Nations, said countries are also healthier, as indicated by measures of life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational development, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. Conversely, the 50 nations that are now in the ranks lowest in terms of human development are strongly religious. Other tests indicate the same situation: the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious fundamentalism and opposition to evolutionary theory, are also unique because of the high homicide rates, abortions, teenage pregnancies, AIDS cases and infant mortality. The same comparison is true within the territory of the United States: States South and Midwest, characterized by higher levels of religious superstition and hostility to evolutionary theory, are particularly affected by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European standards more . Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve issues of causality - belief in God can lead to social dysfunction, social dysfunction can lead to belief in God and each factor can promote the other, or both factors may arise from some deeper source of dysfunction. Leaving aside the question of cause and effect, these facts show that atheism is quite compatible with the basic aspirations of civil society, they also demonstrate, conclusively, that religious faith does nothing to ensure the health and welfare of society.
Countries with high levels of atheism also are the most charitable in terms of providing foreign aid to developing world. The dubious link between Christian fundamentalism and Christian values \u200b\u200bis also refuted by other indices of charity. Consider the ratio of salaries of top executives and average employees: in Britain is 24 to 1, in France, from 15 to 1, in Sweden, 13 to 1, in the United States, where 83% of the population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead, is 475 to 1. It seems that many expect to easily get camels through the eye of the needle.
Religion as a source of violence
One of the biggest challenges faced by civilization in the twenty-first century is that human beings learn to talk about their deepest interests - about ethics, spiritual experience and the inevitability of human suffering - in a way that is not flagrantly irrational. Nothing more hinders the path of this project that we give respect to religious faith. Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into moral communities separated - Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc .-- and these disagreements have become a continuous source of human conflict. Certainly, religion is now an active source of violence, much as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbs against Croats Catholics, Orthodox Serbs against Bosnian Muslims and Albanians), Northern Ireland (Protestants against Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims against Hindus), Sudan (Muslims against Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims against Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims against Christians), Sri Lanka (Buddhist Sinhalese against Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims against Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite Muslims against Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians against Chechen Muslims, Muslim Azerbaijanis against Catholics and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few examples. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.
In a world divided by ignorance, only the atheist refuses to deny the obvious: Religious faith promotes human violence to an astonishing level. Religion inspires violence in at least two ways: (1) People often kill other human beings because they believe that the Creator of the Universe wants to do so (the inevitable psychopathic corollary is that such an act will ensure them an eternity of happiness after death). Examples of such behavior are practically innumerable, the most prominent of jihadist suicide bombers. (2) A growing number of people are inclined toward religious conflict simply because their religion constitutes the core of their moral identities. One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to educate children in the fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religion. Many religious conflicts that seem driven by terrestrial interests are therefore, of religious origin. (Just ask the Irish.) Despite all these undeniable facts, religious moderates tend to imagine that human conflict is always reducible to a lack of education, poverty or political grievances. This is one of the many delusions of liberal piety. To resolve it, we just have to think about the fact that the hijackers were college educated 11-S upper-middle class who had no known history of political oppression. However, they had spent an inordinate amount of time at their local mosque, hearing of the depravity of infidels and the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many architects and mechanical engineers must go back to crashing into a wall at 400 miles per hour, before we admit that jihadist violence is not a matter of education, politics or poverty? Really, quite amazing, is this: a person can be so educated to be able to build a nuclear bomb, and yet believe that will get 72 virgins in Paradise for all eternity. Such is the ease with which the human mind can be alienated by faith, and such is the degree of accommodation of our intellectual discourse of religious illusion. Only the atheist has observed what should now be obvious to every thinking human being: if we want to uproot the causes of violence We must uproot the false religious certainties of religion.
why religion is so powerful source of human violence?
Our religions are intrinsically incompatible. Jesus rose from the dead and return to Earth as a superhero, or not, the Koran is the inerrant word of God or not. Every religion makes explicit claims about the way the world is, and the overwhelming profusion of these incompatible claims - which are also compulsory dogmas of faith for all believers - creates an enduring basis for conflict.
No other sphere of discourse in which human beings articulate so clearly their mutual differences, or to express these differences in terms of eternal rewards and punishments. Religion is the only human reality in which us-them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If a person really believes that calling God by his right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat rather badly to the heretics and unbelievers. So it may be reasonable to kill them. If a person thinks that something else may tell their children that could put their souls in jeopardy for all eternity, then the heretic neighbor is actually much more dangerous than the most sadistic child rapist. The stigmas of our religious differences are vastly more pronounced than those born of mere tribalism, racism or politics.
Religious faith is a powerful obstacle to dialogue. Religion is only area of \u200b\u200bour discourse in which people are systematically protected from the requirement to provide evidence supporting their firmly held beliefs. And yet, these people's beliefs often determine what they live, die, and - too often - what will kill. This is a very serious problem, because when the stigmas are very pronounced differential humans only have a choice between dialogue and violence. Only a fundamental willingness to be reasonable - so that our beliefs about the world to be revised by new evidence and new arguments - can guarantee that we keep talking to us. Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing. Although there is no guarantee that rational people will always disagree, no doubt always be irrational people divided by their dogmas. It seems highly unlikely that we can cure the disagreements existing in our world simply by multiplying the chances for dialogue.
The aim of civilization can not be mutual tolerance or manifest irrationality. Although all supporters liberal religious discourse have agreed to tiptoe through those points where their worldviews collide head on, these very points remain perpetual sources of conflict for their coreligionists. Political correctness, therefore, does not provide a durable basis for human cooperation. If religious war should be inconceivable for us, just as they already are slavery and cannibalism, it will be possible only if we disregard all the dogmas of faith.
When we have reason to believe what we believe, we have no need for faith, when we have no reason, or just have bad reasons, we have lost our connection to the world and beings human. Atheism is not only a commitment to the most basic level of intellectual honesty: a person's convictions should be proportional to their evidence. Pretending to be sure of anything when you are not - indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence even conceivable - is both intellectual and moral defect. Only the atheist has realized this. An atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and has refused to become a lie itself.
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