After reading your article, I felt compelled to write a response. The people you interviewed in your article seem to have one thing in common, they know about religion in an academic fashion, but they do not appear to have been very involved in it. They also seem to be determined to prove the rest of the world wrong. Bit of an ego trip I would think.
Mr. Dawkins seem to forget both America and Canada were founded on Christian beliefs. That is why he has the freedoms he does today. He makes a bold statement which I think is wrong. He says “highly intelligent people are mostly atheists”. What statistics does he base that statement on? There are many highly intelligent people who are religious. Mr Harris speaks of “ the suffering you create in service to your religious myths”, he doesn’t refer to the many who are suffering because of man’s greed and lust for power. Nor does he mention the many thousands of people who are helped daily by Christians with food, lodging, psychological support and guidance, friendship, and the knowledge that someone loves them. I would ask Mr. Harris what he does to lessen and stop the suffering in the world which is created by greed and lack of moral guidance. He talks about a religion of “reason”, which oddly enough is similar to Christianity but without God and Jesus. Not very original.
As far as Penn and Teller, they are by profession, illusionists. They use slight of hand and deception to amaze the paying audience. Hardly examples for atheism or religion.
Mr. Dennett’s statement that there could be a rational religion is similar to that of Mr. Harris. He speaks of “defaults”. I ask who set the “defaults”. I would refer him and all the other atheists mentioned in your article to Nietzsche, a well known atheist. He said“The real truth about ‘objective truth’ is that the latter is a fiction. Every candidate for ‘Truth’ must first be expressed in language, and language is notoriously unable to get us to reality. Words, like a hall of mirrors, reflect only each other and in the end point back to the condition of their users, without having established anything about the way things really are. Truth is the name we give to that which agrees with our instinctive preferences; it is what we call our interpretation of the world, especially when we want to foist it upon others.”
This is an incredibly self-defeating statement. As Ravi Zacharias, a great Christian apologist, says “If what he asserts is right, his very notion that what he is saying is right is only right because he wants to foist it upon us.” Nietzsche, by the way, eventually became a Christian.
Religion is a continuum with many different views of religion, from fundamentalism to charismatic views. I notice that most of the people referenced pick particular spots on the continuum to focus on. When you do this, it is always easy to criticize.
Just as there are rules to any game, there are rules for life. If you follow Jesus, and try to obey his rules, you will in most cases have a happy and fulfilling life. It is when you disobey the rules, that you find unhappiness and sometimes much worse. Bad decisions cause suffering either for you or for others.
In closing, I would ask these atheists, “Would you want to live in a world without religion?” Mr. Harris “veils his academic affiliation and hometown because he fears for his physical safety.” This is in a Christian society. Think how dangerous it would be in a world without God.
Hugh MooreColborne, OntarioCanada
