Chapter 3-4 D’Souza and Atheism Part 2
Atheists, alarmed by the rising power of religion around the world are mounting an unprecedented attack on religion. They thought they were winning; but with the decline of secularism and possibly with the precipitous decline of communism, atheists have suddenly become aggressively evangelistic in their efforts to convince the world of the righteousness of their cause.
Their arguments tend to follow one of two lines of thought. The first is that science has shown that religion is unnecessary to explain reality and that science seems to work better. Carl Sagan writes; “We can pray over the cholera victim or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every twelve hours.” Sagan also points out that even Christians who pray are likely to supplement the prayer with medicine. We are simply carbon based machines and the mythical ‘soul’ is just a ghost in the machine that science has driven out.
The second argument is the historical crimes of religion, the Crusades, the Inquisition, religious wars, witch trials and the like. The solution for them is to weaken the power of religion and drive religion from the public sphere. “Modern atheists view themselves as brave pioneers, facing the truths of man’s lowly origins and the facing death with heroic acceptance.
“Not content with committing cultural suicide-they want to take your children with them.” The atheist strategy is to let the religious breed the children, but the secular will educate them to despise their parent’s beliefs by focusing on science, portraying it as the only reliable source of truth. Richard Dawkins poses the question of how much authority society and the state should give parents to ‘indoctrinate’ their own children and when the state should define such ‘unscientific’ education as child abuse. Is it surprising that home school education is growing at a rate of 15-20% per year or that California recently aborted legislation that attempted to curb the freedom of parents to educate their children as they see fit?
Their arguments tend to follow one of two lines of thought. The first is that science has shown that religion is unnecessary to explain reality and that science seems to work better. Carl Sagan writes; “We can pray over the cholera victim or we can give her 500 milligrams of tetracycline every twelve hours.” Sagan also points out that even Christians who pray are likely to supplement the prayer with medicine. We are simply carbon based machines and the mythical ‘soul’ is just a ghost in the machine that science has driven out.
The second argument is the historical crimes of religion, the Crusades, the Inquisition, religious wars, witch trials and the like. The solution for them is to weaken the power of religion and drive religion from the public sphere. “Modern atheists view themselves as brave pioneers, facing the truths of man’s lowly origins and the facing death with heroic acceptance.
“Not content with committing cultural suicide-they want to take your children with them.” The atheist strategy is to let the religious breed the children, but the secular will educate them to despise their parent’s beliefs by focusing on science, portraying it as the only reliable source of truth. Richard Dawkins poses the question of how much authority society and the state should give parents to ‘indoctrinate’ their own children and when the state should define such ‘unscientific’ education as child abuse. Is it surprising that home school education is growing at a rate of 15-20% per year or that California recently aborted legislation that attempted to curb the freedom of parents to educate their children as they see fit?
posted by complexspecificity | 2:32 PM
4 Comments:
"but with the decline of secularism and possibly with the precipitous decline of communism,"
What are you talking about? Secularism has only been really trashed in the states, where it was never strong to start with. And communism has been shot down since 1991. It has nothing to do with secularism. Seriously- the successor states are all secular.
"Their arguments tend to follow one of two lines of thought."
Except when they don't, right? The main thrust of the argument is that religion is FALSE- there is no evidence for religion's claims, and, in fact, a good amount of evidence that goes the other way.
"The atheist strategy is to let the religious breed the children, but the secular will educate them to despise their parent’s beliefs by focusing on science, portraying it as the only reliable source of truth."
No, it is because the faithful are breeding like bunnies. Serious, they should stop it- we already have too many people.
As for science being the only reliable course of truth, you agree with me on that! After all, you'd probably use faith... but so do Muslims and Hindus! If you get completely opposite answers, it is obvious that it is NOT a reliable source of truth, now is it?
"Richard Dawkins poses the question of how much authority society and the state should give parents to ‘indoctrinate’ their own children and when the state should define such ‘unscientific’ education as child abuse. Is it surprising that home school education is growing at a rate of 15-20% per year or that California recently aborted legislation that attempted to curb the freedom of parents to educate their children as they see fit?"
So your defense of such a practice is... try and stop us?
Sam: You must know by now that getting D'Souza to realize anything other than his delusive thinking is like trying to poke hot butter up a wild cat's ass with a hat pin.
The man is incredibly biased in his way of thinking. In fact, I believe he is on someone's payroll to push this kind of ideology.
He's on a mission to try and put down any other ideas than his own and those of the fundies. Let's face it, they are worried because they have a lot to lose. As you know, religion is one of the biggest businesses in the US and they are losing money.
Religion is getting a very
bad rap due to the fact it no longer makes any sense.
Religion is a collection place for perverts, frauds and other unscrupulous people. It will eventually fail.
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Sam, ----- Enjoy your comments, good thoughts and logical follow through. Too many times people toss out entertaining comments without evidence or cogent arguments. My thoughts follow more or less in the order you presented them.
I think we are having difficulty over definitions. I’m in danger of putting words in D’Souza’s mouth but secularism as used here is the idea that governance should exist independent of religious beliefs. That’s a western way of thinking; most of the rest of the world would argue that trying to separate my physical life from my spiritual or metaphysical life is absurd.
Communist expansionism appears to have stopped with the Vietnam war. The breakup of the USSR in 1991 didn’t end communism/socialism unless you can somehow define Korea, China, Vietnam etc. as something else. In any case, I’m not sure that they in fact are secular in that they don’t espouse separating governance from religion, they tend to deny people the reality of a metaphysical life.
think you are making D’Souza’s point about atheist arguments that religion is false. My question is this. What tools do physical scientists have to investigate the metaphysical? It seems scientists own rules exclude any scientific principles or evidence concerning the metaphysical and therefore disqualify themselves from meaningful discussion.
No argument about world population, the differences between religious groups or even science in general. The point being made is that the large majority of people don’t find evolution believable and this seems to annoy atheists. In California, the result was that secularists tried to limit parental rights to educate their children. The stated reason was quality of education which is absurd because statistics indicate home schooled children do better then their peers in standardized tests and college.
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