> Excellent Post!

> "WhewNotSaved" gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1167022301.399812.312900@i12g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

>> Velvet Elvis wrote:

>>> 10 myths and 10 truths about atheism.
>>>
>>> Should be required reading by all christians. Frank and Melchy, take
>>> note.
>>>
>>> http://tinyurl.com/w5npf

>>
>> this is too good not to paste the whole article here:
>>
>> 10 myths -- and 10 truths -- about atheism
>> By Sam Harris
>> SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and
>> the Future of Reason" and "Letter to a Christian Nation."
>>
>> December 24, 2006
>>
>> SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term "atheism" has acquired such an
>> extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now
>> a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being
>> black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek
>> poll, only 37%% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified
>> atheist for president.
>>
>> Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind
>> to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the
>> supernatural.
>>
>> Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment,
>> believed that atheism was "not at all to be tolerated" because, he
>> said, "promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human
>> societies, can have no hold upon an atheist."
>>
>> That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today,
>> little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87%% of the population claims
>> "never to doubt" the existence of God; fewer than 10%% identify
>> themselves as atheists - and their reputation appears to be
>> deteriorating.
>>
>> Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent
>> and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important
>> to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in
>> our national discourse.
>>
>> 1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.
>>
>> On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless
>> and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal
>> happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is
>> precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived.
>> Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not
>> last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of
>> meaninglessness ... well ... meaningless.
>>
>> 2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
>>
>> People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and
>> Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with
>> fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of
>> religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such
>> regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality
>> cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship.
>> Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what
>> happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of
>> political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society
>> in human history that ever suffered because its people became too
>> reasonable.
>>
>> 3) Atheism is dogmatic.
>>
>> Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so
>> prescient of humanity's needs that they could only have been written
>> under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a
>> person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the
>> claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or
>> be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the
>> historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we
>> are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When
>> you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will
>> understand why I dismiss yours."
>>
>> 4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.
>>
>> No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not
>> entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the "beginning" or
>> "creation" of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of
>> time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.
>>
>> The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance
>> is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As
>> Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, "The God Delusion,"
>> this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory.
>> Although we don't know precisely how the Earth's early chemistry begat
>> biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living
>> world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of
>> chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase
>> "natural selection" by analogy to the "artificial selection" performed
>> by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly
>> non-random effect on the development of any species.
>>
>> 5) Atheism has no connection to science.
>>
>> Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God -
>> as some scientists seem to manage it - there is no question that an
>> engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than
>> support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example:
>> Most polls show that about 90%% of the general public believes in a
>> personal God; yet 93%% of the members of the National Academy of
>> Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking
>> less congenial to religious faith than science is.
>>
>> 6) Atheists are arrogant.
>>
>> When scientists don't know something - like why the universe came
>> into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed - they
>> admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound
>> liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based
>> religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be
>> found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for
>> their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry
>> and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about
>> the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw
>> their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual
>> honesty.
>>
>> 7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.
>>
>> There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love,
>> ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek
>> them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and
>> unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such
>> experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed
>> their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus.
>> What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention
>> and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do
>> the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole
>> savior of humanity? Not even remotely - because Hindus, Buddhists,
>> Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.
>>
>> There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain
>> that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or
>> rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that
>> spiritual experience can authenticate.
>>
>> 8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human
>> understanding.
>>
>> Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way
>> that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully
>> understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the
>> Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not
>> know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there
>> might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an
>> understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists
>> can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if
>> brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the
>> Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human
>> atheists.
>>

>>>From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly

>> trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't
>> have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an
>> observation.
>>
>> 9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to
>> society.
>>
>> Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize
>> that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious
>> doctrine. This is why we have terms such as "wishful thinking" and
>> "self-deception." There is a profound distinction between a consoling
>> delusion and the truth.
>>
>> In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In
>> most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave
>> well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is
>> more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or
>> doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do
>> it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?
>>
>> 10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.
>>
>> If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't
>> discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran - as these books are
>> bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not
>> get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good
>> books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level)
>> hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of
>> thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.
>>
>> We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't
>> make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both
>> books condone the practice of slavery - and yet every civilized human
>> being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good
>> in scripture - like the golden rule - can be valued for its ethical
>> wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the
>> creator of the universe.
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>

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