Truly gone are the days of Epicurus.
Gone are the discussions about Free Will and the existence of Evil. Recently, some vocal atheists apper to be thinking it is time for puerile opinions instead.
Sure, many âpersons without Godâ (including agnosticists such as âBreaking the Spellââs author Daniel C. Dennett) have a healthy respect for the experiences and beliefs of fellow human beings, be them atheists or not.
But then what can one say when an otherwise brilliant thinker like Richard Dawkins publishes without a grain of self-awareness the “Ultimate 747” argument, a so-called âdefinitive proofâ that God does not exist?
It is a sort of an updated âwho created the Creatorâ question that anybody with a brain can beautifully, simply and quite obviously take apart (hint: the Creator doesnât have to be part of the Creation).
In Italy, philosophy Professor Maurizio Ferraris finds it worthwhile to spend his time arguing that Jesus is akin to Santa Claus, whilst mathematician extraordinaire Piergiorgio Odifreddi canât even think of belief in God as anything else than irrational superstition.
Things look like going even more downhill now, with Christopher Hitchens’ new book âGod is Not Greatâ: apparently, a masterpiece with pearls of wisdom such as asking if the Jews did not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments.
Obviously, the problem is not with Hitchens, a professional polemicist that utters outrageous statements for a living (sort of a male Ann Coulter with just a tad less smell of sulphur). The problem is not even with Dawkinsâ anti-fundamentalist crusade that truly throw the baby (Faith) with the bathwater (religious establishments).
There is a much larger issue at hand: the blind acceptance of their half-backed arguments by people evidently in need to justify their atheism to themselves.
Take for example Michael Kinsleyâs review of Hitchenâs book (âWith brio and anger, an atheist takes on religionâ, International Herald Tribune , May 12, 2007).
Mr Kinsley finds âentertainingâ some blatantly silly questions such as âHow could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all?â (Answer: please do read at least one Gospel, once).
Worse, Mr Kinsley is âsatisfiedâ with (yet another?) âdisprovingâ of the existence of God. WowâŚitâs nice to know that age-old questions can finally be set aside: why donât Messrs. Hitchens and Kinsley explain to us the Meaning of Life too?
Mr Kinsley is also quite happy to repeat Mr Hitchensâ thoughts on religious ecumenism. âif any one of the major faiths is true, then the others must be false in important respects â an obvious point often forgotten in the warm haze of ecumenismâ. Boy, have they âobviouslyâ squared the circle or what?
Do people like Kinsley and Hitchens realize how deeply, reactionarily catholic (with small âcâ) is such a limited view of Faith (one God, one Truth, one World)?
How much was the Mahatma a âmoron, lunatic or liarâ then? That’s their definition of a modern believer. After all he did say âNon-violence requires a double faith, faith in God and also faith in manâ and âOne’s own religion is after all a matter between oneself and one’s Maker and no one else’s.â
Doesn’t anybody remember Quintus Aurelius Symmachus? One of the last pagans in ancient Rome, Symmachus protested the removal of the Altar of Victory from the floor of the Roman Senate by a Christian Emperor by saying âWe contemplate the same stars, the Heavens are common to us all, and the same world surrounds us. What matters the path of wisdom by which each person seeks the truth?â.
(No need to waste your breath on our activist atheists, o civis Symmachus! They wouldnât even know what youâre talking about).
Anyway, there is just the faintest of hope of some reasoning capability left in the activist atheistâs mind. Mr Hitchens writes that a sustained argument about the (non-)existence of God shouldnât be either necessary, nor sufficient. I am sure only the most fundamentalist believers and atheists will disagree with that.
What is for atheists then the point of writing books belittling something they do not have?
Perhaps, just perhaps, one day people like Mr Hitchens and Mr Dawkins will realize that they may as well uselessly ponder on mysteries such as why a wonderful person as my wife ever fell in love with a less-than-perfect guy like me. Good luck with that!
Is this really what millennia of debates between believers and atheists have gone down to? Somebody will rightly point out that there are plenty of idiots that believe their Faith should be expressed by insulting, outlawing, threatening and killing others.
Yes, there are!
But two wrongs donât make one right: werenât Dawkins et al. supposed to be the Brights, the superiorly intelligent humans capable of shedding silly arguments and superstition from their lives, and from the lives of anybody that would follow them?
Why are they then switching off their brains whenever the conversational topic is Religion?
If theirs is the Light, we live in a very dim world indeed.
Like the Conquistadores in the Americas, these Brights are fighting to destroy what they can’t understand in the belief of improving the human lot. The bringing down of anything spiritual, it has become their spiritual quest. The attitude of the vast majority of their fellow humans, they consider it a primitive relic unworthy of their own perfection. Several thousand years of contributions in logic and philosophy, that doesn’t mean a thing to them.
Having discovered the âdefinitive argumentsâ for the double impossibility of proving the non-existence of any Divinity, they put themselves outside of human history. And they even gather around their books of wisdom, to accept with little sense of critique anything that is said to belittle the very idea that human being can believe in God.
It’s a hubris extravaganza.
Contemporary (activist) atheists truly set themselves in competition with God: here’s a hint of why they find so compelling to make however flawed an argument against the scandal represented by anybody not believing in their âreligion of atheismâ.