In this audio clip, Dawkins is cornered into admitting that, without God, morality is arbitrary. Dawkins’ reluctance is born of that fact that, just like everybody else, he really doesn’t believe that morality is arbitrary. If he were as reasonable as he would like us to think, he should acknowledge that humanity’s innate belief in non-arbitrary morality is evidence for God’s existence.
But he’s not that reasonable.
From here:
This month, the final Harry Potter film had the most successful opening weekend of any movie ever. Among the fans who lined up for the opening midnight showing were Christians, many of whom see striking similarities between the story of Jesus — with its sacrificial death, burial and resurrection — and the story of Harry Potter.
But at least one atheist has also noticed these similarities, and he’s written a book about it. In the newly-released (and blasphemously-titled) Jesus Potter Harry Christ, Derek Murphy makes the case that J. K. Rowling — the author of the Harry Potter series — achieved her success by tapping into some of the deepest and most ancient longings of the human heart. These same longings, Murphy argues, compelled first-century pagans to construct what he calls “the Jesus myth.”
Surprising: Jesus Potter, Harry Christ but no Jesus Murphy.
As Chuck Colson notes, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien recognised that the truth of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross and subsequent resurrection is so powerful that it permeates the entire universe and ends up finding expression in unexpected places – like Harry Potter:
Well, Murphy is certainly right in recognizing a common thread through pagan religious beliefs. As C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, the heathen religions are full of “…those queer stories…about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”
But what Murphy misses — and Lewis got — is the fact that the human longings for sacrifice, resurrection and redemption are stamped on our hearts for a reason: They point us straight to the God who stepped into history to fulfill them!
In a letter to a friend, Lewis recounts a conversation he had with J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings — and a close colleague of Lewis.
“The story of Christ,” said Tolkien, “is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened…The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”
From here:
Wisconsin officials are reviewing a complaint that the official state website links to an anti-abortion group with religious ties.
The organization is called Care Net, a faith-based group that caters to pregnant women.
The Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation says by linking to the site, the state is advertising evangelical ideals. Group president Annie Laurie Gaylor wants the link removed.
The link in question can be found here, and it points to this site, whose aim is:
As the largest network of pregnancy centers in North America, Care Net is committed to expanding access to the life-saving services and support provided by our local centers and to reaching the hurting and broken with the hope of Jesus Christ.
We work to accomplish this goal by promoting our network of centers and the Option Line call center, preparing our local centers to effectively serve their communities, and partnering with existing centers or like-minded ministries to plant new pregnancy centers in underserved areas.
As you can see, pretty sinister.
I have little doubt that if today’s coterie of benighted God haters had lived in the 19th Century, they would have vigorously canvassed to prevent William Wilberforce end slavery – because he was an evangelical Christian who had no right imposing his Christian perspectives on a secular parliament.
From here:
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — In the military, there are more than 3,000 chaplains who minister to the spiritual and emotional needs of active duty troops, regardless of their faiths. The vast majority are Christians, a few are Jews or Muslims, one is a Buddhist. A Hindu, possibly even a Wiccan may join their ranks soon.
But an atheist?
Strange as it sounds, groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy, hoping to give voice to what they say is a large — and largely underground — population of nonbelievers in the military.
The atheist chaplains will, no doubt, console their faithful with the reassurance that if they are killed in battle, a great black nothingness awaits them. Don’t worry about losing a limb because worms will eat your mortal remains anyway, attached or not; and the framers of the just war theory based their ideas on a belief in God, so if they were wrong about God, there is no such thing as a just war and you might as well desert.
A real morale booster.
From here:
Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition [sic]. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.
…. And don’t keep the faith.
But, of course, Hitchens is keeping the faith:
Faith that a dying organism can bolster the immunity of a randomly assembled conglomeration of molecules – otherwise known as comrades – to a belief in the transcendence which alone offers a remedy for the despair inherent in mortality.
Faith that he, Hitchens is right, that his mind, body, rationality, faculties and voice are subject to no other forces than the material.
Faith that the reasoning abilities he is so proud of, even though they are nothing but the flotsam of a chaotic universe, are, for a mysterious reason known only to himself, more trustworthy than those of Mother Teresa – a creation of the same primordial pandemonium – someone who has earned Hitchens’ undisguised scorn.
Faith that a trust in nothingness is somehow nobler than trust in a Creator.
Faith that the best efforts of medical science to prolong the time that a person struts and frets his hour upon the stage is of consequence when set against eternity.
A wonderful illustration of Psalm 14:1.
From here:
Lord Patten of Barnes, the former Cabinet minister and a practising Catholic, said that he felt he was regarded as “peculiar” over his faith.
His comments come amid a deepening battle over the freedom of religious belief, which last week saw a Christian electrician threatened with the sack for displaying a cross in his van.
Lord Patten, a Conservative peer who will take control of the BBC Trust next month, is the highest-profile political figure to enter the debate over what is seen as a creeping attempt to remove Christianity from public life.
But his comments angered secularists, who last night expressed concern that his faith could affect his ability to remain objective in making decisions.
Unfortunately for secularists, the only possibility there is for objectivity in making decisions is if a Mind exists that is higher than the human mind.
Otherwise all decisions are, at best, by definition subjective and at worst, meaningless mechanistic by-products of an indifferent universe, making the concern expressed by the secularists, by their own measure, of no account and Lord Patten eminently suited to his new position.
A debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig on where moral values come from and whether atheists have grounds for believing in objective moral values.
The whole series is well worth watching. I am, of course, biased but it seems fairly clear that Sam Harris didn’t fare too well. He never came to grips with the problem of his tautological definitions of “good” and “evil”, preferring, instead, to eschew logic and employ the decoy of making emotionally indignant appeals to examples of our or God’s – the God he claims isn’t there – moral failures, along with other randomly selected red-herrings.
William Lane Craig, on the other hand, pounds his points home with remorseless logic.
It is strange that the members of the group that trumpets its appeal to reason alone for the explanation of why we are here, are inclined to share the characteristic of being irrationally angry.
Long gone are the days of enjoyable gentlemen’s debates, full of reasoned intensity and intellectual rigour – such as those between Bertrand Russell and Fr. Copplestone. Perhaps it is partly because they lack the mental equipment of their predecessors or perhaps there is a deeper psychological reason, but today’s Dawkins/Hitchens spawned atheists seem more inclined to rage against a God whom they insist isn’t there.
Sometimes the anger is easily explained by the psychological problems of emotional reasoning, immaturity and low frustration tolerance, but assertions such as those of Hitchens that God, if he existed, would be a “celestial dictator” or of Dawkins that God in the Old Testament is a “sex-obsessed, cruel tyrant” point to the uneasy suspicion that the new atheists disbelieve in God less than they hate him.
Perhaps, then, the explanation is that the new atheists share a common tendency for self-destruction: the impulse to self-destruction leads to a life of learning hatred for the Decider of eternal destinies and is expressed in the angry bravado of rebellion. Come to think of it, there is nothing new about that.
The Templeton prize is supposed to honour someone who:
has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.
This year, the winner was Martin Rees, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University who “has no religious beliefs”, but occasionally attends Church of England Sunday worship – where he fits right in.
It might be possible for this to be more mixed up, but so far we have Rees who doesn’t believe in God, but attends an Anglican Church sporadically, winning a prize for making an “exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension”.
But wait, there’s more: real atheists like Richard Dawkins reckon he’s let the side down by “blur[ring] the boundary between science and religion, making a virtue of belief without evidence”. Meanwhile, Dawkins continues to believe, without evidence*, that the excogitations of the grey soup beneath his thinning curly locks are of a weightier substance than Mr Gumby’s flower arranging instructions.
* J. B. S. Haldane: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…. and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms”
Atheist, A. C. Grayling has written a book giving fellow atheists advice on ways to live a good life. Other than as an act of sheer hubris, giving advice on a commodity – goodness – which has no meaning for atheists seems particularly pointless. If atheism is true, the moral actions of humans are entirely predetermined by evolution, including Grayling’s writing of this superfluous book.
From here:
In The Good Book, Professor Grayling attempts to whisk together in one tome the wisdom of Ancient Greek philosophers, Confucian sages, medieval poets and the discoveries of modern science.
Without any reference to gods, souls or afterlives, it aims to give atheists a book of inspiration and guidance as they make their way in the world.
In place of the more well-known Ten Commandments, his atheist principles are: “Love well, seek the good in all things, harm no others, think for yourself, take responsibility, respect nature, do your utmost, be informed, be kind, be courageous.”
Professor Grayling, the president elect of the British Humanist Association, is unambivalent about the biblical mission of his work.
“The point about the religious bible is that it purports to give us some direction. It contains the commands of a divinity wishing us to live a certain way,” he says.
“In fact it has a message which is that there is one great truth and one right way to live.
“The modest offering of The Good Book is that there are as many good lives as there are people who have the talent to live them, and that people must take the responsibility for thinking for themselves and making that decision for themselves.
“What this book does is try and offer them resources for thinking about that.”
