Religion posion everything from: Christopher Hitchens

Ser~pent SG

God Is Not Great

http://www.slate.com/id/2165033/entry/2165035/

There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had broken. I am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since met such people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different countries. Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned faith after a difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments of un-conviction that were every bit as instantaneous, though perhaps less epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally and more morally justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene road. And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called "brights," is a part of a continuous argument.) We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind andsince there is no other metaphoralso the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds truethat religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, "I am so made that I cannot believe."

Ser~pent SG

http://www.slate.com/id/2165033/entry/2165035/

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited wayone might cite Pascaland some of it is dreary and absurdhere one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewisboth styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealednot too effectively at thatin order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to "fit" with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and thenafter infinite pain and loss and absurdity and crueltyto be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the "meaning" of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yetthe believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what "he" demands of usfrom our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one factionitself composed of mutually warring factionshas the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude "belief" from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.

The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginningbut not the endof all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginningbut by no means the endof all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to "respect" their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal conditionwhich is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

Ser~pent SG

Handsome Author Mr. Green
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/WebCast/story?id=3387666&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

Author Christopher Hitchens challenges religious beliefs to express a few beliefs of his own. (ABC News)

I'm a writer by trade, and my most recent book is called "God is Not Great." The subtitle, in case people don't get the point from the title itself, is how religion poisons everything.

I describe religion as a poison because I think it attacks the very heart of our integrity. It says that we wouldn't have any knowledge of right or wrong, any ability to distinguish between good and evil if we were not afraid of a celestial dictatorship

God did not make man. Precisely the contrary. Man made God. That's why there are so many gods. Always have been -- always will be.

I wouldn't say it's wrong for people to believe in God, but I would say those who believe in a God are very seriously mistaken. But you can believe in a god if you must, or if you will, without having to be religious.

A religious person is someone who goes further than believing the religious process is true.

People who say they know what God wants, they claim to know him in person -- that's more than anyone could possibly claim. Therefore, it's an unsound claim. And because it's a large claim on a very major subject, it is likely to lead to fanaticism.

Well it would be idle for me to say that a Quaker is as bad as say a member of the Mahdi army but I do think that all religions make the same mistake in that they surrender reason, which is our most precious faculty, to faith, which is very vague and abstract

the Bear SG

where there are rabid religious fanatics who disregard common sense, taste, personal choices and logic, there are also rabid anti-religious fanatics who disregard common sense, good taste, personal choices and logic...

you have it in Hitchens...

if he was religious and in another time and place, he'd be Tomas de Torquemada..

Ser~pent SG

tomas de torquemada Rolling Eyes

the Spaniard who as Grand Inquisitor was responsible for the death of thousands of Jews and suspected witches during the Spanish Inquisition (1420-1498 )

or

Spanish Dominican friar who was appointed grand inquisitor by Pope Innocent VIII (1487). Under his authority, thousands of Jews, suspected witches, and others were killed or tortured during the Spanish Inquisition.

Ser~pent SG

The End of Faith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Faith

The End of Faith opens with a literary account of a day in the life of a suicide bomber his last day. In an introductory chapter, Harris calls for an end to respect and tolerance for the competing belief systems of religion, which he describes as being "all equally uncontaminated by evidence". While focusing on the dangers posed by religious extremist groups now armed with weapons of mass destruction, Harris is equally critical of religious moderation, which he describes as "the context in which religious violence can never be adequately opposed."

Harris continues by examining the nature of belief itself, challenging the notion that we can in any sense enjoy freedom of belief for as he points out, "belief is a fount of action in potentia." Instead he posits that in order to be useful, beliefs must be both logically coherent, and truly representative of the real world. Insofar as religious belief fails to ground itself in empirical evidence, Harris likens religion to a form of mental illness which, he says, "allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy." He argues that there may be "sanity in numbers", but that it is "merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your prayers, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window."

Harris follows this with a brief survey of Christianity down the ages, examining the Inquisition and the historic persecution of witches and Jews. He contends that, far from being an aberration, the torture of heretics was simply a logical expression of Christian doctrine one which, he says, was clearly justified by men such as Saint Augustine. Going still further, Harris sees the Holocaust as essentially drawing its inspiration from traditional Christian anti-Semitism. "Knowingly or not," he says, "the Nazis were agents of religion."

Possibly the most controversial aspect of The End of Faith is an uncompromising assessment and criticism of Islam, which Harris describes as being a "cult of death." He infers a clear link between Islamic teaching and terrorist atrocities such as 9/11, something which he backs up with five pages of quotations from the Koran. He also presents some Pew Research data, showing that significant percentages of Muslims worldwide would justify suicide bombing as a legitimate tactic. In an attack on what he terms "leftist unreason," Harris criticises Noam Chomsky among others for, in his view, displaying an illogical willingness to lay the entire blame for such attitudes upon U.S. foreign policy.

However, Harris makes an equally strong critique of the role of the Christian right in contemporary America, in influencing such areas as sex and drug policy, stem-cell research, and AIDS prevention in the developing world. In what he sees as a steady drift towards theocracy, Harris strongly criticises leading figures from both the legislature and the judiciary for what he perceives as an unashamed failure to separate church and state in their various domains. "Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world," he says, "we are positively smug about it."

Next, Harris goes on to outline what he terms a "science of good and evil" a rational approach to ethics, which he claims must necessarily be predicated upon questions of human happiness and suffering. He talks about the need to sustain "moral communities," a venture in which he feels that the separate religious moral identities of the "saved" and the "damned" can play no part. But Harris is critical of the stance of moral relativism, and also of what he calls "the false choice of pacifism." In a controversial passage, he compares the ethical questions raised by collateral damage and judicial torture during war. He concludes that collateral damage is more ethically troublesome. "If we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war," Harris writes.

Finally, Harris turns to spirituality where he takes his inspiration from the practices of Eastern religion, arguing that as far as Western spirituality is concerned, "we appear to have been standing on the shoulders of dwarfs." He discusses the nature of consciousness, and how our sense of "self" can be made to vanish by employing the techniques of meditation. To support his claims, Harris quotes from Eastern mystics such as Padmasambhava, but he does not admit any supernatural element into his argument "mysticism is a rational enterprise," he says, "religion is not." He states that it is possible for one's experience of the world to be "radically transformed", but that we must speak about the possibility in "rational terms".

The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith, which is surely the devil's masterpiece.

Ser~pent SG

Another handsome Author

Sam Harris
Born 1967 (age 4041)

Occupation Author
Nationality American
Genres Non Fiction
Debut works The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004)
Website SamHarris.org

After coming under intense criticism in response to his attacks on dogmatic religious belief, Harris is cautious about revealing details of his personal life and history.[2] He has said that he was raised by a Jewish mother and a Quaker father,[3][2] and he told Newsweek that as a child, he "declined to be bar mitzvahed."[4] He attended Stanford University as an English major, but dropped out of school following a life-altering experience with MDMA (commonly known as "ecstasy").[2] During this period he studied Buddhism and meditation, and claims to have read hundreds of books on religion.

After eleven years he returned to Stanford and completed a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience,[2] using functional magnetic resonance imaging to conduct research into the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris_%28author%29