I sometimes shake my head at the futility of debating the dedicated faithful. By that I do not mean those who are serious about their religion and think it through, but those who attached themselves, limpet-like, to a movement and then abandon all introspection and attack all dissent aimed at…
Dead unbaptised infants throughout the universe are undoubtedly breathing a sigh of relief at this breaking news from the Vatican (as reported by Reuters): The Roman Catholic Church has effectively buried the concept of limbo, the place where centuries of tradition and teaching held that babies who die without baptism…
A friend called me recently. The doctor just found a “suspicious” lump and scheduled a biopsy. As you can imagine, she is anxious that she might have cancer.
What can a good agnostic say to such a person? Consider these options:
Now compare the above impotent responses to the following (add reverb for effect when you read these out loud):
Promising to pray makes it appear that one is really doing something. It would certainly be much more satisfying to both me and to my friend I I could honestly tell her that I was doing something rather than settling for the agnostic version of prayer (i.e., “I hope it isn’t cancer” or “Would you like to talk about your upcoming biopsy over dinner?”).
The false efficacy of prayer plays into one of the great fallacies of our time, …
We’ve had a horrible tragedy back here in the United States. Thirty-three students are dead at Virginia Tech, with many others wounded. Our papers are going to spill a lot of ink on this story, as they should. But on the other side of the world, multitudes of innocent civilians…
At this site we have often debated the extent to which non-Believers are harmed by the beliefs of religious moderates. The main idea is that moderates are serving as human shields for whacked-out literalist fundamentalists. Society would be hammering fundamentalists with enough widespread ridicule to make them political untouchables, except that religious moderates continue clinging to “lite” versions of fundamentalist beliefs.
This concern has been well-articulated by Sam Harris:
Religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism.
This issue raises a serious question: Should non-Believers actively challenge the ubiquitous “mild,” religious pronouncements made by religious moderates? Until recently, I usually remained silent when my kind and decent relatives, acquaintances and neighbors, uttered things like this:
Assertions like this don’t imminently threaten me. The religious moderates who utter such things are not power-mongerers who dream of taking the reins of government to impose literalist versions of their sacred literature on people like me. These assertions certainly don’t pack the poisonous wallop of the commonly uttered fundamentalist accusations that non-Believers like me are morally unfit to participate in society. Rather, statements of faith uttered by religious moderates are usually …