3 posts tagged “atheism”

I haven't been doing as much reading as I should in the past couple of weeks, having been experiencing an unusual amount of drama for my sensibly-shod life.  Finally, I finished The End of Faith, Sam Harris's provocative argument

against religion.  Faithful readers (Jenny? Daphne?) will recall that I didn't care for Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, finding it simplistic and needlessly pugnacious.  Well, this full-length work is considerably more sophisticated, of course. The primary argument is that religious faith -- and that includes religious moderates -- is a force for evil in the world.  His most frightening scenarios involve Islam, but he certainly slams the predominantly Christian culture of the west, as well.   I won't rehash the arguments here; I'm convinced, and the faithful will probably not be.  Most interesting to me were the later chapters outlining the case for ethics without faith and even spirituality without faith.  He presents the atheistic spirituality of Buddhism as something that is not predicated on faith and could be a valuable way for human beings to connect with something larger than themselves.

I am a humanist, which is a way to say I’m an atheist without getting immediately beaten up.  You might expect me to be pretty cynical about Christmas, but you’d be wrong.  Not only do I keep a big, exuberant Christmas, I keep a Christmas that has spirit and depth and meaning way beyond the shopping mall ethos of our times, if I may say so myself. 

I even have a nativity scene in my living room.  I probably don’t have any right to have one, but the Christmas story has always resonated with me.  It’s full of such human, homely details like unwed pregnancy and the tedium of travel and overbooked hotels.  The idea of the big, big God taking the form of a tiny human baby is so moving to me.

For me as a humanist, Christmas is about hope, as exemplified in the birth of any baby, let alone a baby god.  It is about the human potential for good.  It is about social justice, raising poor folk and casting down the proud.  It is about what is beautiful about being human on this green earth.  It is not a fast day.  It is not about atonement or even, particularly, about reverence.  It is a feast day.  Look at all the delights for our human senses that this holiday affords us:  the music, the food, the decorations, the smells, the food. 

My Christmas even has a written gospel, of sorts.  It’s the Gospel of Dickens.  A Christmas Carol argues for a Christmas spirit that encompasses “liberality,” justice, forgiveness and the basic human right of frivolity.  The references to Jesus in that book are few indeed. I wouldn’t say that Jesus is beside the point.  I would say perhaps that the existence of Jesus is sufficient, but not necessary, for the ethic that Dickens is presenting.

Maybe my Christmas mania is just a reflection of my northern European blood that needs to light candles against the darkness. So why do I call this holiday Christmas when I reject the notion of Christ?  Because that’s what I grew up calling it, and because the phrase “winter holiday” is really lame.

This little essay argues that all religion belief is irrational and dangerous.  He discusses the conflict between religion and science, the many instances of cruelty in the Bible, and the religious right's crusade against stem cell research, among other things.  As in his previous book, The End of Faith, Harris argues that religious liberals and moderates are every bit as irrational as the fundamentalists it's so easy to deride.

No argument from me on the basic premise.  I'm an atheist myself, and conscious of the need to stay fairly closeted in my provincial town.  But the tone of the book put me off a little.  I don't mind that it's deliberately provocative; we need some of that.  I just felt like he was talking down to the reader, as if the Christian Nation he is addressing is a really simple-minded child. I wonder if The End of Faith, which I didn't read,  presents a more sophisticated argument.