Oct 19 2006
Atheism finds a market in the U.S.
“A fresh wave of atheistic books has hit the market this autumn, some climbing onto best-seller lists in what proponents see as a backlash against the way religion is entwined in politics.”
Harris and Dawkins are mentioned, and they even talk to Paul Kurtz. Worth a read.
Also, over at Smirking Chimp, have a look at Ben Tripp’s ‘I’ve Got Your God Right Here’, where he comments about the relevance of the Reuters article:
“The article is about how atheist books are ascending the best-seller charts, and staying there, and golly, is this a trend?
I’ll tell you the answer, although you already know it. I’m just being cute. There are millions and millions of perfectly sane Americans out there, claiming to be believers, or at worst agnostic, so please don’t hit me, being held hostage by lunatics that really believe that 2000 years ago one guy, a tribal minority from North Africa, was born by magic through the direct intervention of the tribe’s god, frigged around for 30 years, and was executed by the Romans after he took up doing magic. Being capable of magic, he came back to life and then disappeared.
Elsewhere in the world, people are being held hostage by believers in a variety of equally fruity religions, such as the one where a guy announced there was a new version of that earlier tribe’s religion, and the previous version no longer applied; he did a bunch of magic too, including a visit to Heaven on a half-mule, half-donkey with wings, where he got to hang out with the previous guy that did magic.
The thing that is so terribly wrong with Faith is that it’s predicated, every single time, on a terrible fallacy: that god just ‘is’. There’s no evidence of god, so god exists. Or everything is evidence of god, so god exists. Or as most Americans avow, it’s in the Bible, so it’s true. Never mind it’s also in the Koran, which they hate and fear, and that every religion has had similar texts, going right back to the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, and on and on into the darkness. Faith is the enemy of Truth, because faith requires you take somebody’s word for something, especially something utterly preposterous. Truth requires that you use your senses and your brain to observe what is, while Faith requires you use your senses and brain to observe what isn’t.”
Now, being part of America’s most distrusted minority, I’m not jumping out of my seat here anticipating some big wave of reason and freethought to start sweeping the nation, but it gives me hope that maybe there are more of us than we think. Or maybe some people are starting to feel that it’s ok to question their faith, that it’s not as radical a notion as once thought.
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