Wednesday, November 29, 2006

a voice in the wilderness...

Sam Harris in a tidy summary:
As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population. The plain truth is this: There is no good reason to believe in a personal God; there is no good reason to believe that the Bible, the Koran, or any other book was dictated by an omniscient being; we do not, in any important sense, get our morality from religion; the Bible and the Koran are not, even remotely, the best sources of guidance we have for living in the 21st century; and the belief in God and in the divine provenance of scripture is getting a lot of people killed unnecessarily.
I'm not one who subscribes to "atheism" any more than I do "theism" because I adhere to the principle of not knowing: "I Don't Know!" And while not presuming wisdom here, I have heard said the path toward it begins with that phrase.

I don't know if there is a God or if there is not. But like Harris, I do applaud those who seek truth through empirical methodologies and, short of that, logic. Lowest on the totem pole ought be the so-called faithful who are anything but. I don't mean thoughtful people who are able to acknowledge their intellectual inconsistencies as to their respective conclusions, I'm talking about the desperate and the grasping sorts in need for spiritual security and insist on calling it "the truth." Would that that could satisfy them, let alone inspiring their taking it to the Nth degree and imposing this "truth" on others.

Best that type just piss off and down wind.

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