Religions > Atheism > Article: Religion does untold damage to our politics. An atheist's lament.
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"Sound of Trumpet rational version" |
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06 Nov 2006 06:04:19 AM |
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Article: Religion does untold damage to our politics. An atheist's lament. |
A Dissent: The Case Against Faith
by Sam Harris / Newsweek
Reposted from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15566391/site/newsweek
Religion does untold damage to our politics. An atheist's lament.
Bush in New Orleans
A Toxic Mix? President Bush, himself a born-again Christian, courts
religious voters at a church in New Orleans
Nov. 13, 2006 issue - Despite a full century of scientific insights
attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the
Earth, more than half the American population believes that the entire
cosmos was created 6,000 years ago. This is, incidentally, about a
thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power
to elect presidents and congressmen-and many who themselves get
elected-believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's Ark, that
light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that
the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine
breath, in a garden with a talking snake, by the hand of an invisible
God.
This is embarrassing. But add to this comedy of false certainties the
fact that 44 percent of Americans are confident that Jesus will return
to Earth sometime in the next 50 years, and you will glimpse the
terrible liability of this sort of thinking. Given the most common
interpretation of Biblical prophecy, it is not an exaggeration to say
that nearly half the American population is eagerly anticipating the
end of the world. It should be clear that this faith-based nihilism
provides its adherents with absolutely no incentive to build a
sustainable civilization-economically, environmentally or
geopolitically. Some of these people are lunatics, of course, but they
are not the lunatic fringe. We are talking about the explicit views of
Christian ministers who have congregations numbering in the tens of
thousands. These are some of the most influential, politically
connected and well-funded people in our society.
It is, of course, taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs. The
problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of
religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable and incompatible with
genuine morality. One of the worst things about religion is that it
tends to separate questions of right and wrong from the living reality
of human and animal suffering. Consequently, religious people will
devote immense energy to so-called moral problems-such as gay
marriage-where no real suffering is at issue, and they will happily
contribute to the surplus of human misery if it serves their religious
beliefs.
A case in point: embryonic-stem-cell research is one of the most
promising developments in the last century of medicine. It could offer
therapeutic breakthroughs for every human ailment (for the simple
reason that stem cells can become any tissue in the human body),
including diabetes, Parkinson's disease, severe burns, etc. In July,
President George W. Bush used his first veto to deny federal funding to
this research. He did this on the basis of his religious faith. Like
millions of other Americans, President Bush believes that "human life
starts at the moment of conception." Specifically, he believes that
there is a soul in every 3-day-old human embryo, and the interests of
one soul-the soul of a little girl with burns over 75 percent of her
body, for instance-cannot trump the interests of another soul, even
if that soul happens to live inside a petri dish. Here, as ever,
religious dogmatism impedes genuine wisdom and compassion.
A 3-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a
blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000
cells in the brain of a fly. The embryos that are destroyed in
stem-cell research do not have brains, or even neurons. Consequently,
there is no reason to believe they can suffer their destruction in any
way at all. The truth is that President Bush's unjustified religious
beliefs about the human soul are, at this very moment, prolonging the
scarcely endurable misery of tens of millions of human beings.
Given our status as a superpower, our material wealth and the
continuous advancements in our technology, it seems safe to say that
the president of the United States has more power and responsibility
than any person in history. It is worth noting, therefore, that we have
elected a president who seems to imagine that whenever he closes his
eyes in the Oval Office-wondering whether to go to war or not to go
to war, for instance-his intuitions have been vetted by the Creator
of the universe. Speaking to a small group of supporters in 1999, Bush
reportedly said, "I believe God wants me to be president." Believing
that God has delivered you unto the presidency really seems to entail
the belief that you cannot make any catastrophic mistakes while in
office. One question we might want to collectively ponder in the
future: do we really want to hand the tiller of civilization to a
person who thinks this way?
Religion is the one area of our discourse in which people are
systematically protected from the demand to give good evidence and
valid arguments in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet
these beliefs regularly determine what they live for, what they will
die for and-all too often-what they will kill for. Consequently, we
are living in a world in which millions of grown men and women can
rationalize the violent sacrifice of their own children by recourse to
fairy tales. We are living in a world in which millions of Muslims
believe that there is nothing better than to be killed in defense of
Islam. We are living in a world in which millions of Christians hope to
soon be raptured into the stratosphere by Jesus so that they can safely
enjoy a sacred genocide that will inaugurate the end of human history.
In a world brimming with increasingly destructive technology, our
infatuation with religious myths now poses a tremendous danger. And it
is not a danger for which more religious faith is a remedy.
Harris is the author of the New York Times best sellers "Letter to a
Christian Nation" and "The End of Faith."
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