It takes unspeakable arrogance for you to attempt to tell me what I know
and what I don't know.

No, he was just giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that you
were smart enough to figure out that there is no god for yourself.

It takes unspeakable arrogance for you to attempt to tell me what I know
and what I don't know.

Sound of Trumpet wrote:

http://exchristian.net/exchristian/2005/10/there-is-no-god-and-you-know-it.php



There is No God (And You Know It)


by Sam Harris



Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will
rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind not occurring
at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at
most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that
govern the lives of six billion human beings.

The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe --
at this very moment -- that an all-powerful and all-loving God is
watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is
it good that they believe this?

No.

The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a
philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal
to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the
obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be
observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It
carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is,
moreover, a job that the atheist does not want.

It is worth noting that no one ever need identify himself as a
non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words
for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise,
"atheism" is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing
more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of
religious dogma. The atheist is merely a person who believes that the
260 million Americans (eighty-seven percent of the population) who
claim to "never doubt the existence of God" should be obliged to
present evidence for his existence -- and, indeed, for his benevolence,
given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in
the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our
situation is: most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious
as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her
qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without
pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what
passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos
and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance
is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the
stakes were not so high.

Consider: the city of New Orleans was recently destroyed by hurricane
Katrina. At least a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all
their earthly possessions, and over a million have been displaced. It
is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the
moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and
compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste
to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and
women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only
to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good
men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist
has the courage to admit the obvious: these poor people spent their
lives in the company of an imaginary friend.

Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm "of biblical
proportions" would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the
ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the
light of science. Advance warning of Katrina's path was wrested from
mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God
told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content
to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn't have known that
a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first
gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, a poll conducted by The
Washington Post found that eighty percent of Katrina's survivors
claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.

As hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand
Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can
be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the
Koran. Indeed, their lives were organized around the indisputable fact
of his existence: their women walked veiled before him; their men
regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word.
It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his
faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through
God's grace.

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of
the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is
for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving
God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he
refuses to cloak the reality of the world's suffering in a cloying
fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how
precious life is -- and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of
human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness
for no good reason at all.

Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not
responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the
claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other
way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is
the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it
solved. If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most
egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either
impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following
pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality.
But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the
faithful use to establish God's goodness in the first place. And any
God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay
marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as
inscrutable as all that. If He exists, the God of Abraham is not merely
unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most
reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As Richard
Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and
Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no
different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to
take the profundity of the world's suffering at face value. It is
terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly
terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That
so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion -- to
religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions, and religious
diversions of scarce resources -- is what makes atheism a moral and
intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the
atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in
touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy
life of his neighbors.



This is an excerpt from An Atheist Manifesto, to be published at
www.truthdig.com in December.

It takes unspeakable arrogance for you to attempt to tell me what I
know and what I don't know.

http://exchristian.net/exchristian/2005/10/there-is-no-god-and-you-know-it.php


There is No God (And You Know It)


by Sam Harris



Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will
rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind not occurring
at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at
most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that
govern the lives of six billion human beings.

The same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe --
at this very moment -- that an all-powerful and all-loving God is
watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is
it good that they believe this?

No.