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Atheism In A Submit-Religious World
Tremblay, Francois – Atheism in a Post-religious World – Suite101, 2004
“If a person would observe, in the present day, the teachings of the Old Testament, he could be a criminal. If he would strictly comply with the teachings of the New, he would be insane”
(Robert Ingersoll)
Is ours a submit-non secular world? Ask any born once more Christian fundamentalist, militant Muslim, orthodox Jew, and nationalistic Hindu. Religion is on the rise, not on the wane. Eighteenth century enlightenment is besieged. Because the writer himself usually admits, atheism, as a creed, is on the defensive.
First, we must always get our terminology clear. Atheism is just not the same as agnosticism which isn’t the identical as anti-theism.
Atheism is a religion, yet another faith. It is based on the improvable and unfalsifiable belief (common adverse) that there isn’t a God. Agnosticism is about retaining an open thoughts: God could or may not exist. There is no convincing case either way.
Anti-theism is militant anti-clericalism. Anti-theists (equivalent to Tremblay and myself) regard faith as an unmitigated evil that have to be eradicated to make for a greater world. This treasure of a book – it’s incredible how much the writer squeezed into 50 pages! – is about anti-theism.
Tremblay labels religion a swindle and psychological terrorism and explains, convincingly, why he chose these epithets. He demonstrates the inextricable link between the assumption in the afterlife and immorality and castigates religion’s intolerance coupled with its ever-shifting philosophical goalposts. Its dogmatism leads to a loss of experiential richness and to unfavourable cognitive penalties to both the believer and his milieu.
Faith, observes Tremblay with undisguised repulsion and bitterness, scams folks with false guarantees of the hereafter, its texts are objectionable, it is unnatural, and it promotes falsities. In other words, it is a prison enterprise.
In the chapters he dedicates to refuting the bogus arguments from design, he refers back to the works of George Smith, Michael Martin, and Corey Washington. His own treatment of the issue is much more original and refreshing – complexity and order don’t a design make, he shows.
The e book is just not without its flawed arguments – but these solely add to the fun of mentally sparring with this thought-upsetting author. For example, he does not distinguish between established religions and cults or sects. Similarly he defines theocracy because the rule of religion (lexically right) when, in the real world, it’s the misuse and abuse of religion by rulers.
I missed references to the plethora of related discoveries, theorems, hypotheses, and theories within the precise sciences and in formal logic. Think about this instance: it may be proven that God can not and does not exist (“strong atheism”), Tremblay argues, because having a God results in either meaninglessness or to contradictions or to both. However this is precisely the Gödel theorem: formal logical techniques may be both full or constant, but by no means both. It is a pity he neglects to mention it.
Finally, to my thoughts, Tremblay misses the large picture. As Freud accurately famous a century ago, religion is a psychological pathology. You can not rationally argue with folks whose judgment and cause are suspended. Distinctions between personal and goal beliefs are lost on delusional fanatics.
Spiritual individuals have faith in a god as a result of it fulfills primary and entrenched (and unhealthy) emotional wants – not as a result of its existence can or has been proven. We all – even atheists – maintain irrational beliefs to some extent. Faith simply happens to be a particularly virulent and insidious pressure of irrationality.
If you want to survey the rising battle traces between the regrouping forces of cause and the resurging Dark Ages – read this book. It is a gem of a information to the true Armageddon that’s upon us.
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