Atheists: Remove God from fight against terror

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• Larry Phillips 3 years ago

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  A few comments, out of many possible, about this article:

  First, the implication that religion, and Christianity in particular, was an integral part of the country's principles is blatantly false. As John Adams said "the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion". The only mention of religion in the constitution is the statement that government is not to do anything in support of religion. Clearly, Kentucky's signs invoking "Almighty God" are in violation of that.

  Second, the writer seems to think that we will all be better off if we ask this invisible friend for help by praying. This assumption is demonstrably false: in the Scandinavian countries about 80% of the population is atheist. Yet, by almost any measure, their societies are healthier than ours. They have much lower rates for murder and other crimes, lower divorce rates, lower infant mortality, and longer life spans. How do you religious folks account for this?

  To paraphrase Ronald Reagan "religion is not the answer to the problem, religion is the problem".

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• Diane Petryk-Bloom 3 years ago

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  Mr. Pearcey, you state in the continuation of this article that without belief in God, “…in a merely materialistic and impersonal cosmos, … moral evil does not exist…” You are quite wrong.

  Evolutionary psychology says we get our morals from our animal ancestors.

  “Profoundly, neurology tells us that we are born with an ability to be moral thanks to evolution,” wrote Dorion Sagan and John Skoyles in "Up From Dragons." “We have not just a sense or right and wrong but, as important, a concern with ethics….We did not evolve from animals that were solitary and met only for mating, disappearing for the rest of the year from each other’s sight. We evolved from apes that had to find a way to live together. We thus need to share socially predictable ways of doing things. This, of course does not mean we cannot be self-oriented in our actions. We are out to get the best for ourselves; behind social cooperation is social competition. But we do this like other apes, against a background of finding ways to live and work together in our social group….a world governed by ‘oughts.’”

  In "The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are," Richard Wright says the evolutionary mandate that created morality was the need to get our genes into the next generation. A mother who takes good care of her children is more likely to have them survive. Thus, good mothers get their genes passed on.

  Mr. Pearcey, your type of failed cognition is what Arthur C. Clarke must have had in mind when he wrote that “the greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.”

  Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist at Harvard and author of "The Blank Slate," says he’s still surprised at the morality/religion link because history suggests otherwise.

  “The Bible contains several injunctions from God to the Israelites to slay the occupants of the towns they covet,” Pinker writes in his essay “Evolution and Ethics” in the anthology Intelligent Thought. “…except for the young women, who they are to take as unwilling wives. Since then religions have given the world stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, holy wars, jihads, fatwahs, suicide bombers, gay bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, child molesters, and mothers who drown their children so they can happily be reunited in Heaven.”

  “The character of Moses is the most horrid….” writes religion scholar William Edelman. “Moses said (according to the Bible) ‘Kill every male among the little ones…and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him…but of all the women who have not known a man…keep alive for yourselves.” Were the women expected to have any right to object to being kidnapped and raped? The Bible doesn’t consider that a moral problem. Today, most of us would. Our laws and natural inclinations so indicate.

  Was the wretchedness of Moses an isolated case? Consider Abraham, whose marrying his sister and seducing her handmaid were his lesser crimes. Abraham drove one child and its mother into the desert to starve, drove out his other children and their mothers, and was willing to butcher his other child to please God.

  As Mr. Phillips comments here, many more things could be said. But I am reminded of an H. L. Meneken quote: Religion is “so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.”

  As Sam Harris writes: “Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance.”

  Science/science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), author of more than 500 books, said Bible believers ignore all the patient findings of thinking minds throughout the centuries since the Bible was written. “And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us,” (like Mr. Pearcey, I submit) “who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all…”

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