An Atheist Defends Religion

Here's a nice change of pace, an atheist actually defending the virtues of religion. Instead of arguing whether God does or does not exist, the author considers the value of religion itself and looks at is as a cultural institution.

An Atheist Defends Religion


New Book Blasts Attacks by Unbelievers

In "An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion Than Without It," (Alpha Books), Bruce Sheiman offers a new perspective to the contest between believers and atheists.

The "God question" can't be resolved to the satisfaction of the contending sides, he states but what Sheiman does set out to do is to consider the value of religion itself. He does not seek to prove God exists, but defends religion as a cultural institution.

Regarding his personal views, Sheiman explains that he is not a person of faith, but he does not "stridently repudiate God." He describes himself as an "aspiring theist" because "religion provides a combination of psychological, emotional, moral communal, existential, and even physical-health benefits that no other institution can replicate."

The best way to convincingly dismiss the case for atheism, he explains in his introduction to the book, is not by arguments that seek to prove the existence of God, but to demonstrate the enduring contribution of religion.

"Religion's misdeeds may make for provocative history, but the everyday good works of billions of people is the real history of religion, one that parallels the growth and prosperity of humankind," Sheiman affirms.

One way that religion benefits us is by giving our lives meaning, Sheiman notes. We are aware we live in a world of great power and potentiality, but in contrast to animals that just live in a utilitarian relationship with the world, humans are aware that this world exists apart from ourselves.

Sheiman then recounts some examples of how primitive societies sought to give sense to their lives in the midst of the wider world by means of religion. Their myths and rituals helped those peoples to connect the mortal realities to the eternal and spiritual.

In the modern world science has in many cases replaced religion in terms of explaining the world and the universe, but Sheiman points out, while we can accept what science says about how the universe works, this does not explain to us what it means for our lives.

In other words, how the world works is not the same as why the world works. In our drive to discover what Sheiman terms lowercase truth -- facts and knowledge -- we have sacrificed uppercase truth -- meaning and purpose.

Moral nature

Another aspect of religion is morality. It's clear that people can be moral without religion, Sheiman affirms, but it's also evident that religion makes people good. In fact, he asserts, humans exhibit ethical behavior that goes well beyond the explanatory power of group cohesiveness.

Progress

In another chapter of the book, Sheiman relates how religion was behind the Western world's progress in such fields as democracy and freedom, and science and technology.


Read more: Zenit

Many atheists are not "anti-religion".

Its just the radicals who jump to force it down people's throats.

Yknow...kinda like religious radicals do.

Good thread, S&F.

the best thing is that, if we have religion, people dont "waste" their times trying to research about science, about our bodies, about our minds, since all the answers finish with god ...

so, yeah, its great for the elite to have people not interested in the art of thinking

I believe also religion has a significant role in society to control and contain the population. If religion makes you a better person, wanting to contribute positively to the earth, then brilliant, goto church, find Jesus, or worship a totem..

The problem typically comes when people use religion as a weapon of self rightousness.

The average sheep need a shepherd and that is the function of religion in a modern society. Wolves are the problem (westboro baptist church anyone?).

Anti-religious athiests are also another religion incidently...they demand...believe that there are no dietys whatsoever...none. While this may be true, to state something as a absolute fact based on your belief is...tada...religion.

Go agnostic...its the sensible choice

Finally, a thread that shows we are not all religious hating biggots!!!

S&F for this......and hopefully some of the religious memebers will actually take note of this

reply to post by Faiol


Thats just it...we dont need a world populated by thinking individuals with a firm understanding of science and human psychology...we need tax paying peasents to build the roads and bridges in society. The elites are few and far between but there needs only be a few of them per population percentage.

You need alot more slaves than slavers to build the pyramids of society.

You really aren't joking are you?
At first click I was thinking, this was going to be one of those Atheistic lure
headlines. Where the thread has nothing to do really with the message
you get from the heading.

Some people actually have a talent for being able to step outside themselves to gain a larger perspective. All done mentally without the use of Psychodelycs or OBEs. I suspect his wider perspective to be the result of that talent. How cool this guy must be. Hard to believe as for me, being on these
boards a lot lately, has manifested in the illusion that all atheists were stereotypically holier than thou..SnF

star for you Oz

and Mask

SnF

[edit on 21-2-2010 by randyvs]

Any benifit from religion can be gained through purely secular means

Originally posted by hippomchippo
Any benifit from religion can be gained through purely secular means

Any one-line post trying to detail what religion can or can not achieve in one's life verses what you call "secular means" , is probably not the correct answer.

I am just going to allow you to make that sweeping judgment on behalf of each individual's life on earth.


Good try though...

reply to post by FortAnthem


In other words:

If the only reason some jackass does "the right thing" is because he/she is afraid of burning in a lake of fire forever and ever and ever, then BY GOD you better make sure they keep that fear.

Originally posted by randyvs
Some people actually have a talent for being able to step outside themselves to gain a larger perspective.

That's exactly it. Of course you rarely hear the atheists who feel this way because they're not out there preaching their disbelief. They're there, though.

I actually come at it from the position of it being a right enumerated in the Constitution. I support freedom of religion as strongly as I do freedom of speech or the right to bear arms.

It's secondarily that I support religion because it serves a very valuable purpose in many people's lives and I'm not in a position to judge their desire for it or their need to practice it. I don't feel a need for it, but that doesn't mean that no one should.

Thirdly, some religious groups provide some fantastic social services for their communities. I don't judge them based on what they believe or practice at Westboro Baptist Church. The true tenets of Christianity are pretty great and I live my life in line with a lot of them. Not because they are religious dogma, but because I determine that it's wrong to lie. It's wrong to cheat. It's wrong to be disrespectful to others, etc. And it's right to love and help my fellow man.

Whilst I agree that religions and spirituality have done much to organise our morals into a straight forward legal system, aka the Ten Commandments, religions most certainly do not "make us" good.

Dostoyevsky said "If there is no God, then we are lost in a moral chaos. Everything is permitted."

But this, I believe, is looking at the issue backwards.

Humans moral emotions existed long before the Old Testament. They are a fundamental part of the primate brain.

Our ancestors where extremely social and intelligent animals and, to survive this intelligence, they evolved brain functions that stopped them from doing all "amoral" things that they might think about doing.

As Joshua Greene, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard has said "This basic primate morality doesn't understand things like tax evasion, but it does understand things like pushing your buddy off a cliff."

Here is very interesting article about his studies into morality:
www.harvardscience.harvard.edu...

We had our morals, first, and then we reached a point where we realised that there is something to be gained by organising our moral instincts into a set of moral orders, hence religion.



[edit on 21/2/10 by Horza]

Originally posted by Mr Mask

Originally posted by hippomchippo
Any benifit from religion can be gained through purely secular means

Any one-line post trying to detail what religion can or can not achieve in one's life verses what you call "secular means" , is probably not the correct answer.

I am just going to allow you to make that sweeping judgment on behalf of each individual's life on earth.


Good try though...

I understand that religion can have a profound effect on people, I'm just saying they don't need religion to have these experiences.

Wow, I did a thread about atheists that didn't get flamed by the atheists. I must be loosing my touch.

Could it be that all atheists aren't Christian hating zealots who would like nothing better than to see all Christians herded into concentration camps for a "final solution"?

I will have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the friendly response from the atheists to this thread. Judging by all of the flame wars I see on these boards between Christians and atheists, I thought it might have been impossible for the two groups to see eye to eye, much less live in peace.

Now I have hope that there may be some possibility for peaceful co-existence.

For those of you who responded positively to this thread, about the hard core militant atheists like Dawkins who spend most of their energies assaulting Christianity and religion in general, do you feel they are doing more harm than good to the atheist cause or do you feel they are on the right track?

It seems to me that they are just creating hard feelings between the two camps.

[edit on 22-2-2010 by FortAnthem]

reply to post by FortAnthem

It seems to me that they are just creating hard feelings between the two camps.

Speaking as one from the opposite pole and battle hardened by such wars.
Your thread has caused me to reexamine my own parameters of tolerence
to find them completely out dated. Time to work on some changes. Not a
bad thing.

Heretic

I actually come at it from the position of it being a right enumerated in the Constitution. I support freedom of religion as strongly as I do freedom of speech or the right to bear arms

I find the things you say very true most of the time. Never have I read anything disrepectful or insulting. You are of a standard I would do well to hold even myself up to. I will continue to wrestle with my emotions I'm sure. I do have goals.

[edit on 22-2-2010 by randyvs]

[edit on 22-2-2010 by randyvs]

Originally posted by FortAnthem

Wow, I did a thread about atheists that didn't get flamed by the atheists. I must be loosing my touch.

Could it be that all atheists aren't Christian hating zealots who would like nothing better than to see all Christians herded into concentration camps for a "final solution"?

I will have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the friendly response from the atheists to this thread. Judging by all of the flame wars I see on these boards between Christians and atheists, I thought it might have been impossible for the two groups to see eye to eye, much less live in peace.

Now I have hope that there may be some possibility for peaceful co-existence.

For those of you who responded positively to this thread, about the hard core militant atheists like Dawkins who spend most of their energies assaulting Christianity and religion in general, do you feel they are doing more harm than good to the atheist cause or do you feel they are on the right track?

It seems to me that they are just creating hard feelings between the two camps.

[edit on 22-2-2010 by FortAnthem]

Can you show me a example of Dawkins being militant about atheism?
I've only seen him debate rationally and logically, albeit a bit demeaning sometimes.

reply to post by FortAnthem


I've met more agnostics than atheists, and of the atheists and agnostics I know, very few are of the militant branch prominently displayed on this here forum.

I really believe that outside of the overwhelming mass of militant fundamentalist atheists on this site majority of atheists just honestly don't believe in God, but don't care to demean those who do. I see the same of Muslims, Christians and Baha'i.

There just happens to be alot of extremism on this site, so you'll find fundamentalist atheists and fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist everything. There are few on this site in the middle of the road, it's a very radical site and that's part of its greatness, we can all reach a middle ground by looking at contrasting extremes here.

By the way, I don't call myself a christian but I follow Christ, and if that makes me some kind of knuckle-dragging simpleton go ahead and challenge me to intelligent debate. I don't try to convince anybody to change their belief structure, as the only beliefs we shall question are our own. But when the debate comes up I will not deny who I am, to be any more than all I am would be a lie.

-Louie

reply to post by hippomchippo


A quote from Dawkins' book "The God Delusion":

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Under the title "Militant Atheism" in Wickipedia:

The terms militant atheism and militant atheist are designations applied to atheists who are, or are perceived to be, hostile towards religion. The term has been used going back to at least 1894 [1] and it has been applied to people from Thomas Hobbes onwards. It had a specific application within the materialism of Marxism–Leninism, and in the early years of the Soviet Union, and more recently the term has been used, frequently pejoratively, to describe atheists such as Richard Dawkins,[2] Christopher Hitchens,[3] Sam Harris[4] and Daniel Dennett.[5]

Wickipedia

He seems to spend all of his time attacking religion. That seems pretty militant to me.

[edit on 22-2-2010 by FortAnthem]

reply to post by FortAnthem


Thanks for the very good thread. It's good to remind people that not everyone is a rabid extremist that feels the need to assault those that disagree. Gives one hope for the future.
On the subject of Dawkins, I think he has dreams of some sort of anti-church. He is dogmatic in his assault on supposedly dogmatic belief and seems to lean towards the idea of thought crime in that he thinks some ideas are inherently dangerous and magically make people act like twits to each other.

Originally posted by randyvs
reply to post by FortAnthem

 

I find the things you say very true most of the time. Never have I read anything disrepectful or insulting. You are of a standard I would do well to hold even myself up to. I will continue to wrestle with my emotions I'm sure. I do have goals.

Apparently you've missed a few of my previous threads:

Intolerant Atheists Retaliate Against Christian Billboards

and

An Apologia Pro Evolution (Like, are all atheists, like, as totally smart as, um, these guys?)

Also better known as "FortAnthem behaving badly".

What can I say, I like to poke the atheist hornet's nest from time to time but, it's mostly just for fun.