Atheist Manifesto

Sam Harris recently posted "An Atheist Manifesto" up at Truthdig. Here's a snippet:

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: 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.

One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of smallpox in the 20th Century, many of them infants. God’s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith. In matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the Earth.

Perhaps his best moment comes when he refutes claims by religious folk that atheism is evil too by virtue of Nazi Germany and their secular ilk:

Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself--of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable. (emphasis mine)

Every time I hear a Christian respond to an atheist's claims that the Christian religion has begat many an evil, they inevitably refer to Nazi Germany. While Harris' statement above adresses part of the issue, it doesn't address the fact that such a rebuttal by a Christian does nothing to disprove or negate the fact that Christian, and indeed people of most religions, have committed some of the most heinous acts in the name of their deity. To point out the Nazis is to avoid addressing the accusation.

One of Harris' speeches was recently carried on BookTV so, if you missed it like I did, then look for a repeat broadcast.

And while I'm on the topics of atheism, evolution, and BookTV, entomologist Edward O. Wilson was also on BookTV last weekend and his presentation is available to watch online here.