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Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomenon,- Jacques Maritain.
In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than their practitioners, -Jonathan Miller.
If physicists can believe that the universe is just one of those things, then believers can affirm that God is just one of those things as well,- David Berlinski.
The character of modern religion is so contorted that the most logical step up, for the slightly reasonable person, with little loyalty to tradition, is atheism. One cannot hold atheists accountable for their moral perversion of faithlessness. It is a straightforward result of the absurdities of religion itself.
Religion, as it stands today, cannot defend itself with its own tools. The arguments for God fail; evolution has made the narrative of the 6000-year-old biblical earth seem like a toddler’s lullaby. All religions appear to be the products of infantile minds, but even children find it hard to believe in this God. And if this omnipotent God exists, he is doing an abysmal job. Suffering, evil, pain, how can he allow all this to happen? People are discriminating, suppressing and killing others in his name. If there is a God why won’t he announce himself and stop this destruction? Where is the proof for his existence? Has anybody ever seen him? Religion is the root of so many ills which plague society; from racism and misogyny to terrorism and genocide. Religion does more harm than good; it is a bane of the world. Is it not?
Today atheism has adopted a jingoistic posture, just like religion had in the dark ages, harsh enough to snuff out dissent. Who knows, with the way things are progressing, atheism could take on totalitarian characteristics, cementing its already established imperialism. So what, you could ask? Is that not a good thing? Rationality, logic and intelligence ought to rule over blind faith and irrational thinking, right? Aren’t atheists right in believing religious belief to be a product of deluded minds? When everything about ‘God’ is so counterintuitive and unappealing, God must be a stupid myth, no?
Truth be told; atheism and belief have coexisted in atemporal tension, and always will. As long as man lives on earth. In fact, the ‘God impulse’ and the ‘rational impulse’ exist together, as a human condition. This condition is a push-pull duality in every individual, as it is in a community, a society, in the whole of humankind. Some groups are convinced about one idea more than the other, and depending on the evolutionary stage of a civilization, one ideology rules over the other. Do you think this move from religious imperialism to atheism is a novel once-in-history progress? Barely. It must have happened before, even in unrecorded history. This crest and trough, this ascent and descent of belief and atheism. No, the impetus for ‘God’ must not be completely irrational if it has existed as long as man has. Before and despite modern science.
There has to be something to it.
Of course, there is no denying that most rational people WILL find it hard to accept the suggestions of our modern religion. One can empathise with this indignant, incredulous dismissal of religion by militant atheists. However, it is as difficult to be convinced by their simplistic logic, as it is to be bowled over by the modern God. The atheist philosophy is wafer thin, altogether too shallow and immature. The most easy refuge for the atheist are the wide, beautiful arcades of modern science. Science is supreme; it is logical, empirical and verifiable. Allright, but the foundation of the atheist objection to God is not based in any strong disproving evidence within the scientific framework itself. The logic for the claim of non-existence of God is weak; the logic exists only because he is unacceptable. That is sheer tautology.
There cannot be a God; they believe with vehemence. They can conjure up any argument to support that. The absurdities of science they are willing to bypass and ignore, but will not grant the same leeway to religion, because they are in fundamental opposition to God. This stance is as dogmatic as religious belief itself! Science gets to decide whatever mythical, incognito metaphysical ideas: parallel universes, imaginary realms of time just before inflation, tunneling of one universe into another and many others get to be called science. Ironically, it wholly rejects similar sounding postulates of religion, just, only because they don’t come from ‘SCIENCE’.
Atheists can take modern science’s support to convince only those of us who have no insight into the current theories of modern physics. To others on a more serious, mature, deeper quest for answers, both modern religion and modern science seem like a crudely built little boats, lost in the inexorable waters of an endless ocean!
The late Christopher Hitchens was one of the four horsemen of modern militant atheism. The polemical Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett are its other untiring crusaders. Mr. Hitchens was always a pleasure to listen to, but his mellifluous, poetic expression, to his merit, often couched his near non-existent arguments for atheism. Whenever I watched a debate between a religious apologist and Mr Hitchens, I realized he said nothing substantial, apart from railing smugly at religion with eloquent excesses. Unaware of his own near non-existent, flimsy arguments, he seems to have said, “There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument”.
True. Atheists, charm cannot make up for a lazy argument.
Sam Harris is said to be one of the most persuasive new generation philosophers. His atheistic logic seems earnest, but only till you focus on his cogent eloquence. Look deeper and you arrive at its intellectual scarcity. The ‘Moral Landscape’ and ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’, are wildly popular books today only because they mirror the sentiments of a world in arms against the dogma of religion, but in themselves have nothing new or insightful to offer.
A pretty, clever sounding argument does not make for a real one, dear atheists, all of you. It has been conceded that modern religion is a fortress of shambles, but your counter- ideology has to make more sense than religion, which it just does not.
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