Exciting article here:
RICHARD DAWKINS IS RIGHT. His deicidal bestseller The God Delusion attacks the absurdities and cruelties, the contradictions and superstitions, the rip offs and fantasies of religion across the world and throughout history. I couldn’t agree more. It’s enough to make you wish Abraham hadn’t been in when God called round.
The problem is, like other fundamentalists, Dawkins won’t stop talking when he’s finished talking sense. Rather than surveying the countless varieties of religion, weighing up their mixed record, and arguing that on balance we’d be better off without it, he is only willing to see the dark side, and writes off the whole thing, dismissing evidence that makes a monochrome worldview uncomfortable.
He sees the moral failures, but not the moral breakthroughs. He lists the atrocities and ignores the triumphs. He cuts through the supposed proofs of God’s existence like a particularly moist sponge cake, but shows no conception at all of why people actually believe – other than that they’re a bunch of morons who don’t know any better.
There’s a lot of sense there, but I especially like the line “like other fundamentalists.” I still think that atheism is as much a faith-based position as theism. After all, you can’t prove that my God doesn’t exist. So atheists just have to believe it – they have to have faith. Just like mine.
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