As for those who are angry over the film, Comfort was candid. Non-believers, he claims, are simply frustrated that their worldview is being eroded by what’s exposed in “Evolution vs. God.”Comfort's video is reminiscent of agnostic David Berlinski's "The Devil's Delusion" in which he pokes holes in militant atheists' arguments from science.
... a Pennsylvania-based restaurant ...has been offering a 10 percent discount for individuals who bring in a church bulletin on Sundays."Discriminatory"? Sure the restaurant was being discriminatory. That's its right and no business of the bleeding government.
... Citing this action as discriminatory, John Wolff, a local atheist, filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC). Now, the restaurant will be forced to offer discounts to any individual who brings in a pamphlet involving religious faith — including atheism.
Mortal:
And therefore, O God, I pray thee, if thou hast one ounce of mercy for this thy suffering creature, absolve me of having to have free will!
God:
You reject the greatest gift I have given thee?
..And concludes with:
..
Mortal:
You said a short while ago that our whole discussion was based on a monstrous fallacy. You still have not told me what this fallacy is.
God:See also, Barbara and Jonathan Kay's reponses to Harris.
Why, the idea that I could possibly have created you without free will! You acted as if this were a genuine possibility, and wondered why I did not choose it! It never occurred to you that a sentient being without free will is no more conceivable than a physical object which exerts no gravitational attraction. (There is, incidentally, more analogy than you realize between a physical object exerting gravitational attraction and a sentient being exerting free will!) Can you honestly even imagine a conscious being without free will? What on earth could it be like? I think that one thing in your life that has so misled you is your having been told that I gave man the gift of free will. As if I first created man, and then as an afterthought endowed him with the extra property of free will. Maybe you think I have some sort of "paint brush" with which I daub some creatures with free will and not others. No, free will is not an "extra"; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.
..
..
... Hitch was a court jester for the liberal elites. He took care never to violate their most sacred taboos. Like Stephen Jay Gould, who also died too young, also of cancer, Hitch carried the banner of soft Marxism forward into the post-Soviet era. ...Raymond De Souza
... For many of Hitchens’ fellow journalists, the virtuosity of his brilliant writing and bracing conversation earned him a pass on the hatred. But hatred it remained. His commercial genius was to harbour hatreds sufficiently vast and varied that a lucrative constituency could be found to relish all of them....Jonah Goldberg
... He was no conservative. You can’t really be a conservative in the Anglo-American tradition and hate religion. You can be a non-believer, I think. But you have to at least have respect for the role of religion and maybe a little reverence for the role of transcendence in people’s lives. Hitch had nothing but contempt. It was one of the last truly asinine Marxist things about him.
... I’m not inclined to sugarcoat my take on the man given how he could be absolutely cruel when spouting off about the deaths of others. He could be mean, pigheaded, and insensitive (though never dull!). He could also be generous and kind. He was a brilliant and gifted polemicist who sometimes took the easiest way out by going after his opponents’ weakest arguments rather than their strongest. He defied easy categorization while having a gift for categorizing others. He’ll be missed because he was so damn good at being Christopher Hitchens.
... Many such people will describe themselves as "religious" or, better, "spiritual"; they are, they will say, "seekers", pilgrims who journey hopefully but somehow never arrive.
...By and large, the appeal of agnosticism is to the spiritually timid. Its attraction is that it gives the illusion of a safe harbour in a roiling sea when, in fact, it offers no harbour, only more seasickness.
... etc.And today Chris Selley replied ... bollocks. I'm with Selley on this one, a happy "seeker".
Sam Harris is one of the “New Atheists,” joining Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as a bold slayer of mental viruses that prevent people from thinking straight. That is, like him.Great stuff.
... Like Richard Dawkins, himself a reflexive socialist, Mr. Harris believes that man can transcend himself (Mr. Hitchens is much less naïve). It doesn’t occur to him that the notion of self-transcendence might be the most dangerous, moralistic self-delusion of all. Meanwhile he fails to register that the greatest horrors of the past century have all been perpetrated in the name of “scientific” socialism, whose root is the “moral” rejection of capitalism.
... Meanwhile it’s not just a mental illness, it’s a plot. “Because there are no easy remedies for social inequality, many scientists and public intellectuals also believe that the great masses of humanity are best kept sedated by pious delusions.” This is pure Marxist “opiate of the masses.” Meanwhile nowhere are these “scientists and public intellectuals” named.
... Mr. Harris makes only the most tangential reference to the mass murder and poverty brought about by the secular religion of Communism.
By contrast, his anti-business and anti-“conservative” bias is blatant, indeed sometimes hilarious.
... Science may help us better examine moral values, but only if attached to historical knowledge and philosophical wisdom. Mr. Harris might consider removing the beam from his own liberal eye before he pretends to deal with the conservative mote that he finds so annoying in the eyes of others.
... When [Sam Harris] writes that he has been ‘dumbstruck’ by Christian and Moslem intellectual commitments, I believe the word has met the man.Berlinski doesn’t argue in favour of any particular religious beliefs but instead shows how the bellicose proselytizing atheists’ arguments from science are full of logical holes.
... The sciences, many scientists argue, require no criticism because the sciences
comprise a uniquely self-critical institution ... Individual scientists may make mistakes, but like the Communist Party under Lenin, science is infallible because its judgements are collective.
... physicist Victor Stenger scoffs that it is the "last resort of the theist who seeks to argue for the existence of God from science and finds all his other arguments fail". Sheer chutzpah, if I may use the Greek for cheek. It is Stenger who is arguing against the existence of God "from science."
... Having begun with Stenger, I might as well finish him off.... he has completely misunderstood the terms of the problem ... A man must really know his limits, as Clint Eastwood observed.
No less than the doctrines of religious belief, the doctrines of quantum cosmology are what they seem: biased, partial, inconclusive, and largely in the service of passionate but unexamined conviction.
To an editorial in ‘Nature’ that claims: "The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is ‘unassailable fact’ ... With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside." [Berlinski replies:] Those not willing to put such sentiments aside, the scientific community has concluded, are afflicted by a form of intellectual ingratitude. – It is remarkable how widespread ingratitude really is.
I would find Hitchens’s thoughts even more gratifying than I do had he not enlarged them to encompass nonlinear dynamics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, subjects that in his ineptitude he waves like a majestic frond.
On Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg’s nihilism: "The more comprehensible the universe becomes ... the more it also seems pointless." He has a point. The arena of the elementary particles – his arena – is a rather depressing place ... What is it’s point?
Mindless argument found in godless books [Essay subtitle]
..."the new atheism" is not particularly new. It belongs to an intellectual genealogy stretching back hundreds of years ... [It is]driven by a visceral contempt for the personal faith of others....
... In describing their atheism as illiberal, I do not mean to imply that the new atheists are closet totalitarians. On the contrary ... Yet the fact remains that the atheism of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens is a brutally intolerant, proselytizing faith, out to rack up conversions.
... the tone of today's atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that "religious readers who open ['The God Delusion'] will be atheists when they put it down."
... It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism.
... To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.
Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not.
