The Acid Jazz Channel

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Religion As Delusion

1 comment:

Philip Shropshire said...

I agree that its not nice. But why are atheists like myself such mean cold hearted people? Have you seen the story about the family that's suing th e minister who convinced a loved one to stop taking chemo and use the power of prayer? She died of course.

Someone should have given that woman a mean dose of reality and told her that one, prayer doesn't work--and even if it does it certainly doesn't work as well as scientific therapy--and two, that the her belief system is in fact magical and delusional.

The reason why I think people like Dawkins and Harris--he's really mean--take such a strident tone is that one situation is really the global situation. We're all just sitting around waiting for confident Christians with nuclear weapons to meet confident islamic extremists with nuclear weapons to have their final conversation. Two groups that are immune to logic and who quite frankly aren't interested in this world but the fantasy afterlife--full of virgins in one case and watching loved ones, probably, burn in hellfire for eternity in the other case--and they're sure that they're not wrong.

The result could well be the end of humanity. People like Harris and Dawkins are saying the not nice things that should have been said to that woman who chose prayer over chemo: your beliefs are not worth killing or dying for. If someone had, rude though they may have been, she might still be here. Atheists are trying to, even if its not nice, to reduce the amount of people who are certain of their happy ever after afterlives. By doing that they are doing humanity a tremendous service....