Part 2 of my summary of:
An introduction by Christopher Hitchens to the book: The Portable Atheist.
The Human Species has been in existence for at least 150,200,000 years. It’s a mere instance in evolutionary time.
In order to subscribe to monotheistic religion, one must believe that humans were born, struggled, waged wars, loved, worked and died during all this time; often dying in childbirth for want of basic nurture, died young of diseases, and with a life expectancy of perhaps 30 years at the most.
Add to these the turf wars between discrepant groups and tribes, alarming outbreaks of disease which had no germ theory to explain it, let alone palliate them, plus associated natural disasters and human tragedies.
And yet, for all these millennia heaven watched with with indifference and then; only in the last 6,000 years at the very least; decided it was time to intervene as well as to redeem. Heaven would only intervene and redeem in the remote area of the Middle East, thus ensuring that even more generations would expire before the good news begin to spread.
The willingness to even entertain such elaborately crazy ideas involves much more than the suspension of disbelief, or the dumb credulity that greet magic tricks.
It also involves ignoring or explaining away the many religious beliefs that pre-dates Moses. Richard Dawkins may have phrased it most pungently when he argued that everybody is an atheist in saying in saying there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe.
The man made character of religion from which monotheism promises to deliver us at least in its pagan form, persists in a terrifying shape in our own modern time as believers fight each other over the correct interpretation, even kill in battles over doctrine.
There seems to be what the poet Shelly once called the necessity of atheism. Ons cannot avoid taking a position. Either one attributes one’s presence here to the laws of biology and physics, or one chooses intelligent design.
Once one chooses to believe that human life is worth living, one can combat one’s natural pessimism by stoicism and the ignoring of illusion. There are beauties in science and extraordinary marvels in nature; there is consolation and irony in philosophy, there are infinite splendors in literature and poetry. There is the grand resource of art and music and architecture - any one of these enough to absorb in a lifetime.
We as atheists can find awe and magnificence and splendor without having to invocate the supernatural. Anyone surrounded by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be bored by by supernatural and spiritual gibberish.
Religion is more than the belief in a supreme being or creator. It is the cult
of that being and the belief that it’s wishes have been made known or can be determined or even altered by prayer or meditation.
Something horrible has now happened to religion. Apart from places where it can still be enforced by fear, superstition and ignorance, it has become one opinion or interpretation amongst many. It is forced to compete in the free market of ideas and ideologies and has to stand in open debate and submit to free inquiry. The main enemy they now, face is “faith-based”.
Reposted from The Atheist Toolbox