The whole religion sham based on an actual carpenter of good deeds to his fellow man is ludicrous. Churches only exist to make money from poor souls that they have managed to convert. The evengelic cult/Churches are the worst for lightening a parishener's wallett. Look at Jimmy Baker and the Assembly of God for example. I have attended these services as I looked around it looked as if the "pastor" was preaching to hundreds of programmed robots. The same robots who contribute a percentage of their weekly pay every week to belong. Nothing more than mass hypnosis and should be criminally outlawed.

stickman, I've not studied the work of the individuals in any real detail and am not trying to make a comment about specific individuals.

My point is that if the author is only concerned with militant unbelievers and see's less critical thinking than he see's in some theological circles it may be because he is not comparing apples with apples. Compare militants with militants.

My impression is that the religious thinkers who deal honestly with doubt are not the militants. Doubt by it's nature tends to temper views and lessen the desire for militancy (expect for those who hide in denial and get all the more strident to cover the uncertainty).

R0bert

Boaz_David
Yes I do evaluate ancient happenings based on my western enlightenment education and experiences. Joshua claimed to hear a voice telling him, “Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you.” As I said earlier people who hear voices in this age are considered somewhat loony. His claimed voice led to power seeking aggressive behaviour against peoples who were no immediate threat. The people who lived in Jericho and other cities had walled their domains because of earlier experiences with marauders but the treachery and brutality of Joshua and his troops knew no bounds. Men women and male children were slaughtered wherever he led, as were the livestock, and only the virgins were saved for the use of the troops.
There have always been people who have known how to live but they have often been the victims of religious or political totalitarians. I would put Joshua and those responsible for the Inquisition in one or both of those classes.
You claim the ability to establish an historical connection between those events and how things are now. Everything now is connected in some way to what has happened in the past and I am grateful that from Joshua’s era my necessary forebears survived if only because they weren’t in his path.

The very idea that there could or should be progress to higher levels of life is an indication of progress itself. The fact that this idea is post-Christian indicates that Christianity prevented such progress in the first place.

In parts of the world where ethical advances have been made, they have, on the whole, been kept and built upon throughout history thanks to secularism and maintenance of a separation of religion and state. Eg America and Australia.

Where the foundations of these ethics begin to come under attack, religion is most likely at play (albeit further in the background that in previous times) influencing people's morals to be tolorant of such things as torture by justifying them with propoganda like "The War On Terror" or the "Axis of Evil". These moral infuences then flow into societal ethics.

This is why it is imperative that we continue to push towards a global, secular society free of religion and more so now than ever before because the downward slide toward a very oppressive, neo-religious world seems to have already started.

As far as truth and meaning go, the story of the tree of knowledge in the bible is anything but profound. This is simply another blatant attempt by Christianity to prevent people from seeking the truth and therefore meaning because their versions of the two serve their own purposes.

Knowledge is the key to truth and meaning and to suggest that science (or secular thought- the distinction is not very well made) should have something as ridiculous as this story added is totally counter to the concepts themselves.

Lastly, the ideas that 1) religion is somehow self-questioning and 2) that science and/or secularism need to be more self questioning are simply false. Religion, by definition, is followed unquestionably while science and secularism by their definitions came about and continue to exist because of questioning.

Typical Christian chutzpah. The idea of progress ending in an apotheosis is derived from the Jewish Bible as is the injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself. It is Christian plagiarism to call it a Christian idea. Nevertheless utopianist or messianic thought has resulted in tragedy whether in the Crusades, the thousand year Reich or the eventual classless society. Better to recognise that there is no magic recipe to regain paradise and face life without a big daddy in the sky or any place else. We can try to leave the world a little better for our existence and dispense with pie in the sky by and by.

David F

Is the author really trying to suggest that atheism is some sort of religion?

As I suggested elsewhere, that's like calling baldness a hair colour.

The true mythology happens when significant parts of religious texts are deliberately edited and whole sections mysteriously inserted by unnamed authors for political or ecumenical reasons. Then the end result becomes so far removed from the original version that the true meaning is lost and hijacked by self-interest.

Leave out the added "Sermon on the Mount" and "casting the first stone" stories and change "Son of God" back to the original "Son of Man" for a start, and see how subtley the story changes.

As for the notion of evangelism, atheists tend to be reactive and it's generally the hardened sectarians that start these sorts of tiresome unresolvable discussions.

I'm yet to have an atheist knock on my door to tell me the good news about there being no God or see them picketting places of worship.