Sam Harris writes:
… [Congressman Pete] Stark is the first of our leaders to display a level of intellectual honesty befitting a consul of ancient Rome. Bravo.
The truth is, there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave. And yet billions of people claim to be certain about such things.
He always finds a way to bring the topic back to the delusion of the religious, doesn’t he…
Later, he says:
The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin’s Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren’t sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.
I’m sure there are Christians here that would like to respond to that.
Incidentally, this piece appeared in the LA Times, which also wrote an editorial on Pete Stark today.
The editorial stated that “…it is statistically unlikely that Stark is the only nontheist among the 535 members of Congress. But he may be the most honest.”
[tags]atheist, atheism, Sam Harris, Pete Stark, Jesus, Muhammad, Gabriel, Christian, Bible, God, Dominionist, theocracy, John Calvin, Geneva, fundamentalist, LA Times[/tags]