God May Be Dead But Damned if I Am

I n her recent outing in Foreign Policy Magazine, noted apologist, Karen Armstrong, says Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins:

  “  … are wrong … about human nature.

Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus.

As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures.

While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives.

Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues.

So God isn’t going anywhere.

And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults.

Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

Or in other words, god may be dead but don’t let’s upset the natives – they’ve got guns and bombs and exploding underwear and if you’re unkind to them they might set them off.

So let’s pretend for the sake of a peaceful life that he’s not dead, okay? And after all, the human diddums is fragile and if we tell her there is no objective meaning “out there” diddums might cry.

I don’t know about you but when you read her article do you get the awful feeling of sly inauthenticity and wheedling manipulation all for the sake of her desperation for … what? Her own frantic need for a sense of her own meaning, probably. The fact that people may naturally, in a search for meaning, have conjured up an imaginary friend doesn’t make the imaginary friend either real, or worthy of respect or protection.

If there are no gods then there are no gods – end of story. No point in the prolonging the fantasy. And, by the way, there is no evidence that there is one.

Anyway, we can’t respond to the Armstrong nonsense nearly as neatly as Sam Harris’s reply:

“  In her article (“Think Again: God,” November 2009), Karen Armstrong discovers that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and I have mistaken “fundamentalism” for the totality of religion. (Sorry about that.) But do Richard and Christopher really hold religion responsible for “all human cruelty”? That is a surprise. I hadn’t realized that they were idiots.

In any case, I am hopeful that Armstrong’s winsome depiction of Islam will shame and enlighten them, as it has me. They will discover that Hassan al-Banna and Tariq Ramadan are paragons of meliorism and wisdom, while we are ignorant bigots who know nothing of theology (of course), politics (Christopher, are you listening?), human nature (what’s to know?), or the proper limits of science (um … narrower?).

[ … ]

But in Kenya elderly men and women are still burned alive for casting malicious spells. In Angola, unlucky boys and girls have been blinded, injected with battery acid, and killed outright in an effort to purge them of demons. In Tanzania, there is a growing criminal trade in the body parts of albino human beings — as it is widely believed that their flesh has magical properties.

I hope that Armstrong will soon apply her capacious understanding of human nature to these phenomena.

[ … ]

People will torture their children with battery acid from time to time anyway — and who among us hasn’t wanted to kill and eat an albino? I sincerely hope that my “new atheist” colleagues are not so naive as to imagine that actual belief in magic might be the issue here.

Read his whole reply here.

[Armstrong’s response to Harris is upsettingly whining, disingenuous, special pleading, illogical and just nonsense. She seems to want a “dialogue” about the existence or not of a god but the existence is not open to question.] 

R’Amen (and may his noodley appendage be upon you)