After playing golf last week with my hardcore atheist friend, we stopped to have a beer. He shook his head and said, "Religion has done so much harm in the world." Instead of withnessing to him about Jesus, I said "My observation is that religion makes good people better, bad people worse and crazy people crazier. Alas, there are a lot more bad and crazy people than good ones." He replied, "Yes, that's just about right."
In my pretty considerable experience, I have encountered few genuinely dogmatic, fundamentalist atheists: "There ain't no God, we can live however we damn well please, and that's all there is to it." Most, if pressed, don't completely discount the possibility of postmortem survival or the existence of a spiritual realm. "Atheist," for them, really means something more like "disgusted with religion, especially this pushy nonsense that calls itself Christianity."
Increasingly, I have to agree. Notwithstanding all the good that Christianity and other religions have accomplished, their net effect has been extremely negative.
I am not so delusional that I believe an atheistic world, in which human nature were allowed to run amuck, would be better. Moreover, I happen to believe that the best evidence - of which most people are staggeringly ignorant - does point in the direction of postmortem survival, the existence of a spiritual realm, and even some sort of creator.
What would be better, I think, would be a frank acknowledgement that We Just Don't Know. We are all just guessing. We may believe the Bible is God-inspired and Jesus was resurrected and all the rest, but we don't know. We merely hold convictions on the basis of whatever data we have assembled and whatever interpretations and intuitions we apply to that data.
The most a Christian can legitimately say to a Buddhist or Hindu, and vice-versa, is "I don't know which of us is right, but I disagree with the data on which you rely and the interpretations and intuitions you apply to it."
Alvin Plantinga, the father of Reformed Epistemology, is regarded as one of the greatest Christian philosophers of modern times. I was staggered to hear him shallowly respond to a question about his view of other religions with a smug "Well, they can't all be right."
No, Alvin, they can't all be ontologically true, but all - including your Calvinist Christianity - can be ontologically false, or ontologically partly true. You just don't know, and neither do I or the Pope or the Dalai Lama or Deepak Chopra or anyone else. Why not be humble enough to admit this fact?
If one holds deep Christian convictions, it may be entertaining to consider and debate with other Christians the Inside Baseball sort of stuff like whether Yahweh is actually God's name (what???). But the overarching realization should be that you are debating the fine points of something you can't possibly know to be ontologically true. There may be no God at all, let alone one named Yahweh. Or perhaps his name is Allah, Brahma or Zeus.
The really sad spectacle is those believers who don't realize they really can't Know, who pretend to Know things that can't be known, and who browbeat others who believe differently about being Wrong. It's exactly why I'm starting to appreciate the atheist perspective that the world would be better off without religion. If we stuck to the evidence, we might have a world where pretty much everyone accepted the likelihood of postmortem survival, the existence of a spiritual realm, and some sort of higher purpose and meaning to our existence - as studies show some 15-20% of atheists actually do.
In my pretty considerable experience, I have encountered few genuinely dogmatic, fundamentalist atheists: "There ain't no God, we can live however we damn well please, and that's all there is to it." Most, if pressed, don't completely discount the possibility of postmortem survival or the existence of a spiritual realm. "Atheist," for them, really means something more like "disgusted with religion, especially this pushy nonsense that calls itself Christianity."
Increasingly, I have to agree. Notwithstanding all the good that Christianity and other religions have accomplished, their net effect has been extremely negative.
I am not so delusional that I believe an atheistic world, in which human nature were allowed to run amuck, would be better. Moreover, I happen to believe that the best evidence - of which most people are staggeringly ignorant - does point in the direction of postmortem survival, the existence of a spiritual realm, and even some sort of creator.
What would be better, I think, would be a frank acknowledgement that We Just Don't Know. We are all just guessing. We may believe the Bible is God-inspired and Jesus was resurrected and all the rest, but we don't know. We merely hold convictions on the basis of whatever data we have assembled and whatever interpretations and intuitions we apply to that data.
The most a Christian can legitimately say to a Buddhist or Hindu, and vice-versa, is "I don't know which of us is right, but I disagree with the data on which you rely and the interpretations and intuitions you apply to it."
Alvin Plantinga, the father of Reformed Epistemology, is regarded as one of the greatest Christian philosophers of modern times. I was staggered to hear him shallowly respond to a question about his view of other religions with a smug "Well, they can't all be right."
No, Alvin, they can't all be ontologically true, but all - including your Calvinist Christianity - can be ontologically false, or ontologically partly true. You just don't know, and neither do I or the Pope or the Dalai Lama or Deepak Chopra or anyone else. Why not be humble enough to admit this fact?
If one holds deep Christian convictions, it may be entertaining to consider and debate with other Christians the Inside Baseball sort of stuff like whether Yahweh is actually God's name (what???). But the overarching realization should be that you are debating the fine points of something you can't possibly know to be ontologically true. There may be no God at all, let alone one named Yahweh. Or perhaps his name is Allah, Brahma or Zeus.
The really sad spectacle is those believers who don't realize they really can't Know, who pretend to Know things that can't be known, and who browbeat others who believe differently about being Wrong. It's exactly why I'm starting to appreciate the atheist perspective that the world would be better off without religion. If we stuck to the evidence, we might have a world where pretty much everyone accepted the likelihood of postmortem survival, the existence of a spiritual realm, and some sort of higher purpose and meaning to our existence - as studies show some 15-20% of atheists actually do.
