There are some very compelling articles and books out there right now on this very issue. I have a feeling that we've approached these ideas in other threads, but check these out...
If there's one person who is getting panties in a bunch these days, it's Richard Dawkins. This Wired article is worth checking out:
http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71985-0.html
Quote:
Dawkins' style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means.
Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one -- that science could never disprove God -- provoked him to sarcasm. "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," he said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it."
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My favourite recent article comes from the Guardian. This one's about how religion will just be too silly to outlast the end of the century:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/S...980979,00.html
Quote:
People's fascination for religion and superstition will disappear within a few decades as television and the internet make it easier to get information, and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers argue today.
The web magazine Edge (www.edge.org) asked more than 150 scientists and intellectuals: "What are you optimistic about?" Answers included hope for an extended human life span, a bright future for autistic children, and an end to violent conflicts around the world.
Philosopher Daniel Denett believes that within 25 years religion will command little of the awe it seems to instil today. The spread of information through the internet and mobile phones will "gently, irresistibly, undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance".
Biologist Richard Dawkins said that physicists would give religion another problem: a theory of everything that would complete Albert Einstein's dream of unifying the fundamental laws of physics. "This final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions."
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Finally, South Park did a great two parter about this whole thing, taking a very reasonable position that any extremist view leads to trouble:
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timeless_002719.php
Quote:
In a convoluted plotline (Episode one and Episode two) involving teaching evolution in the classroom, Nintendo’s soon-to-be-released game system Wii, and the botched cryogenic freezing of Eric Cartman that leads him to be revived 500 years too late, it is revealed that the society of the future is based on godlike worship of Dawkins -- along with his eventual wife Mrs. Garrison -- as the founder of worldwide atheism. In a situation that recalls the Judean People’s Front and People’s Front of Judea in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the atheists of the future are split into three warring sects: the United Atheist Alliance (UAA), United Atheist League (UAL), and the Allied Atheist Allegiance (AAA), who also happen to be sea otters. Their core grievance with one another is the answer to the “great question,” namely what to call their respective groups.
The key criticism South Park seems to be pursuing is that extremist enthusiasm for any belief system -- in this case Dawkins’ vaunted atheism and scientific rationality -- can lead to sectarian group-think, absolutism, and even schismatic violence. Replacing religious dogma with atheistic dogma still leaves us with the problems of dogmatism. In the future, people -- and otters -- say “Science damn it” and “Oh my science” and adhere as rigidly and inflexibly to their own brand of Dawkinsism as they did before to whatever religion that subscribed to.
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So if CNN is pissing you off, atheists, don't worry... there's a lot more intelligent dialog out there.