Carson WeitnauerOur experiences, perhaps more than anything else, powerfully shape our lives and our beliefs. There’s a reason “love at first sight” is a cliché, but “love after multiple, rational deductive tests” is not.
If you’ve been hurt by a church or by Christians, you know what I’m talking about.
Has science replaced religion as a guide to morality? Are our genes a better guide to right and wrong than revelation from a divine being? Can science lead us to a new morality?
A recent study, by Abigail Marsh and her team at Georgetown, might imply that science is replacing religion when it comes to our moral beliefs. Their study offers some initial insights into a potential link between our genes and our moral judgments. As Georgetown’s website summarizes,
The search for God can seem so puzzling and so difficult that many people feel like, “All that God-stuff is a mystery, and no one really knows what’s true.”
If this is how you are feeling, it makes sense to dig into this instinct and see if this objection to faith can withstand a rigorous investigation. Let’s start by considering some of the main reasons why the search for God seems strange and even impossible.
Is human life absurd, meaningless, and empty? Or do our lives have purpose and significance?
One way to find an answer to these big questions is to ask another question: if we never existed or ceased to exist, would it matter? For instance, if there was one less piece of dust in a lifeless galaxy five billion light years away, this would hardly affect anyone. The dust’s existence – or nonexistence – just doesn’t matter very much.
The word “spiritual” is a common, everyday word that many people use to describe a wide variety of apparently transcendent experiences. But should we be more careful? Has “spiritual” become a word that some people deliberately use in order to deceive others?
Paula Kirby, a “consultant to secular organizations,” recently wrote in an article for The Washington Post that, “Religion is a parasite that feeds on all that is good in humanity as a whole and then proclaims it as its own gift to the world.”
That’s a very strong, unqualified, and unconditional statement. If true, religious practice is a very serious problem, one that we should all work to eradicate.
In a post reflecting on the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Dr. Sam Harris speaks about religious practice in sharply negative terms. For instance:
According to some estimates, there are about 2.1 billion Christians in the world, or around a third of the world’s population. Whether you are a Christian questioning your faith or simply curious about the world’s largest religion, you’ve probably asked yourself: how can we know if Christianity is true?
The New York Times recently published online a piece entitled “Confessions of an Ex-Moralist” by Dr. Joel Marks, a scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University. His post offers an opportunity to discuss some arguments for and against amoralism, which will highlight the problem that atheists have in defending an objective morality. (Please notice how I define atheism).
Today I’d like to look at a very commonly held idea regarding religious belief. It is often expressed somewhat like this, “It is arrogant to say that Christianity is true and that all other religions are false.”
We need to thoughtfully consider this statement, because if is true, it means that being a Christian is, to some degree, an inherently bad thing.