You may not have caught up with all the evangelical Christian and/or creationist reviews of Richard Dawkins’ excellent book The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006). Strangely enough, all of these reviewers were less than impressed with what Dawkins had to say, and expressed themselves accordingly.

Let’s start with conservative Presbyterian Barney Zwartz, the Melbourne Age’s religious affairs editor – The God Delusion:

As a former philosophy tutor, I would have hated to have Richard Dawkins in my class. Most tutors have met his sort: the loud, opinionated, supercilious student who shouts down other views without actually listening, who stands in awe of his own cleverness when everyone else can see that it is simply an immature over-confidence.

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Filed in: Atheism, Fundamentalism

Sorry, but I just don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. They have to come up with such weird and exotic theorising, which any Joe Six-pack can see is patent nonsense.
- Bill Muehlenberg, What About Those Who Have Not Heard? (Discussion, 28 Jan. 2007, 5pm)

Bill is an evangelical Protestant of the Baptist persuasion. This means that he has enough faith to believe the following sensible and self-evident propositions:

In the time of the ancestors, a man was born to a virgin mother with no biological father being involved.

The same fatherless man called out to a friend called Lazarus, who had been dead long enough to stink, and Lazarus promptly came back to life.

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Filed in: Atheism, Evangelicals

In the lead-up to this month’s Australian census, many Christian Right organisations were churning out the mantra that Australia was ‘68% Christian’. This figure had apparently been set in stone by the 2001 census and wouldn’t it be awfully nice if that statistic could be maintained or even increased this year?

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Filed in: Atheism

Recent research apparently shows that between 69 and 94 per cent of young American Christians ‘forsake their faith’ after leaving high school, while another study found that 88 per cent of youth leave the church in adulthood. (Christian Post as quoted in Australian Prayer Network International News, 17 Apr. 2006)

These figures reflect statistics circulated for several years by conservative pollster George Barna and cast strong doubt on assertions that the USA is a nation of churchgoers. The process of secularisation is extremely corrosive in its effect on religious observance in all developed countries, with America as the last, lingering holdout.

Filed in: Atheism

I have been doing a little more research on the response of Religious Right groups to the recent catastrophe. Thankfully, in Australia we haven’t seen much evidence yet of support for the “Rapture craze” that has swept America (the “Left Behind” books etc.) so there is little discussion yet about whether the tsunami might have “end times” implications. The Rapture Index, a wacky “temperature” measurement predicting the nearness of “end times”, has gone up a bit, but hasn’t been updated since Dec 27. I do hope the author hasn’t been vanished ;-)

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Filed in: Atheism, Creationism

The tsunami disaster continues to dominate world news as the death toll increases daily. Two articles in the Australian media yesterday took up the theme I raised in my last post, i.e. how do believers reconcile a disaster of this magnitude with their faith in a benevolent God?

The Age – Is God to blame for this?
“It is a pertinent and challenging question for all those who believe in an interventionist higher being, an omnipotent God. What did the many thousands of victims throughout Asia and Africa do to deserve their fate? And what sort of God would sanction such apparently meaningless devastation?”

Sydney Morning Herald – Waves of destruction wash away belief in God’s benevolence
“How, then, did a God as powerful and benevolent as this allow such a thing to happen? If he is benevolent then he cannot also be omnipotent, for a God who has both these attributes would have wanted to, cared to and been able to prevent such a catastrophe.”

Both of these articles are worth reading, although neither is able to answer the fundamental questions raised.

Filed in: Atheism

Christmas Day. What are we to make of this festivity? The churches exhort us to consider the “real meaning of Christmas”, the “reason for the season” etc. But Western society left the nativity behind many years ago. We know that the celebration of Christ’s birth wasn’t invented until 336AD, and that the day itself was in fact a pagan feast for hundreds of years prior to that (natalis solis invicti – the Roman “birth of the unconquered sun”). Most of the symbols of Christmas (gift-giving and merrymaking from Roman Saturnalia; greenery, lights, and charity from the Roman New Year; Yule logs and various foods from Teutonic feasts) have their origins in pagan traditions. So let us ignore the ponderous exhortations from pulpits: let those who wish to celebrate the birth of a god-child do so, and let others show goodwill towards all men in their own way.

Filed in: Atheism