One of the most commonly heard arguments against religion is the observation that there are so darned many different varieties, each of which claims its own proclamations are right and the others mistaken. Atheists, of course, just can’t stand this ubiquity of religion. “Why, oh why, are men everywhere so foolish? If only they could get past their folklore, all these deluded supernaturalists would see the true nature of things.”
Now, it’s true that the incompatibility of competing religious claims should give all theists pause. But pausing over faith isn’t the same as jettisoning it altogether. In fact, by pausing we see there’s another fairly obvious lesson one could learn from the observational premise that men everywhere have religion, namely that men everywhere have religion! The atheist lamenting man’s universal impulse to religionize begins by granting the impulse is universal.
But to jump from the fact that all men everywhere pursue religion to the conclusion that instead men ought nowhere to pursue it at all is truly bizarre. If everywhere you find one thing springing forth from another thing, you reasonably infer that such sprouting is normal, not aberrant. But denying all religions requires denying any validity to the deep religious impulse in virtually all men. Yet if all men everywhere do a thing, doesn’t such denial like anti-humanism rather than the name most often taken by such advocates?
Who, then, is the true humanist: the man who does as all other men have always done (affirming their mutual humanity in the process) or the man who looks at all other men with contempt and thinks himself triumphantly superior to them precisely insofar as he becomes unlike them? For all their talk of loving humanity, atheists have actually relabeled sub-humanity as the ideal. Animals, you see, are forgivably incapable of being so awed by the universe as to seek transcendent explanations for it. Atheists, on the other hand, are unwilling, and they then dare recast their repression as a virtue.
1 comment:
I've long felt that the pursuit of religion is really the pursuit of truth. An answer to the existential questions: Who am I, where did I come from, and why am I here? When compairing faiths, the discussion can not be about, "How much do I have to give, and what will I get in return?" It must always be about what is or is not true. For what does it matter how many virgins a man may be promised in the afterlife; if, in fact, there never really was an Allah to make such a promise? And to answer this question we need only turn to Deuteronomy 4:32 where Moses states that no other god has ever laid claim to this creation. But what about the athiest? Do they simply lack the wisdom to see the miracles staring them right in the face? Doubtful, that God would make a man incapable of salvation. Or, are they really just mad at God and express their frustration as unbelief? P.S. I loved this post. I forwarded it to every athiest I had an e-mail address for. Now they can turn their frustration towards me!
Post a Comment