Jersey Girl wrote:DrW wrote:Jason,
Just checked in quickly and have not read the entire thread, but I do have one suggestion if you have decided to read work on religion and God by non-believing authors.
That suggestion is to start with Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. This book is short, sweet, and gets the job done quite nicely.
It was written specifically in response to American Evangelicals who bombard Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, and others with questions and hate mail each time one of them publishes a new book.
IMHO, this book should be required reading for graduation from high school.
DrW,
I am not at all familiar with the book that you recommended. I did a quick wiki on it and here is an excerpt:
We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God’s teachings on morality: if a man discovers on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he must stone her to death on her father’s doorstep (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).[3]
Tell me, does Harris acknowledge at all the New Testament and what does he have to say about it as it relates to the Old Testament?
Jersey Girl,
It is fair to say, I think, that both Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins look at religion, and especially American Evangelical Christianity, through a "long lens". That is, from their viewpoint, the scriptures (Old Testament and New Testament) are sort of collapsed together as they form the foundation for Christianity.
While Evangelical Christians might be a little more willing to look at the Old Testament as metaphorical as compared to the New Testament, from the non-believer's perspective neither scripture is much more than a compilation of Bronze Age tradition, myth and legend.
When Harris and Dawkins talk about the authors of the Bible, they do not distinguish much between the Bronze Age beliefs or herdsmen and farmers of the Old Testament and those of the more advanced societies of the New Testament. Both scriptures are full of anthropomorphized deities, superstition, vengeance and magic.
Since both are foundational documents for Christianity, then Christians can rightly be held to account for their professed beliefs, as set forth in both.
I personally think that
Letter to a Christian Nation focuses in on this issue very effectively.
It really asks Christians some tough questions:
"Do you really believe all of this stuff?"
"Do you understand the extent to which religion, and the contemporary practice of religion, is based upon demonstrable lies?"
He goes into this latter issue in some detail, and for good reason.
The follow-on questions are no easier:
"If you do not believe all of it, then where do you draw the line and on what basis do you make that decision?"
"Are you really going to simply pick and choose?
"For example, are you really going to disregard the New Testament apocrypha as scripture when they have been arbitrarily distinguished from the canonized books of the New Testament based on the decisions of a group of men with a clear political agenda?"
Once someone figures out that the whole set of work is nothing more than an internally inconsistent and largely arbitrary set of myths and legends based on superstition, misunderstanding and tradition, and that they no different from the hundreds or thousands of other creation myths and consequent religious texts from other societies and from other times, the rest is easy.