10 myths -- and 10 truths -- about atheism. Реферат. Другое.

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SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term
"atheism" has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United
States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in
politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to
a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise
qualified atheist for president.
Atheists are often imagined to be
intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically
closed to evidence of the supernatural.
Even John Locke, one of the great
patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was "not at all to
be tolerated" because, he said, "promises, covenants and oaths, which
are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist."
That was more than 300 years ago.
But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87%
of the population claims "never to doubt" the existence of God; fewer
than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be
deteriorating.
Given that we know that atheists are
often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any
society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing
a larger role in our national discourse.
1) Atheists believe that life is
meaningless.
On the contrary, religious people
often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed
by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite
sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and
fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need
not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of
meaninglessness … well … meaningless.
2) Atheism is responsible for the
greatest crimes in human history.
People of faith often claim that the
crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of
unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are
too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions.
Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality
cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship.
Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens
when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political,
racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history
that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Jews, Christians and Muslims claim
that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity's needs that they could only
have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is
simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the
claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or be
otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian
Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we are both
atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why
you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss
yours."
4) Atheists think everything in the
universe arose by chance.
No one knows why the universe came
into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak
about the "beginning" or "creation" of the universe at all,
as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the
origin of space-time itself.
The notion that atheists believe
that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a
criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous
book, "The God Delusion," this represents an utter misunderstanding
of evolutionary theory. Although we don't know precisely how the Earth's early
chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in
the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of
chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase
"natural selection" by analogy to the "artificial
selection" performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection
exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.
5) Atheism has no connection to
science.
Although it is possible to be a
scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it —
there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to
erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an
example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a
personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do
not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to
religious faith than science is.
When scientists don't know something
— like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating
molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is
a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based
religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in
the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility,
while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no
scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and
our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This
isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.
7) Atheists are closed to spiritual
experience.
There is nothing that prevents an
atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value
these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is
make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the
basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have
transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to
Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention
and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the
positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of
humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even
atheists regularly have similar experiences.
There is, in fact, not a Christian
on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that
he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of
claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.
8) Atheists believe that there is
nothing beyond human life and human understanding.
There is, in fact, not a Christian
on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that
he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of
claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.
Atheists are free to admit the
limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is
obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more
obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of
it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but
there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding
of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such
possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist,
the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them
than they are to human atheists.
From the atheist point of view, the
world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the
universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make
such an observation.
9) Atheists ignore the fact that
religion is extremely beneficial to society.
Those who emphasize the good effects
of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the
truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as
"wishful thinking" and "self-deception." There is a
profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.
In any case, the good effects of
religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives
people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available.
Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their
suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you
to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?
10) Atheism provides no basis for
morality.
If a person doesn't already
understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible
or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both
human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is
good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level)
hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking
about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.
We have made considerable moral
progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible
or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet
every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination.
Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its
ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the
creator of the universe.
Для
подготовки данной работы были использованы материалы с сайта http://www.atheism.ru/


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