A challenge to believers and unbelievers I think this guy wants a fight!

Pathofreason
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A challenge to believers and unbelievers I think this guy wants a fight!

What do you guys think of this? I think this guy wants a fight?

 

http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/10/12/a-challenge-to-believers-and-unbelievers/

 

 

The Bible tells Christians not to be of the world, sharing its distorted priorities, but it does call upon believers to be in the world, fully engaged. Many Christians have abdicated this mission. They have instead sought a workable, comfortable modus vivendi in which they agree to leave the secular world alone if the secular world agrees to leave them alone. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed the terms for the treaty in his book Rocks of Ages when he said that secular society relies on reason and decides matters of fact, while religious people rely on faith and decide questions about values. Many Christians seized upon this distinction with relief. This way they could stay in their subculture and be nice to everyone.

 

But a group of prominent atheists-many of them evolutionary biologists-has launched a powerful public attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular; they have no interest in being nice. A new set of antireligious books-The End of Faith, The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, and so on-now shapes public debate. These atheists reject the Gould solution. They say that a religious outlook makes specific claims about reality: there is a God, there is life after death, miracles do happen, and so on. If you are agnostic or atheist, you have a very different understanding of reality, one that is formed perhaps by a scientific or rationalist outlook. The argument of the atheists is that both views of reality cannot be simultaneously correct. If one is true, then the other is false.

The atheists have a point: there are not two truths or multiple truths; there is one truth. Either the universe is a completely closed system and miracles are impossible, or the universe is not a closed system and there is the possibility of divine intervention in it. Either the Big Bang was the product of supernatural creation or it had a purely natural cause. In a larger sense, either the secular view of reality is correct or the religious view is correct. (Or both are wrong.) So far the atheists have been hammering the Christians and the Christians have been running for cover. It's like one hand clapping.

This is not a time for Christians to turn the other cheek. Rather, it is a time to drive the money-changers out of the temple. The atheists no longer want to be tolerated. They want to monopolize the public square and to expel Christians from it. They want political questions like abortion to be divorced from religious and moral claims. They want to control the school curricula, so that they can promote a secular ideology and undermine Christianity. They want to discredit the factual claims of religion, and they want to convince the rest of society that Christianity is not only mistaken but also evil. They blame religion for the crimes of history and for the ongoing conflicts in the world today. In short, they want to make religion-and especially the Christian religion-disappear from the face of the earth.

 

The Bible in Matthew 5:13-14 calls Christians to be the "salt of the earth" and the "light of the world." Christians are called to make the world a better place. Today that means confronting the challenge of modern atheism and secularism. My new book What's So Great About Christianity, which is just hitting the stores, provides a kind of tool kit for Christians to meet this challenge. The Christianity that is defended here is not "fundamentalism" but rather traditional Christianity, what C.S. Lewis called "mere Christianity," the common ground of beliefs between Protestants and Catholics. This Christianity is the real target of the secular assault.

 

I have written this book not only for believers but also for unbelievers. Many people are genuine seekers. They sense there is something out there that provides a grounding and an ultimate explanation for their deepest questions, yet that something eludes them. They feel the need for a higher sense of purpose in their lives, but they are unsure where to find it. Even though they have heard about God and Christianity, they cannot reconcile religious belief with reason and science: faith seems unreasonable and therefore untenable. Moreover, they worry that religion has been and can be an unhealthy source of intolerance and fanaticism, as evidenced by the motives of the September 11 terrorists. These are all reasonable concerns, and I address them head-on in this book.

 

This is also a book for atheists, or at least for those atheists who welcome a challenge. Precisely because the Christians usually duck and run, the atheists have had it too easy. Their arguments have gone largely unanswered. They have been flogging the carcass of "fundamentalism" without having to encounter the horse-kick of a vigorous traditional Christianity. I think that if atheists are genuine rationalists they should welcome this book. It is an effort to meet the atheist argument on its own terms.

Nowhere in this book do I take Christianity for granted. My modus operandi is one of skepticism, to view the claims of religion in the same open-minded way that we view claims of any other sort. The difference between me and my atheist opponents is that I am skeptical not only of the irrational claims made in the name of religion but also of the irrational claims made in the name of science and of skepticism itself.

 

Taking as my foil the anti-religious arguments of prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the others, What's So Great About Christianity shows the following: 1) Christianity is the main foundation of Western civilization, the root of our most cherished values. 2) The latest discoveries of modern science support the Christian claim that there is a divine being who created the universe. 3) Darwin 's theory of evolution, far from undermining the evidence for supernatural design, actually strengthens it. 4) There is nothing in science that makes miracles impossible. 5) It is reasonable to have faith. 6) Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history. 7) Atheism is often motivated not by reason but by a kind of cowardly moral escapism. I end this book by showing what is unique about Christianity and how our lives change if we become Christians.

 

If you want to read more about the book, check out my website dineshdsouza.com

 

 

 

 

 


jcgadfly
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D'Souza likes to run his

D'Souza likes to run his mouth. I don't think he'd be up for a scrap with anyone who is knowledgable about anything he claims to be knowledgable about.

Forgive misspellings - I think fast and my fingers stumble after. 

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Sounds to me more like he

Sounds to me more like he wants to sell books.

D'Souza is widely-known as a critic of Western industrial civilization.  When publishers send me sample copies of essay anthologies because they hope I'll adopt one as a freshman comp textbook, there's usually a D'Souza essay in there, and sometimes they have good ideas in them.

But most of what he says is inflammatory for the sake of being inflammatory.  He's sort of like Ann Coulter's separated-at-birth heteropagus twin.

"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert


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Indeed. I do not think that

Indeed. I do not think that Distort D'Newsa should be running his mouth about that which he is not trained in. As you see from my argumentative style on the forum, nothing raises my blood pressure more than people who do this. It is for this reason I always debate science and philosophy and a dabble of modern history and never debate ancient history, scripture, ethics etc.

How can he possibly know that people turn to "atheism" because of "moral escapism"? Is this his ingenious Freudian Insight into some denial over the tip-top of Maslow's heirarchy, or is it just something he is saying because he thinks it feels good despite that he knows nothing about it. Truly, how can he know such things. Likewise, what does he know of scientific disciplines or their methods? How can he establish that scientific discoveries "point to a designer" forgetting that science is naturalistic, and by nature does not deal in such things? Does he really, honestly think he will publish an a posteriori argument that no one has seen before?

 

How can he draw anything more than a false correlation that can be rent asunder by reductio ad absurdum between "Hitler" "Stalin" and "atheism" (I have already read his article on this matter. It was terrible) Just as, for example, I could say:


 "The war in Bosnia/Herzegovnia was between the Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs who were predominantly Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox respectively" One of the reasons for this ethnic cleansing was the religious strife. Therefore, Roman Catholicism, Islam, and Russian Orthodoxy is bad QED.

This is complete nonsense and I think that if I made such statements, I would deserve to get spat at. Likewise, for breaking Godwin's law, D'Souza should be hit on the head with a cartoon mallet. 

And especially considering this far-right wing polemic is absolutely fetishist over fallacies of equivocation, pidgeon-holing people over their political beliefs. How on earth does he manage to imply that all atheists wish that religion were wiped off the face of the Earth? What a remarkable falsehood. Even if it were true (it is not), as Harris pointed out, this label is merely a way of holding arguments at arm's length without acknowledging them.

"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.

-Me

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Do they seriously want war

Do they seriously want war with people that can destroy their entire belief systems within a matter of hours?

Nero(in response to a Youth pastor) wrote:

You are afraid and should be thus.  We look to eradicate your god from everything but history books.  We bring rationality and clear thought to those who choose lives of ignorance.  We are the blazing, incandescent brand that will leave an "A" so livid, so scarlet on your mind that you will not go an hour without reflecting on reality.


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We will be joining the NYC

We will be joining the NYC Atheists at a Hitchens/D'Souza debate in NY on Monday, Oct. 22. YEAH!!!


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I saw this book and plan on

I saw this book and plan on buying and reading it. I'll let you know what I find out as I read it.


Pathofreason
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Yes!!!!!

kellym78 wrote:
We will be joining the NYC Atheists at a Hitchens/D'Souza debate in NY on Monday, Oct. 22. YEAH!!!

 

Any plans of video taping this? or possibly even doing the private RRS room again for this event? Dammit I wish i still lived in NY.

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Brian37
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kellym78 wrote: We will be

kellym78 wrote:
We will be joining the NYC Atheists at a Hitchens/D'Souza debate in NY on Monday, Oct. 22. YEAH!!!

Good, and Hitchens is just the person to do it. DSouza is going to get his clock cleaned. Glad you guys will be there as wel. 

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
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