The Occasional Solipsist

The one good thing about living in a time when the forces of religious zealotry leave almost no room for intellectual thought to survive, let alone prosper, is the application of Newton's Third Law to human sociology: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

One major component of the reaction to the unending barrage of religious dogma that is splintering and destroying us is Richard Dawkins, whom I mentioned in a recent post about The Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just finished an article by Dawkins that any rationalist, atheist, humanist, or any other non-dogmatically-challenged-ist needs to read.

Look for the link after the jump.

Here's a sample, where Dawkins quotes Sam Harris:

by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ . . . Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency. Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily, as Reagan did his stars? We don't know, but would anyone be surprised?

'American Taliban' indeed.

And here's Dawkins' conclusion, for the very lazy. It ruins nothing for those who want to enjoy the full article:

We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.

Check out the full article here.

Labels: atheism