I'm finding myself increasingly interested in Atheism - academically, not religiously - and have come across these two tidbits in the last month:
The Atheism Tapes with Jonathan Miller
and
Doubt by Jennifer Michael Hecht
If you get netflix, you can watch the BBC series on demand.
What I've been finding so interesting is that I find myself agreeing very much with many of the views of the doubters, but not with their ultimate conclusion that there is no God. The other piece that interests me is the claim made by athiests that they are rational thinkers, or at least more rational than theists are. I tend to think that both history and experience show such assertions to be nonsensical. My experience is an anecdote, I was trained in the Church's educational system. Evolution, the geologic timescale, and Marx were all taught to me by the faithful, if not by the clergy themselves. On a more universal level, I can't find any evidence for the assertion that atheists or antitheists are somehow a more rational crowd than theists in any way. Zany knows no theology. More importantly, war knows no theology - while those engaging in warfare might espouse theologies the rationale for war lies solidly in the material: territory, money, ethnicity, a lover (Helen comes to mind). Atheism is no antidote for violence - indeed sience, athiesm's vaunted tool, has, at least in the last century, advanced our ability to make war, the hydrogen bomb physics' tower of Babel.
There's much more to be pondered on this day after Epiphany, when we celebrate the wise mens' visit to our Lord, but this is it for now...
