God is not great

Jake Starkey said:
Of course I do. You don't believe in deity or that it could exist.

I know that is false.

The facts are not there, so I just hold it in abeyance, and go about my way.
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Perry lies a lot and has a weird attraction to @Cypress

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Cypress said:
There are a lot of stupid Christians, stupid atheists, stupid agnostics.

I'm not a Lutheran myself, but I participate in some of the Lutheran Christian fellowship activities here. These fellowships includes groups that read about and discuss quantum physics, discuss Taoist philosophy, read and discuss the Tao Te Ching, and discuss books.

You'd be hard pressed to find a more intelligent set of people if you just randomly grabbed people off the street.

I am confident in saying these Lutheran fellowships are more intelligent and amicable than the level of discussion you see here on Just Plain Politics
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Religion makes people stupid. Not the same as quantitative intelligence.
 
Cypress said:

God Is Not Great is a 2007 book by journalist Christopher Hitchens in which he makes a case against organized religion.​

Hitchens begins by describing his early scepticism toward religion and argues that faith persists due to human fear of mortality. He claims religion imposes itself on others and frequently incites violence.

Hitchens posited that organized religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children"

He critiques religious interference in public health, referring to the Catholic Church's stance on condoms in Africa, resistance to vaccines in some Islamic groups, religious circumcision and religious female genital mutilation.

He argues that religious metaphysics are false and that advances in science make leaps of faith increasingly redundant.

Hitchens contends that all reported miracles are unverified and that belief in them relies on fabricated or unreliable testimony. He argues that many religions originated in fraud or delusion.

Critical reception​

Positive Reviews​

Bruce DeSilva considered the book to be the best piece of atheist writing since Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), with Hitchens using "elegant yet biting prose.

The book was praised in Kirkus Reviews as a "pleasingly intemperate assault on organized religion" that "like-minded readers will enjoy".

In The Sydney Morning Herald, Matt Buchanan dubbed it "a thundering 300-page cannonade; a thrillingly fearless, impressively wide-ranging, thoroughly bilious and angry book against the idea of God"; Buchanan found the work to be "easily the most impressive of the present crop of atheistic and anti-theistic books.

Michael Kinsley, in The New York Times Book Review, lauded Hitchens's "logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever".

Jason Cowley in the Financial Times called the book "elegant but derivative".

Negative Reviews​

David Bentley Hart interpreted the book as a "rollicking burlesque, without so much as a pretense of logical order or scholarly rigor". Hart says "On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens' book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them.

Responding to Hitchens's claim that "all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule", Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution quotes paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Referencing a number of scientists with religious faith, Gould wrote, "Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism.

William J. Hamblin of the FARMS Review criticized Hitchens for implying unanimity among biblical scholars on controversial points and overlooking alternative scholarly positions, and felt that Hitchens's understanding of biblical studies was "flawed at best."

Stephen Prothero of The Washington Post considered Hitchens correct on many points but found the book "maddeningly dogmatic" and criticized Hitchens's condemnation of religion altogether.


en.wikipedia.org

God Is Not Great - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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how about personal practices and thoughts one forms from reading religious text on one's own?

why are you still mixing religion with science?
 
Cypress said:
For my money, the most impressive atheist influencer out there is Alex O'Connor, who used to align himself with the hard core New Atheists. He actually has an education in theology, unlike Dawkins or Hitchens.

But recently, he's taken to calling himself an agnostic, and admitting there is at least a plausible case to be made for God and the resurrection of Jesus.

So for all intents and purposes he seems like a former militant atheist who has transitioned to agnosticism and is even on a trajectory to being open to the plausibility of of God.
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why do you put so much emphasis on what atheists think?

are you trying to port status in one area to another area?

like asimov's foundation trilogy making scientists the new priesthood?

that's dumb because many of them are de facto mass murderers for hire.
 
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