Just Started Reading a Book Called "Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became one of America's Leading Atheists"

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Breaking Bad Snob
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First paragraph of the Foreword tells me this is going to be a good book:

It isn't difficult to work out that religious fundamentalists are deluded- those people who think the entire universe began after the agricultural revolution; people who believe literally that a snake, presumably in fluent Hebrew, beguiled into sin a man fashioned from clay and a woman grown from him in a cutting: people who find it self-evident that the origin myth that happened to dominate their own childhood trumps the thousands of alternative myths sprung from all the dreamtimes of the world. It is one thing to know that these faith-heads are wrong. My mistake has been naively to think I can remove their delusion simply by talking to them in a quiet, sensible voice and laying out the evidence, clear for all to see. It isn't as easy as that. Before we can talk to them, we must struggle to understand them; struggle to enter their seized minds and empathize. What is it really like to be so indoctrinated that you can honestly and sincerely believe obvious nonsense- believe it with every fiber of your being?
 

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Dan Barker used to be a fundy evangelical Christian, and now he's a fundy atheist. He regularly uses sources from unqualified people to make bad arguments -- and when confronted about this, he doesn't want to comment. I think there are better books out there from atheists who are more intellectually rigorous scholars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ-NBFFMm90
 

Breaking Bad Snob
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Dan Barker used to be a fundy evangelical Christian, and now he's a fundy atheist. He regularly uses sources from unqualified people to make bad arguments -- and when confronted about this, he doesn't want to comment. I think there are better books out there from atheists who are more intellectually rigorous scholars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ-NBFFMm90


Perhaps, but hopefully this book will give me the insight into the mind of someone who chooses faith over logic, reason, and evidence. The book got a ringing endorsement from Dawkins (who wrote that paragraph above), Hitchens and Shermer and that's good enough for me.
 

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DEAC, i'm disappointed. i thought festering zit was finally starting to get through to you
 
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Plenty of atheists and other worshipers of the religion of Darwinism convert
the other way.

British journalist Peter Hitchens, wrote a brilliant book about how atheism led him to
Christianity. He's the brother of prominent atheist Richard Hitchens.

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Synopsis

Here, for the first time, in his new book The Rage Against God, Peter Hitchens, brother of prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens, chronicles his personal journey through disbelief into a committed Christian faith. With unflinching openness and intellectual honesty, Hitchens describes the personal loss and philosophical curiosity that led him to burn his Bible at prep school and embrace atheism in its place. From there, he traces his experience as a journalist in Soviet Moscow, and the critical observations that left him with more questions than answers, and more despair than hope for how to live a meaningful life.
With first-hand insight into the blurring of the line between politics and the Church, Hitchens reveals the reasons why an honest assessment of Atheism cannot sustain disbelief in God. In the process, he provides hope for all believers who, in the words of T. S. Eliot, may discover 'the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.'
More Reviews and Recommendations Biography

Peter Hitchens is a conservative British author, broadcaster, and journalist, and is currently a regular columnist for the London Mail on Sunday. Born in the British colony of Malta in the closing years of the British Empire, he says he was brought up for a world that no longer exists. A former revolutionary, he attributes his return to faith largely to his experience of socialism in practice, in many years spent reporting in Eastern Europe and nearly three years as a resident correspondent in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
 
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Another brilliant read is by renowned scientist David Berlinski.

Berlinski received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and was later a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as three novels. He has also taught philosophy, mathematics and English at Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Université de Paris. In addition, he has held research fellowships at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. He lives in Paris.>


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Breaking Bad Snob
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I challenge you to read Godlesss, zit. If your faith is so strong, you have nothing to fear.
 

Breaking Bad Snob
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Couple of excerpts that I've highlighted:

...it slowly dawned on me that there is no single Christianity- that there are thousands of Christianities. (There may be as many Christianities as there are Christians.) There are many hundreds of denominations and sects, and each one of them can open a bible and prove that theirs is the correct interpretation and the others are all off in some way, either slightly aberrant or grossly wrong. They can all do that.

Every generation of Christians, including the first, has thought that they were living in the "end times".

I finally realized that faith was a cop-out, a defeat- an admission that the truths of religion are unknowable through evidence and reason.

Millions of good people live happy, productive, moral lives without believing in a god.

I used to think it was a tough thing to be a Christian in this big, bad world. You want to see something interesting, try not being one.
 

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DEAC -- notice how all of your highlights, even if granted true, still don't logically lead to the conclusion "therefore God does not exist" or "therefore Christianity is false".

...it slowly dawned on me that there is no single Christianity- that there are thousands of Christianities. (There may be as many Christianities as there are Christians.) There are many hundreds of denominations and sects...
It doesn't follow from the multiplicity of Christian sects that therefore they are all false. Barker is also embellishing on the differences among the different denominations. They all essentially agree on the doctrine of God & the resurrection.

There are likewise, at least 10 different physical interpretations of quantum mechanics -- and nobody knows which one is the correct one. Still, no one would argue that because of that, quantum physics is false.

Also, there are different types of atheism -- some atheists believe there is nothing beyond space, matter & energy; while others believe numbers exist in a platonic realm. Some believe there is no universe beyond this one, while others believe there are an infinite number of universes beyond this one.

Differences in sects is not something exclusive to Christianity, nor is it relevant to the truth/falsehood of the core beliefs of a worldview.

Every generation of Christians, including the first, has thought that they were living in the "end times".
Even if true -- so what? But it's not true. Unfortunately, Barker has never heard of preterism.
 

Rx. Senior
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I really don't get these sort of things. If you have the same faith as the author isn't it mostly things you've already decided upon for yourself? And if you have a different faith it's mostly things you don't care to hear or read about
 

hangin' about
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The existence of god(s) can be neither proven nor disproven given current technology. Why not just hand ourselves over to simply not knowing? Why is it so difficult for people to discern between what they believe and what they know?
 

Oh boy!
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Perhaps, but hopefully this book will give me the insight into the mind of someone who chooses faith over logic, reason, and evidence. The book got a ringing endorsement from Dawkins (who wrote that paragraph above), Hitchens and Shermer and that's good enough for me.

DEAC, have you read "The God Delusion"? If so, what did you think about it?
 

Breaking Bad Snob
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DEAC, have you read "The God Delusion"? If so, what did you think about it?

I didn't read it. I love Dawkins and think he's an excellent ambassador for reason and logic, but I find his books to be pretty dry. Sam Harris is more my speed.
 
Why do you need this book to understand that the Bible is propaganda?

The mass murdering, genocidal maniacs who call themselves Hebrews or Israelites took some facts that paint them in a very bad light (genocidal maniacs) and used propaganda to claim that "God" told them to do all those horrible things. The New Testament is another set of half truths and un-truths which highlight Greek Philosophy with a bit of Roman law smattered in, the purpose of which is to pull people away from the Old Testament and the Hebrew clergy, so that they can now be abused by the "Christian" clergy.

If you get several good translations of the Bible and read it yourself you will see this with your own eyes. You won't need anyone else to tell you what is really going on. Here is just one example of the crimes committed by these genocidal maniacs:
Deuteronomy 20:16, 17,
16: "Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes.
17: But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you"

Here "God" is demanding that ALL inhabitants, including women, children, old people, EVERYONE in 6 nations be murdered. Now, no one warns these people that this is coming, nor does anyone tell them what sins they have committed, or explains what they can do to change and be accepted by "God". They are just murdered, all of them. Six cases of genocide against people who had no idea why they were being murdered.

This is totally outrageous.

The Old Testament is filled with this kind of insanity.

The Hebrews (Israelites) had a big problem after they committed all of these crimes. Everyone knew about it. So, they made up this idea that "God" had ordered them to do it, and that they were some sort of "Holy" people just carrying out "God's" orders in order to make up some excuse for their monstrous crimes. Preposterous.
 

Breaking Bad Snob
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Why do you need this book to understand that the Bible is propaganda?

I've known that since I read the bible in my early 20s. I was reading it to find out how an fundamentalist evangelical made the transition to atheist.

I suspect that the overwhelming majority of believers haven't read the bible and would be horrified at the contents. I know this is just anecdotal, but I know more about the bible than every single one of my Christian friends, and I would suspect that's the case for many atheists.
 

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