Myths/Truths about atheism: 10 points

Thanks to Niklassi who has provided a link to a latimes.com article and upon which I would like to elaborate, point by point by demonstrating that the differences of opinion between religion and atheism are primarily semantic.

Here is the link to the article:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-harris24dec24,0,3994298.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

The Meaning and Purpose of Judaism from an atheist perspective 
http://hydepark.hevre.co.il/topic.asp?topic_id=533534&whichpage=#R_3

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בברכה

The knowledge and the basic practices of morality are already acquired in kindergarden. However, that knowledge and training is not sufficient for overcoming the trials of life that man encounters as he grows. He needs to grow in an atmosphere of moral discipline which as mentioned earlier, is provided solely by religious obligation with its godly supervision of the most inner recluses of human dwellings and of the depths of his heart.

The Bible does not portray utopian human beings and does not demand to jump at once to utopia. Human nature allows man to mature gradually. When slavery was accepted everywhere it would have no educational sense to demand its banishment. It would either cause the rejection of the bible or it would mold man to do something that would remain unacceptable to his heart and would be performed as hypocritical acting. The bible takes man as he is and leads him gradually to become man as he should be. It is therefore that the bible requires an oral interpretation which keeps the bible's principles throughout the changes in human mental and moral evolution.

The stagnation that has occured with the oral interpretation is the problem of religions as mentioned earlier.  

If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in ure — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

This the crux of the problem with religion, that it does not provide anymore a gradual process for maturing out of it. In the past before the oral interpretation of the bible was written down and that its texts were holified to a similar level to the written divine revelation, it provided an evolutionary dynamism. this has been blocked and religion has stagnated.

Furthermore, religions have failed to understand the necessity for dynamism to a point that they have developped a cruel intolerance towards those who matured out of its nitty gritty details. That intolerance undermines the purpose of religion and may cause the desmise of the stiffening religions as they become unbearable.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as "wishful thinking" and "self-deception." There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

It is a common mistake which is firmly rooted in many minds, that the Bible's presentation of Creation is scientific as would be any book of geology and physical cosmology. The organisational nature of the story of creation in the bible is so obvious and so compatible with its educational purpose, that there is no reason to assume a revelation of future scientific discoveries. Man has been taught that the burden of scientific revelation bears upon him. Interestingly, the jewish calendar does not start day one from the first day of creation, which couldn't be a proper day with no astrological system yet, but from day six, when the creation of the first chronicled man, Adam, is described.

Understanding the educational purpose of the Bible, suggests that also historical facts in the Bible, may not have happened, but were told for education's sake. The probability that the book of Job is a mere legend is widely accepted in judaism based upon a talmudic opinion. 

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

The statement about religion's influence upon human behavior; "It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind", is a very accurate deion of what religion is about. But in order for "certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct" to have the profoundest effect upon the human mind, it must have the power of a religious obligation which comes as an absolute. 

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

One who is an atheist out of wantonness and rejecting discipline is arrogant but a moral atheist basically has a god, that is his subjugation to morality.

When scientists don't know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

A scientist is naturally inclined not to fool himself and therefore he has more difficulty to accept personal god. However if he recognizes his shortcomings and thus the necessity to take upon himself an absolute disciplining authority, his wisdom will lead him to realize that the absoluteness of religion with the personification of being as its basis is his only resort.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

The difference between "chance" and "natural selection" is one between orientation and disorientation. Atheism should have no problem with anyway the arousal of the universe ia identified. It is a fact that in general, orientation is identified in the universe, but that does not yet prove any personified (limited) god. It just presents us with the wonders of Being whether we are plain atheists or we choose to be religious in order to discipline ourselves to the ethical-moral guidelines of Being.