Wired News: The Crusade Against Religion:
Prophecy, I’ve come to realize, is a complex meme. When prophets provoke real trouble, bring confusion to society by sowing reverberant doubts, spark an active, opposing consensus everywhere — that is the sign they’ve hit a nerve. But what happens when they don’t hit a nerve? There are plenty of would-be prophets in the world, vainly peddling their provocative claims. Most of them just end up lecturing to undergraduates, or leading little Christian sects, or getting into Wikipedia edit wars, or boring their friends. An unsuccessful prophet is not a martyr, but a sort of clown.
this article reflects pretty closely where my sense of things has gone over the last few months.
i, too, have read dawkins and harris and found them… lacking.
i, too, have decided that it’s perfectly okay to be agnostic without having to slide into atheism, and that religious belief is not an evil to be overcome, necessarily.
it’s not a comfy place, but it is my place, and it’s actually a pretty happy one.
It’s our place. Let’s throw a party.
Long live religious ambiguity!
so, funny thing: sal and i were driving somewhere the other day and listening to the science friday podcast where richard dawkins reference FSM and it’s religious sects and what not and i told him you had read dawkins and found it laughable and he was (for lack of a better word) astonished.
we always were a little too opened minded to fit in his christian box. i liked that about us. 🙂
sometimes i read my old comments and gasp at my misuse of english. i wish i could use the excuse that it is not my first language.