Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (61 page)

Because among the harm has been the active obstruction of the good, including stem cell research, women’s rights, sound reproductive policy, civil rights, and science education.

Because religion causes many people to pass their moral decision making to religious authorities and scriptures, which are steeped in Bronze Age ideas.

Because it leads people to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Because everyone benefits when everyone’s decision making is grounded in the same rules of evidence and reason.

He then goes through his own reasons for believing God doesn’t exist (many of which are similar to those I include in
Chapter 3
), the roots of religion, the natural basis for morality, and suggestions for the way forward.

Dawkins writes that he hopes to the book will “raise consciousness” by illustrating four main ideas:

That atheists can be “happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled.”

That science provides better explanations of the world than religion.

That children shouldn’t be labeled by their parents’ beliefs, meaning terms like “Catholic child” or “Muslim child” or “atheist child” should sound as strange and inappropriate to our ears as “Marxist child” or “Republican child.”

That far from being ashamed, atheists should be proud of their willingness to question religious belief, which is evidence of a healthy, independent mind.

The response to the book has been predictable and focuses mostly on tone. The best thing readers of any perspective can do is read it themselves and decide.

Breaking the Spell with Daniel Dennett

In 2006, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University named Daniel Dennett came out with the most scholarly and measured of the “Horsemen” books.
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
(Viking) argues that religion is a natural consequence of being human, and that people can and should study religion and the scientific claims it makes.

The middle of the book does just that, using biology and social science to figure out where religion came from and how it evolved into what is today. By the time he gets to the meat — the actual effects of religion in the world — Dennett’s done an excellent job preparing the reader for his conclusions that religious people can certainly be moral and have meaningful lives, but that religion itself shouldn’t get the credit for that, and can actually get in the way.

Maybe the best way to sum up Dennett’s description of religion as a natural human thing is this: Religion is a way of looking at the world that worked really well a hundred thousand years ago when people lived in small, separate tribes and had no better way to understand the world or control their own behavior. But now that those tribes are all knitted together into a big interdependent world of seven billion people — with a lot of things that go seriously bang — people need to take a hard look at the way they think and the things they believe.

And that in the end is Dennett’s reasonable proposition — not that any one way of thinking is thrown out, but that everyone agree to the simple notion that all ideas should be open to discussion, and that everyone must work together to find out what’s true and what’s good.

If you’re a religious person who wants to hear from the other side, but having your beliefs forcefully challenged makes you queasy, Dennett is a good start. He has the careful approach of an academic, following up nearly every claim with something like, “Of course I could be wrong,” or “More research is needed.” In the end, his conclusions are almost identical to Dawkins and Harris, but you may feel less tension in your neck and shoulders.

Arguing that God Is Not Great with Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, a British journalist and public intellectual who died in 2011, seemed to have spent every day of his remarkable life absorbing knowledge and handing out opinions. He seemed to have read everything, known everyone, and retained more about the world than three standard lifetimes would allow. Combine that with the fact that he clearly didn’t care what anyone thought of him and you get one of the most intelligent, forceful, and unapologetic voices of the past century, not to mention a hugely satisfying read — unless he’s slitting the throat of one of your own sacred cows.

Just about every Hitchens reader has had the experience of seeing his own cows gutted, by the way — and not just the religious. I was a staunch opponent of the Iraq War, and Hitchens was a strong supporter of that war. Waving away someone as sharp as Hitchens wasn’t easy when he ripped into my own conclusions, so I have some sympathy for religious readers when he goes after their beliefs.

He did have the courage of his convictions. When he claimed that waterboarding (an “enhanced interrogation tactic” by which a subject experiences the sensation of slowly being drowned) wasn’t torture, he accepted a challenge to be waterboarded himself. When he ended the experiment in terror after five seconds, he made it clear that he’d been wrong: “If waterboarding does not constitute torture,” he said, “then there is no such thing as torture.”

Hitchens weighed in on most of the major issues of his times, and his 2007 book
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
(Twelve Books) was his biggest contribution on the topic of religion. His title and subtitle perfectly capture what he meant to say: that God as described in the Bible is a contemptible figure, and that religion poisons everything it touches. It’s violent, irrational, and intolerant, he says, supports and defends racism, tribalism, and bigotry, promotes ignorance and is hostile to open questioning, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children. He then provides arguments and anecdotes gathered from his wide-ranging knowledge and experience to support his conclusions.