50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God by Guy P. Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

nourish reason and compassion.
    • We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.
    • We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries
still to be made in the cosmos.
    • We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are
open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.
    • We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than
despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear,
love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

    • We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that
we are capable of as human beings. (Council for Secular
Humanism Web site)
    Why would anyone have a problem with those principles? Who can
honestly say that secular humanists are bad people based on what they
stand for? I know the knock against all things supernatural troubles
believers but I hope they can at least see that these are positive themes.
Don't principles like these offer us a chance to improve our world, a
much better chance than Sharia Law or the laws of the Old Testament,
for example?
    Whether one calls them members of a religion or not, isn't it
obvious that people who are pushing "optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth
instead of ignorance . . . and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality" are on the right side of human progress? While I am not a
card-carrying member of any humanist organization, I am proud to say
that I agree with their general attitude toward life and their goals for
our world. They do not seem to be a group of people who would be
likely to burn people alive for thinking differently or intentionally fly
planes into buildings. They sound like the kind of people I wouldn't
mind having as neighbors.
    Having worked to make the case that atheism is not a religious
belief, I will now confess that I have a secret belief about gods that I
rarely talk about. It's sort of embarrassing because it is very similar to
religious belief. I can't back it up with convincing evidence or overwhelming arguments but it's there, rattling around in my head
nonetheless.
    I believe there are no gods.
    There, I said it. I'm a believer too, sort of. I can't prove that my
belief is true and I freely admit that I may be wrong. I will change my
belief if I'm shown to be wrong. However, based on what I know about the creativity of the human mind and the complete lack of evidence or strong arguments to support claims about gods, I can't help
but "believe" that all gods were invented and do not exist. I don't
know this and I can't prove it but I do believe it. I just have a hunch
that if gods were real somebody would have come up with some evidence or at least a really good argument for them by now. After all, we
have discovered three billion year-old fossils and identified galaxies
far beyond our own. Surely we would have found some trace of gods
by now if any were there. But we haven't so, reluctantly, I find myself
believing in their nonexistence. This silly little belief is not my religion, however. I have none.

CHAPTER 6 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND
RECOMMENDED READING
    "The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles." The Council for
Secular Humanism. http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section
=main&page=affirmations.
    Dawkins, Richard. A Devil's Chaplain. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
    Robinson, B. A. "Definitions of the Word `Religion."' Ontario Consultants on
Religious Tolerance, Religious Tolerance.org. http://www.religious
tolerance.org/rel-defn.htm.
    Smith, George H. Atheism: The Case Against God. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1989.
    Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

     

3kzpie?
Evolution is bad.
    I will destroy human wisdom and discard