>Voyou wrote:
> >
> >
> > The problem I have with all these attempts to show that religion is
> > false isn't that they offend the delicate sensibilities of believers,
> > but that they seem so boring.
>
>Yes. (Though there's some excitement in Ingersoll and, of course, in
>Twain.) On occasions such as this I'm happy that I enjoy my atheism as a
>birthright rather than as achieved by meerit and having everlastingly to
>be reaffirmed. It's much more cheerful never to have had faith than to
>go through the process of rejecting it.
>
>Bujt those who haven't read Dryden's Religio Laici really should check
>it out.
i can't remember what it was, but you were reminding me that sometimes we needed to write stuff that is boring to us, now, because there are people for whom it is all new.
you and I are a lot alike in this regard: born atheists. it's sort of like having a tongue. i've always had it. it's unremarkable. i remember the first time, teaching a college course, i said something matter of factly about not believing in god. i wasn't even livnig in the south at the time.
my students gasped. i had no idea this was shocking to anyone.
but that has never precluded me from working right alongside very religious people. it didn't stop me from writing letters to the ed, protesting the treatment of a religious fundamentalist group, or appreciating the work of Bellah et al. on religion in american life, or even advocating for the idea that religious groups have and continue to be a source of that social movement base i've often talked about.
in the meanwhile, though, if you're not like you and me, I think that it's important for lefties to encounter books like Parenti's. I read Hitchens books but it was only b/c it was Hitchens and I'd just reconnected with reading again after years of being way to busy to do so. it was rather a yawn except for the fact that hitch was pretty funny. he can turn a phrase.
lefties who don't encounter this stuff or never have, or are on the path toward agnosticism or atheism, *they* do need to encounter the arguments, just as people who don't know they're lefties yet need the work of mechanical marxists and simplifiers like noam chomsky - I've forgotten andie's label for chomsky's rather unsophisticated marxism that has lots of problems, but is probably just the right thing for people who don't quite realize they're marxists yet.
so, i hate to dismiss this kind of work as boring. it is boring to us, but not to people who need those books to help them shake the ghosts of dead religious beliefs off them.
shag
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)