Posts Tagged ‘evolution’
The God-shaped Hole: Whither Theology?
I recently came across the following exchange between the late Christopher Hitchens, renowned atheist and author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell:
Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?
Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian. [Emphasis added]
I have enormous respect for Hitchens and his extraordinary eloquence, intellectual integrity, and encyclopedic knowledge of history, literature, and art. His position is one of the New Atheist talking points, shared by his colleagues among the “Four Horsemen” — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris — which argues that religion loses all meaning when it’s released from its supernatural and superstitious moorings.
This is one point — perhaps the only point — on which fundamentalists and the New Atheists wholeheartedly agree.
We are monkeys, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps…
“This is how we lift ourselves by our bootstraps out of the morass of our ignorance; how we throw a rope into the air and then swarm up it—if it gets any purchase, however precarious, on any little twig.”
~ Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach
Welcome to my blog.
Over the years, my friends have encouraged me to start one of these, and I’ve tossed the idea around on more than a few occasions. The reasons for my resistance to the concept are varied and not altogether interesting, so I will not bore you, dear reader, with the details. Suffice it to say that the hurdles have been crossed, and you are now witnessing the outcome.
bootstrap monkey 