If it's true that atheism is a "religion" because it has a "non-belief system," there are a helluva lot of atheists out there, since there are a lot of religions and most people believe in at most one of them. Or as one wag put it, "We are all atheists. It's just that I believe in one less god than you." That's a fairly trivial observation and not the main point of this week's Sermonette, which is about Evolution -- in particular, The Origin of Specious. But most people will have no trouble making the inference:
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Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: The Origin of Specious
Category: Evolution • Freethinker Sermonettes
Posted on: March 29, 2009 6:51 AM, by revere
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Comments
Only heathens like me are reading this on Sunday morning. I loved that video though!
Posted by: drdrA | March 29, 2009 12:47 PM
Actually, belief in a higher power and Evolution are not incompatable. As Asa Gray said in 1874 "God was so wise that he can make all things make themselves".
Religion tends to get taken over by political forces who use it for control, and to divide and rule. My religion is better than your religion, so say the Atheists, and the Monotheists of different religions.
Evolution may be a tool created by the creator, perhaps this made his job easier, or maybe he wants to be surprised and see what would evolve. Who knows, maybe he wants us to evolve to be God, perhaps even a new and improved model, so he can retire.
Some of our elite rulers have believed man can evolve to be like Gods, so they embraced Social Darwinism and Eugenics, the latter since renamed after Hitler gave it a bad name. Without stress, catastrophe and shocks, further evolution would not be possible, so thats what they give us. If life was too good and too comfortable, we might even devolve, maybe we already have. Utopia was likely rejected as an alternative for war in the industrial age for this reason.
The incompatability between religion and science is a myth, except for fundamentalists that will insist otherwise. Part of the reason for the lingering of Creationism, ludicrous as it is, may be to discredit monotheistic religion where the individual is important, and make way for the new secular religion of Gaia worship, which is actually an old pagan religion disguised as science, and man in this religion is a sinner or parasite, not very important outside of it's collective self to serve Gaia and her philosopher kings .
Interesting how Darwinism and Atheism, took off at the same time as Marxism.
Posted by: pft | March 30, 2009 3:24 AM