A very readable article in NY Times on Science and Religion. Here's something that I find inane that touches upon meaning and purpose of life.
"There are six billion people in the world," said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman Catholic priest. "If we think that we are going to persuade them to live a rational life based on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming -- it is like believing in the fairy godmother.""People need to find meaning and purpose in life," he said. "I don't think we want to take that away from them."
Religion, contrary to what is said above, does not give hope but takes it away. A believer will have to invoke God as the ultimate explanation and that is an act of hopelessness.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
tags: books, memoir, religion, godlessness, losing faith, William Lobdell
Unlike most people who were raised in a religious household and grew up surrounded by religious people, I never experienced a "crisis of faith" since I never believed there was a god any more than I believed there was a Santa…
This is becoming a regular series, isn't it? It wasn't intended as such. Rusty's latest salvo deals with a couple of questions. It started with his post concerning the Understanding Evolution website, and one section of that site in particular, which advised teachers on how to answer the common…
The media are lashing back. The post-convention media (with the exception of one article in the Australian) has been abysmally bad, relying on tried-and-true excuse-making from religious apologists. It would be nice if they actually had conversations with atheists rather than immediately running to…
You asked for it, I deliver. Here's a good chunk of the opposition email that I've received in the last two days; not quite all of it, though, since I got bored and a lot of it has just been going straight into the trash. I've tried to cut out most of the identifying names and so forth, but if I…
The conference site for the meeting discussed in the
above-quoted NY Times article seems to be:
http://beyondbelief2006.org/
The Edge, http://www.edge.org/
seems to list some other reports on it
(From New Scientist, Sunday Times...)