Religion
I recently read The End of Faith by Sam Harris. This is his 200-mumble-page rant about religion and why it’s the root of all evil in the world.
I think he made some good points. For instance, he said that the core beliefs of a lot of the world’s major religions are actually pretty absurd. If one person believed them and was ranting about it on a street corner, we’d think he was crazy. But because millions of people believe it, we think it’s normal.
Personally, I don’t get worked up about religion. I was raised without it. Like I always say, religion and football were the same in my house. They were both thing that other people did on Sundays. When I see people going to church I tend to think, “look at the natives and their quaint rituals”.
Some choice bits from the book:
How many hours of human labor will be devoured , today, by an imaginary God? Think of it: if a computer virus shuts down a nation’s phone system for firve minutes, the loss in human productivity is measured in billions of dollars. Religious faith has crashed our lines daily, for millenia.
Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.
Quoting Christopher Hitchens: “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”
Faith is like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won’t do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.
Overall, this was a pretty entertaining book. But I don’t think that it’s ultimately going to make any difference in the world.
