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God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong
God's Defenders What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong Author:S. T. Joshi Either there is one god, multiple gods, or none. Either there is such a thing called the human soul or there isn't, and, if there is, it either can or cannot survive the death of the body. Either Jesus Christ, if he existed, was the son of God or he wasn't. Either Mohammed, if he existed, was God's prophet or he wasn't. That the essential doct... more »rines of the world's major religions -- especially Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- are matters of truth or falsity is itself a fact around which no amount of sophistry or special pleading can get. Unfortunately for them, evidence has been steadily accumulating for at least the last half-millennium to suggest that these doctrines are false. What has saved religions from completely collapsing of their own absurdity is, of course, the difficulty--indeed, the impossibility--of definitively determining the truth or falsity of these doctrines. The impossibility allows the pious to maintain, as a slim and ever-decreasing hope, that the tenets of their religion might somehow still be true, or at least not clearly false. No amount of negative evidence can ever conclusively put any given religious dogmas out of court (aside from those that can be shown to be self-inconsistent), because there will always remain the remote possibility that they are true. . . [I]t is plain that the battle against religious obscurantism must and will continue. The moment one folly is snuffed out, another and still greater folly seems to emerge to take its place. The greatest harm that religion has done, and continues to do -- well beyond such malfeasances as the killing of witches and heretics, the suppression of civil liberties, the disastrous uniting of religion with morality, and the terrorizing of its own adherents with thoughts of hellfire and eternal damnation -- is the subversion of clear thinking. This subversion, in my judgment, corrupts even the social benefits that religion has on occasion provided. My only plea, therefore, is that atheists, agnostics, and secularists speak out a bit more vociferously, even tartly and pungently, against their foes -- for foes they certainly are, not only to human freedom and dignity, but to the advance of all human knowledge and civilization.« less