It is a very deft (transparently daft to me) reframing of belief by Harris in trying to parallel it to racism. He wants to consign me to a lunatic fringe of hooded racists but who have I hung from a tree and what harm have I done anyone because of my belief? Harris does not believe in God, he is a...what is he? He does not want a label but he is perfectly happy to label me.
He demands evidence for theism but there is not a scrap of evidence for atheism. Atheists howl about how they alone are reasonable but pray tell is reason scientifically measurable? Can it be quantified? He believes in reason however.
To believe in God is far more rational than rejection based on "science" which does not and never will be able to deny the possibility being a domain of knowledge inaccessible to it. Harris wants to destroy belief in God but retain all the trappings that he believes are beneficial. He says my emperor has no clothes. I say that his clothes have no emperor. A hollowed out beam that won't support any weight is what he will be left with. A pretty garment without a body. He wants religion without faith. In dumping the basin, he loses both the baby that he wants to keep and the water that he does not. The bliss of faith without the faith. Sex without consequences. It really is the same thing. Having the cake and eating it too.
The atheist brigades say that biological evolution evidences no sentience even though sentient influences are strongly evidenced in the evolutionary process. A reasonable conclusion mught be that such influences not only create goals for the evolution but also provide the basis for religion coming into existence.
I WANT to believe. Harris does NOT.For many it is a choice in the end. He wants to create conditions of social pressure where people will be more likely to choose to not believe. Social engineering. Ridiculous. He is no different from the fundamentalist atheists he is adressing in the audience, he merely disagrees with how to accomplish the goal. Eradication will never be universally possible. Some of us perceive God more clearly than others. You can tell me to try to believe blue is red or black is white and even offer me a million dollars but I can't believe what I know is not true and neither can you. Harris thinks what I believe is complete bunk but it doesn't cost me anything and besides I really relate to it. So just what is his problem here?
Without a grounding in the Absolute the atheists create a relative world where truth is in the eye of the perceiver. Deny away. People make up what they want to believe is right. The problem is that this leads to one of two states, totalitarianism, where the powerful tell us what is right and we have no choice, or anarchy, where everyone decides what they want to believe and the hell with whoever is in the way. It makes Man into God. Christians believe God wants to make us like Himself, but in a completely different way. He takes us into Himself and paradoxically we become more ourselves than we could ever have been. He took our form in the incarnation of Jesus Christ in order to accomplish this purpose. He became one of us so that we could become like Him.
I took this from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I believe it is very applicable to the discussion.
Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.
The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.
The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment.
The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.
The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.
God's triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.
