Jerry Dewitt a preacher for 25 years in De Ridder , La, decided to quit preaching and join Atheists. During his 25 years as a priest he found it difficult to believe that prayers do anything more than console the sufferers. He belonged to a long line of preachers on both sides of the family. The author, Robert F. Worth, writes in his article ‘From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader’ in NYT :

“He was 41 and had spent almost his entire life in or near DeRidder, a small town in the heart of the Bible Belt. All he had ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea what I’m going through?”

Dewitt researched at internet, read books by Bertrand Russel, Richard Hawkins and Christopher Hitchens and converted to atheism. He started to preach Atheism, just like he was preaching Christianity. The author writes:

“After a few months he took to the road again, this time as the newest of a new breed of celebrity, the atheist convert. They have their own apostles (Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) and their own language, a glossary borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Bible and gay liberation (you always “come out” of the atheist closet).

DeWitt quickly repurposed his preacherly techniques, sharing his reverse-conversion story and his thoughts on “the five stages of disbelief” to packed crowds at “Freethinker” gatherings across the Bible Belt, in places like Little Rock and Houston. As his profile rose in the movement this spring, his Facebook and Twitter accounts began to fill with earnest requests for guidance from religious doubters in small towns across America. “It’s sort of a brand-new industry,” DeWitt told me. “There isn’t a lot of money in it, but there’s a lot of momentum.”

The author argues that atheists and secular are no longer considered eccentric and the movement is spreading with organizations and clubs spreading in colleges, universities and neighborhoods. The author writes:

“The reasons for this secular revival are varied, but it seems clear that the Internet has helped, and many younger atheists cite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment of disgust with religious zealotry in any form. It is hard to say how many people are involved; avowed atheists are still a tiny sliver of the population. But people with no religious affiliation are the country’s fastest-growing religious category. When asked about religious affiliation in a Pew poll published this summer, nearly 20 percent of Americans chose “none,” the highest number the center has recorded. Many of those people would not call themselves atheists; “agnostic,” which technically refers to people who believe that the existence of a higher being can’t be known by the human mind, remains the safer option. The godless are now younger and more diverse than in the past, with blacks and Hispanics — once vanishingly rare — starting to appear in the ranks of national groups like the United Coalition of Reason and the Secular Student Alliance. “

Pastor Dewitt paid heavy price for his conversion to atheism. He was divorced by his wife, lost job and rejected by the community where he spent most of his life. He was a native son of that community. The author writes:

“At the same time, DeWitt is something of a reality check for many atheists, whose principles rarely cost them more than the price of “The God Delusion” in paperback. DeWitt refuses to leave DeRidder, a place where religion, politics and family pride are indivisible. Six months after he was “outed” as an atheist he lost his job and his wife — both, he says, as a direct consequence. Only a handful of his 100-plus relatives from DeRidder still speak to him. When I visited him, in late June, his house was in foreclosure, and he was contemplating moving into his 2007 Chrysler PT Cruiser. This is the kind of environment where godlessness remains a real struggle and raises questions that could ramify across the rest of the country. Is the “new atheism” part of a much broader secularizing trend, like the one that started emptying out the churches in European towns and villages a century ago? Or is it just a ticket out of town?”

After reading the article, the question I was pondering was;

Devout religious people are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of religion, and some may call it cult mentality. Pastor Dewitt sacrificed everything for the new belief/ideology and is preaching the atheism as he was preaching religion. Atheists also have their gurus/apostle, Richard Hawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell. Atheists are also much more organized now holding rallies and sessions. What is the difference-getting freedom from one ideology and being enslaved by the other?

To read complete article click on link;

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/magazine/from-bible-belt-pastor-to-atheist-leader.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

Fayyaz Sheikh

ETHICS AND MORALITY  Plus or Minus  GOD 

Is there a genuine meaning of life for one who rejects existence of divinity? Or can a person realize a significant life if one abandons faith in providence? Since death is in store for everyone, is life absurd and tragic because it is finite? Human beings faced with such existential dilemma would cry out, “Can we be happy or why we live if there is no God, if there is no immortal soul, no resurrection or no purpose immanent in nature?” Living a life without God, declining that the universe has a divine purpose but given the existence of evil, is there a basis for moral conduct?

An atheist may say frankly to a theist that he is deceiving himself by the assumption that only a broader purpose of life extended to hereafter be the “Real Meaning of Life” in this world. A philosopher may remark, if human beings are obligated to worship and glorify God in order to enjoy a life forever and ever, what kind of enjoyment there is when an omnipotent God is the Master and the humans as slaves living in a constant fear; a fear that if they do not pledge allegiance to God’s will, they would suffer damnation. For atheist the religions depict a picture of the universe akin to a model-prison where the inmates on the one hand are programmed with free will and on the other hand are living in chains dependent upon their Master not only for existence and sustenance, but also for every move in this life and dependence upon His mercy even in the life hereafter. But the believer replies to the skeptical philosophers, “God promises eternal salvation, not oppression.” For the believer, the humans are free, since man is created in “God’s image” gifted with the ability to choose between good and evil. The atheist remarks that means only if a person chooses to obey the Master he will be rewarded, but the problem of evil turns this drama into divine comedy.

Ha! The atheist bursts, God entrusted man with power and freedom of choice, yet He will punish if man strays from Him. Why at the time of creation did He not program man so that man could not avoid knowing and worshipping Him? Is there any sense that after implanting in man free will, He would condemn man for satisfying his natural inclination? Then why Does He permit suffering and pain, torment and tragedy, disease, war, plunder, rape, chaos and so on? All this in order to test human beings, test innocent girls being raped, to punish many innocents who never sinned, and why visit pain and torment upon infants and children? If they are paying for the sins of others or their parents, is this not a morality of collective guilt? But still the rationalization by the believer continues that evil is due to human beings’ omission, not God’s commission. God gave reason and power to discover cure for our diseases for example cancer etc., learn to stop war, conflict and other atrocities the humans commit and the harm they inflict to the innocents. For a believer there is no natural evil, the only evil is human’s “moral evil.” The philosopher remarks that the inescapable inference is that God permits evil. He could have hanged Satan and could have stamped evil out but He set the devil free. Why should not God be merciful and loving rather than “Legalistic” and “Moralistic?” Is God, as David Hume speculates that “God is like us: merely limited in power.” And for Bertrand Russell the philosopher, “to sing hymns in praise of Him and hold hands throughout all eternity would be sheer boredom. What of the lusts of the body, the joys of the flesh, the excitement and turmoil of pleasure—will these be vanquished in the immortal life? For the free person, Hell could not be worse.”

The believers may refer to scriptures that there are things and matters beyond the understanding of the humans; many yet to be explored, such as the paradox of free will and determinism, and most importantly the problem of evil. Some believer-philosophers maintain that evil may be only an illusion and what appears to be evil may turn out in the end to be good. The believers thus have woven a fanciful fabric of mythological imagination in order to soothe the fear of death and to comfort those who share this dilemma. For the philosopher this may be an ad-hoc rationalization, but it is ridden with some puzzling loopholes.

In order to deal with life full of suffering, living unhappy because of the fear that everyone is definitely going to die, and that the life does not possess a meaningful purpose, religion is often interpreted to be a form of bliss; a form that may release human beings from the pangs and anxiety of being purposeless immortals. But for an existentialist religion is flight from the realization and actualization of human’s naturally attained powers. For them, religions fail to give meaning to life, to exist as humans are, by exaggerating the pathology of fear, the anxiety of punishment, and the dread of death, which are a source of unhappiness. Humans are obsessed with this overextended sense of sin and guilt and they are in fact wavering by their perennial struggle between biological impulses and repressive divine commandments.

Summing up the whole question and answer debate, the most complex problem before the human beings is, can humans really be moral without divine instructions and religious beliefs? Are the humans capable of nurturing moral virtues and a sense of responsibility without the commands or presupposed moral order of a deity or deities? What I believe as moral, the answer depends upon “what is meant by the term moral.” For the believers morality requires the existence of a faith in the pious appreciation of God’s redemptive power. This requires the “virtue” of acquiescence and obedience, as well as the suppression of human’s natural biological desires. For the religious person, if there is no God, is not everything permissible? Would the humans not be rapacious and misuse their fellow creatures. When Nietzsche argued, “God is dead,” the horrors of the twentieth century with its two world wars, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, and the atrocities of Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Slobodan Milosevic have played an unprecedented havoc in the history of humankind. How, without God, charity, justice, kindness, and many moral virtues can be guaranteed. Human brotherhood presupposes a divine conception of individual dignity based upon God’s pattern. To abandon this postulate of the moral life would be to reduce the human race to hunters and barbarians.

Basically, these are empirical questions. Moral sympathy is not dependent upon theistic belief and religious devotion is no guarantee of moral devotion. This leads us to derive that there is ample evidence that ethical and moral concern is rather autonomous, rooted in human beings’ independent phenomenological experience. History of humankind determines that atheistic, agnostics, and skeptics have been moved by moral consideration for others as have believers. Spinoza, Kant, Marx, Russell, Sartre, and many others have had deep moral interest without depending upon religions to support their morality. They have rather demonstrated that ethics and morality, grounded in human experience and reason, is a far more reliable guide to conduct. The highest virtues are in man’s existing for himself. Thus it is possible to be moral with or without a belief in God.

 Mirza I. Ashraf is author of many books and active participant of Thinkers Forum USA.

HUMANS  +  GOD

 By Mirza I Ashraf

Is there a genuine meaning of life for one who rejects existence of divinity? Or can a person realize a significant life if one abandons faith in providence? Since death is in store for everyone, is life absurd and tragic because it is finite? Human beings faced with such existential dilemma would cry out, “Can we be happy or why we live if there is no God, if there is no immortal soul, no resurrection or no purpose immanent in nature?” Living a life without God, declining that the universe has a divine purpose but given the existence of evil, is there a basis for moral conduct? . . . . and so on.

(Please feel free to advise me that this subject is OK as there is very sensitive material ahead).
Mirza

During the Thinkers’ Forum meeting yesterday, a question was raised by one of the participant ” why some very intelligent and accomplished personalities have blind faith in religion? ”

Mirza Ashraf has sent this article to shed some light on this subject. It includes some excerpts from an article by Walter Issacson published in Time.

EINSTEIN & FAITH 

In his fifties when he settled into deism based on what he called the “spirit manifest in the laws of the universe” and a sincere belief in a “God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists.” He put it, “The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.” “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secret of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.” “Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are causally bound as the stars in their motions,” (p.391). Statement to Spinoza Society of America, Sept. 22, 1932.

“We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws,” (p.386). “I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will. Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine. In that respect I am not a Jew,” (p.387).

Expressing what he meant when he called himself religious Einstein said, “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man,” (387). From Einstein’s “What I Believe,” originally written in 1930.

Answering the question whether he believed in God he said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” (p.388-89) Einstein to Herbert S. Goldstein, April 5, 1929.

‘Einstein explained his view of the relationship between science and religion at a conference at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, he said, that the realm of science was to ascertain what was the case but not evaluate human thoughts and actions about what should be the case. Religion had the reverse mandate. Yet the endeavors worked together. He said, “Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion,” (p. 390). His pithy conclusion became famous. “The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind,” (p. 390). But there was one religious concept, Einstein went on to say, that science could not accept: a deity who could meddle at whim in the events of his creation. “The main source of present-day conflicts between the spheres of the religion and of the science lies in this concept of a personal God.” Scientists aim to uncover the immutable laws that govern reality, and in doing so they must reject the notion that divine will, or for that matter human will, plays a role that would violate this cosmic reality,’ (p. 391). Einstein’s speech to the Symposium on Science, Philosophy and Religion, Sept. 10, 1941. He declared in a statement to Spinoza Society 1932, “Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions,” (p. 391). He read this from Schopenhauer who held that “everything acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. . . . A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.” The foundation of morality is rising above the “merely personal” to live in a way that benefited humanity.

‘Do you believe, Einstein was once asked, that humans are free agents? “No, I am a determinist,” he replied. “Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.”’ (p. 391-92).

“The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions,” he wrote to Rev. Cornelius Greenway, Nov. 20, 1950. “Our inner balance and even our existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.” (393).

Newton and Religion:

He’s considered to be one of the greatest scientists of all time. But Isaac Newton was also an influential theologian who applied a scientific approach to the study of scripture, Hebrew and Jewish mysticism. Now Israel’s national library, an unlikely owner of a vast trove of Newton’s writings, has digitized his theological collection – some 7,500 pages in Newton’s own handwriting – and put it online. Among the yellowed texts are Newton’s famous prediction of the apocalypse in 2060.

Newton revolutionized physics, mathematics and astronomy in the 17th and 18th century, laying the foundations for most of classical mechanics – with the principal of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion bearing his name. However, the curator of Israel’s national library’s humanities collection said Newton was also a devout Christian who dealt far more in theology than he did in physics and believed that scripture provided a “code” to the natural world.

“Today, we tend to make a distinction between science and faith, but to Newton it was all part of the same world,” said Milka Levy-Rubin. “He believed that careful study of holy texts was a type of science, that if analyzed correctly could predict what was to come.” So he learned how to read Hebrew, scrolled through the Bible and delved into the study of Jewish philosophy, the mysticism of Kabala and the Talmud – a compendium of Jewish oral law and stories about 1,500 years old. For instance, Newton based his calculation on the end of days on information gleaned from the Book of Daniel, which projected the apocalypse 1,260 years later. Newton figured that this count began from the crowning of Charlemagne as Roman emperor in the year 800.

The papers cover topics such as interpretations of the Bible, theology, the history of ancient cultures, the Tabernacle and the Jewish Temple. The collection also contains maps that Newton sketched to assist him in his calculations and his attempts to reveal the secret knowledge he believed was encrypted within. He attempted to project what the end of days would look like, and the role Jews would play when it happened. Newton’s objective curiosity in Judaism and the Holy Land contrasted with the anti-Jewish sentiment expressed by many leading Christian scholars of the era, Levy-Rubin said. “He took a great interest in the Jews, and we found no negative expressions toward Jews in his writing,” said Levy-Rubin. “He said the Jews would ultimately return to their land.”

How his massive collection of work ended up in the Jewish state seems mystical in its own right.

Years after Newton’s death in 1727, his descendants gave his scientific manuscripts to his alma mater, the University of Cambridge. But the university rejected his non scientific papers, so the family auctioned them off at Sotheby’s in London in 1936. As chance would have it, London’s other main auction house – Christie’s – was selling a collection of Impressionist art the same day that attracted far more attention. Only two serious bidders arrived for the Newton collection that day. The first was renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes, who bought Newton’s alchemy manuscripts. The second was Abraham Shalom Yahuda – a Jewish Oriental Studies scholar – who got Newton’s theological writings. Yahuda’s collection was bequeathed to the National Library of Israel in 1969, years after his death. In 2007, the library exhibited the papers for the first time and now they are available for all to see online.

The collection contains pages after pages of Newton’s flowing cursive handwriting on fraying parchment in 18th-century English, with words like “similitudes,” ”prophetique” and “Whence.” Two print versions in modern typeface are also available for easier reading: A “diplomatic” one that includes changes and corrections Newton made in the original manuscript, and a “clean” version that incorporates the corrections. All of the papers are linked to the Newton Project, which is hosted by the University of Sussex and includes other collections of Newton’s writings. The Israeli library says the manuscripts help illuminate Newton’s science and well as his persona. “As far as Newton was concerned, his approach was that history was as much a science as physics. His world view was that his ‘lab’ for understanding history was the holy books,” said Levy-Rubin. “His faith was no less important to him than his science.” (Hindustan Times 2/17/2012)