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There Is No God, and Belief in Him Is Stupidity
How can one accuse of arrogance those who fight against the metaphysical foolishness of religion? It’s the religious who lord it over the atheists and claim exclusive ownership of spirituality, values and belief.
There is no God. An individual who believes in a God that actively intervenes in earthly events, keeps an eye on him personally, and listens and responds to his prayers is mistaken. He doesn’t understand basic facts about the world and the provenance of the phone from which he sends text messages, the car that he drives, the antibiotic that cures his bronchitis and the electricity that brightens in his home.
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Belief in such a God is such an ignorant mistake that there’s something mentally disturbed about it. There’s no dispute at all over whether such a God who created the universe exists. There’s no need to assume his existence in order to explain the world, and there’s no objective evidence of his existence.
Such a God can, of course, exist within a personal and subjective mystical experience, but you can’t establish a religion based on personal and subjective experiences. In a religion, the existence of God is objective.
Shlomo Avineri argues that “secular intellectuals” who think that “anyone who believes in God and religion is stupid and benighted” commit the sin of arrogance. They do not. Under liberal and enlightened moral standards regarding human rights, orthodox religion is indeed benighted. And anyone who insists on believing in the existence of a God contrary to heaps of evidence that debunks this is indeed behaving stupidly.
How can one accuse of arrogance those who fight against the metaphysical foolishness of religion and the moral injustice it entails? It’s the religious who lord it over the atheists and claim exclusive ownership of spirituality, values and belief.
Avineri holds that God and his ordinances aren’t the main thing in religion. Rather, he says, “many of those who cling to religion (in Israel and elsewhere) do this not because they are certain about the correctness of the theological and metaphysical arguments concerning divinity,” but rather because they need “a concrete framework for their self-identity and sense of security as human beings.” This, he says, is the social power of religion: “It’s above all a focus of identity.”
This position is of course the ultimate in arrogance. He prefers not to relate seriously to beliefs and opinions to which many people who cling to religion will swear, or to take seriously the unconscious needs they don’t know they have and which he decries. He describes these people as weak; people devoid of confidence.
No doubt there are sociological reasons for religion. Secularism also has sociological reasons, of course. The exchange of opinions in Haaretz has sociological reasons. Avineri has published an article in Haaretz in part because the publication provides him a framework for his self-identity and because for him Haaretz is a focus of identity.
But this doesn’t mean that it’s right to identify with his social or psychological motives. We still have to confront his arguments on their merits; it would be arrogant to dismiss them contemptuously as stemming from his psychosocial needs.
We also have to confront orthodox religion with conviction and determination, without the political correctness that emerges from Avineri’s approach. Why should anyone fake hypocritical tolerance and empathy toward a religion that in its essence is against tolerance? We have to speak the truth and stop trying to curry favor. There is no God and belief in him is stupidity.
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Yosef
23:00 07.01.2018
I disagree with Roger Alpher because he has no hope with Zionism anymore. But I totally agree with his idea about religion. 1) Religion is based on belief, and you can believe anything, anything, anything. Each time I tell you there’s no god, there’s nothing in the whole world meaning there’s a god, you can tell me something like : “I don’t mind, I feel there’s a god”. You can tell me : “There’s a camel in a bathroom on another planet and he created the whole universe, I know that even if I can’t go up to this planet”. But how do you know ? “I know, I strongly feel it, and can you tell me or prove the opposite ? No you can’t.” 2) There are thousands of religions on earth, can you tell me why my religion would be the proper one ? 3) Religion is a stupidity because it means you believe and belief is just the opposite of knowledge. Just think of the primitive human beings : They believed many wrong things because when they didn’t know, they invented. Some thought the sun was a god’s eye, who would say such an idea is smart ? When you don’t know, the best is not to think you know, but men and women hate to do so.
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