I used “three stooges” (in the post title) to describe the three iconoclastic Darwinian malcontents that are mentioned in the following Pew Forum article. I would never want to besmirch the good name of Mo, Larry or, my hero, Curly by comparing them with the atheistic, Darwinian stooges below!
May 27, 2009
Opinion: Let’s Talk About God
by Lisa Miller
Newsweek
The atheist writers (Three Darwinian Stooges) Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins (Head Stooge) and Christopher Hitchens have presented us with a choice: either you don’t believe in God or you’re a dope. “It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational human being can believe in God, simply because that belief makes him happy,” writes Harris in the 2005 “Atheist Manifesto” now posted on the Web site of his new nonprofit, The Reason Project. Their brilliance, wit and (general) good humor have made the new generation of atheists celebrities among people who like to consider themselves smart. We enjoy their books and their telegenic bombast so much that we don’t mind their low opinion of us. Dopey or not, 90 percent of Americans continue to say they believe in God.
This iteration of the faith-versus-reason debate has gone on for years, with no real resolution. Men (yes, mostly men) of faith have published passionate defenses of God. (See Tim Keller’s 2008 The Reason for God.) In response, believers have published accounts of journeys toward unbelief; atheists have testified to conversions. The latest entrant in this category is from the Marxist Terry Eagleton: Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Yet despite the proliferation of viewpoints, I’m guessing few readers have ever closed one of these volumes and honestly declared themselves changed.
Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, which comes out next week, is about to reframe this debate. Wright (the + 1) doesn’t argue one side or other of the “Is God real?” question. He leaves that aside. Instead, he grapples with God as an idea that has changed–evolved–through history. Wright is a journalist who specializes in evolutionary psychology, and his previ-ous book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, was a reported meditation on the way human evolution changes us for the better. Over time, we’ve grown more moral, more responsible and more in-spired. In The New York Times Book Review, the British pale-ontologist Simon Conway Morris threw down the gauntlet: he accused Wright “of a failure of nerve.” Why not, he asked (and this is my rephrasing), connect that sublime human capacity for moral behavior to the thing that some people call God? (Writing in Slate, the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker took the opposite tack, accusing Wright of providing ammunition to advocates of intelligent design.)
Wright picks up the challenge in The Evolution of God. He argues that the scriptures of the three Abrahamic faiths were written in history by real people who aimed to improve things–economic, social, geographical–for their constituencies. (And then he exhaustively, minutely catalogs who those writers were and what those specific aims might have been. This is not a book to read on the beach this summer.) But he never argues that what he calls a materialist view of scripture disproves God. Instead, he takes another approach: as our societies have grown more complex and more global, our conceptions of God have grown more demanding and more moral. This is a good thing, for religion can “help us orient our daily lives, recognize good and bad, and make sense of joy and suffering alike.” Wright is optimistic even about Islam in today’s world: “The ratio of good to bad scriptures varies among the Abrahamic faiths, but in all religions it’s possible for benign interpretation of scripture to flourish.” (emphasis added)
Mr. Wright is definitely the “plus 1″ stooge. In fact, as his detractors point out, he’s a fraud. At least the three original Darwinian stooges, Rich, Sam and Chris, continue to blather on in the same atheistic mode. In other words, the three Darwinian stooges aren’t hypocritical; or at least not blatantly so.
So evidently by staying away from claiming God doesn’t exist, as the original Darwinian stooges claim, Mr. Wright (wrong) thinks he can manipulate those who believe into chasing after his fairy tale.
This quote, in particular, is what I’m talking about,
…as our societies have grown more complex and more global, our conceptions of God have grown more demanding and more moral. This is a good thing, for religion can “help us orient our daily lives, recognize good and bad, and make sense of joy and suffering alike.”
As with most other atheists, and many church goers also, Mr. Wright has totally confused man’s religion (man’s version of God) with the true God and His Christ. Mr. Wright doesn’t deny God in a forthright manner, he instead covers up his unbelief and hatred of God with deceitful and manipulative statements. Mr. Wright has been blinded by the god of this world and therefore, can’t discern the truth: God didn’t evolve through man’s needs and desires anymore than man evolved by chance and mutation. God created man, and man created religion: whether it be Islam, Christendom or atheism.
Mr. Wright, listen carefully, God has always been and will always be. Everything you see, Mr. Wright, was created by His Son, the Christ. Man didn’t create God. The Christ (the Logos), God’s Son, created man! Get it…? Got it…? Forget it! No way will Mr. Wright ever get this, or at least not in this age!
What Mr. Wright can’t comprehend is that God, unlike man’s religious version of Him (Christendom), is not a magic genie who allows us (who believe and have been called) to live a better life, according to our own will, and go merrily along the way to destruction. The Lord was not just a great orator and prophet, He was the divine image of God in the flesh. The Lord is our only way, truth and life that can proceed to the Father!
I have no respect for any of these “men,” needless to say. But at least the Darwinian stooges, as opposed to Mr. Wright, remain constant in their spiritual blindness and stupidity!
The entire article can be found here:
Religion News: Opinion: Let’s Talk About God.
Tags: atheism, Atheists, Darwinism, eugenics, evolution, hypocrisy, material science, naturalism, relativism