Why Believe in God?

Ads proclaiming, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake," will appear on Washington, D.C., buses starting next week and running through December. The American Humanist Association unveiled the provocative $40,000 holiday ad campaign Tuesday.

In lifting lyrics from "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," the Washington-based group is wading into what has become a perennial debate over commercialism, religion in the public square and the meaning of Christmas.

"We are trying to reach our audience, and sometimes in order to reach an audience, everybody has to hear you," said Fred Edwords, spokesman for the humanist group. "Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion."

To that end, the ads and posters will include a link to a Web site that will seek to connect and organize like-minded thinkers in the D.C. area, Edwords said.

Edwords said the purpose isn’t to argue that God doesn’t exist or change minds about a deity, although "we are trying to plant a seed of rational thought and critical thinking and questioning in people’s minds."

Because, of course, rational and critical thinking is an exclusive province of the atheist camp.

In my own life, I just had a fan of secularism tell me this in all sobriety. When I produced examples and evidences to the contrary, he retreated to the posture of merely repeating himself without addressing any of the points raised. In other words, it was an dogma of faith with him, not open to dispute. Ironic, no?

Regarding the article, this is the part that gets me: "Edwords said the purpose isn’t to argue that God doesn’t exist or change minds about a deity."

Oh, rubbish. That is exactly your purpose, and if it is not your purpose, you are a disgrace to the cause of atheism. If you are an atheist, you believe that belief in God is false, if not morally wrong, then it is your duty, your duty damn it (does that word mean nothing to you?!), to argue that God does not exist and to change minds about a deity: because all honest men must oppose what is false, and all virtuous, what is wrong.

I must say that I did not depart the atheist camp because of my disgust with my fellows, but the disgust did make the departure pleasant rather than filled with lingering regret when it came. My fellow atheists who were reasonable, not merely anti-clerical bigots, were a small and silent minority, and the choir of yammerheads was the majority.

I still regard men of reason, men of the mind, to be my allies against the forces of unreason, whether the unreason issues from within the Church or from without it. A logical man respects the LOGOS, whether he calls it divine or not.

When the atheist movement turns into a secular form of religion, it has lost its soul.

———————————–

Lucretius wrote in epic hexameter a poem about physics, DE RERUM NATURA, inventing Latin words to capture the meaning of some Greek terms. As far as I know, this is the only epic poem of pure philosophy, and one of the classical expressions of atomist theory. Remarkable in so many ways, I wonder why it is not better known. This is from the William Leonard translation:

de Rerum Natura. (excerpt)

Whilst human kind
Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed
Before all eyes beneath Religion- who
Would show her head along the region skies,
Glowering on mortals with her hideous face-
A Greek it was who first opposing dared
Raise mortal eyes that terror to withstand,
Whom nor the fame of Gods nor lightning’s stroke
Nor threatening thunder of the ominous sky
Abashed; but rather chafed to angry zest
His dauntless heart to be the first to rend
The crossbars at the gates of Nature old.
And thus his will and hardy wisdom won;
And forward thus he fared afar, beyond
The flaming ramparts of the world, until
He wandered the unmeasurable All.
Whence he to us, a conqueror, reports
What things can rise to being, what cannot,
And by what law to each its scope prescribed,
Its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.
Wherefore Religion now is under foot,
And us his victory now exalts to heaven.

The Roman poet deflects the criticism that irreligion leads to immorality with an argument you might recognize, dear reader:

I fear perhaps thou deemest that we fare
An impious road to realms of thought profane;
But ’tis that same religion oftener far
Hath bred the foul impieties of men:
As once at Aulis, the elected chiefs,
Foremost of heroes, Danaan counsellors,
Defiled Diana’s altar, virgin queen,
With Agamemnon’s daughter, foully slain.
She felt the chaplet round her maiden locks
And fillets, fluttering down on either cheek,
And at the altar marked her grieving sire,
The priests beside him who concealed the knife,
And all the folk in tears at sight of her.
With a dumb terror and a sinking knee
She dropped; nor might avail her now that first
‘Twas she who gave the king a father’s name.
They raised her up, they bore the trembling girl
On to the altar- hither led not now
With solemn rites and hymeneal choir,
But sinless woman, sinfully foredone,
A parent felled her on her bridal day,
Making his child a sacrificial beast
To give the ships auspicious winds for Troy:
Such are the crimes to which Religion leads.

St. Jerome reports that Lucretius wrote his great poem while suffering from the ingestion of a love-philtre that drove him mad, a claim that belittles both the greatness of the poem and the dignity of Epicureanism as a philosophy among the Romans. Tennyson follows the tradition of St. Jerome when he pens this poem:

Lucretius (excerpt)

Lucilla, wedded to Lucretius, found
Her master cold; for when the morning flush
Of passion and the first embrace had died
Between them, tho’ he loved her none the less,
Yet often when the woman heard his foot
Return from pacings in the field, and ran
To greet him with a kiss, the master took
Small notice, or austerely, for his mind
Half buried in some weightier argument,
Or fancy-borne perhaps upon the rise
And long roll of the hexameter — he past
To turn and ponder those three hundred scrolls
Left by the Teacher, whom he held divine.
She brook’d it not, but wrathful, petulant
Dreaming some rival, sought and found a witch
Who brew’d the philtre which had power, they said
To lead an errant passion home again.
And this, at times, she mingled with his drink,
And this destroy’d him; for the wicked broth
Confused the chemic labor of the blood,
And tickling the brute brain within the man’s
Made havoc among those tender cells, and check’d
His power to shape…