Whence then is evil?
Posted 1 year, 3 months ago at 12:49. 1 comment
As an atheist, I am sometimes challenged to defend my beliefs, or perhaps more accurately, my lack of belief. The Jehovah’s Witnesses next door proved very persistent when we first moved into our current home, for example. My (mercifully) infrequent interrogators question my lack of belief because I have no unified source of knowledge to underpin that belief, often using their “one book” as the basis for comparison.
This is a false dichotomy. For the atheist, there is no one book but many, written by many philosophers and scientists over the ages, each of which undoes a small part of the religious web. My problem historically has been how to arm myself appropriately against such religious inquiry by reading the most important and seminal of those works. How easy it must be to rely on just one book? It would certainly cut down on library fines, not to mention my Amazon bill.
Over the past decade or so, prominent atheists have taken up that charge. Authors like Richard Dawkins
Whereas Dawkins may advocate for “brights” and our need to stick together, Hitchens simply lays it all out: arguments presented by various religious organizations, along with why they are at best wrong and internally inconsistent, and at worst, dangerous. As a reading list, an atheist could do much worse than to use Hitchens’ references section as a starting point. His style isn’t for everyone, though, so if you’re interested in pursuing the matter further, I recommend his Authors@Google talk on YouTube as a starting point. Some basic searching will turn up other priceless nuggets if you’re then so inclined.
Let me reiterate that conversion is not my goal here, I’m merely arming myself with defensive knowledge, sad though it may be that I feel the need to couch it in those particular terms. In no way am I ashamed of my beliefs, but atheists don’t have much of a lobby group.
