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"Atheism lite & religion"

TheStar.com - Just give me that old-time atheism!

An interesting argument put forth by Salman Rushdie. Particularly so since his view includes both the west and the East. Here's a passage:

"Nor does the current behaviour of organized religion breed confidence in the Evans/Ruse laissez-faire attitude. Education everywhere is seriously imperilled by religious attacks.

In recent years, Hindu nationalists in India attempted to rewrite the nation's history books to support their anti-Muslim ideology, an effort thwarted only by the electoral victory of a secularist coalition led by the Congress party.

Meanwhile, Muslim voices the world over are claiming that evolutionary theory is incompatible with Islam.

And in America, the battle over the teaching of intelligent design in U.S. schools is reaching crunch time, as the American Civil Liberties Union prepares to take on intelligent-design proponents in a Pennsylvania court.

It seems inconceivable that better behaviour on the part of the world's great scientists, of the sort that Ruse would prefer, would persuade these forces to back down.

Intelligent design, an idea designed backward so as to force the antique idea of a Creator upon the beauty of creation, is so thoroughly rooted in pseudoscience, so full of false logic, so easy to attack that a little rudeness seems called for.

Its advocates argue, for example, that the sheer complexity and perfection of cellular/molecular structures is inexplicable by gradual evolution."

However, the multiple parts of complex, interlocking biological systems do evolve together, gradually expanding and adapting” and, as Dawkins showed in The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, natural selection is active at every step of this process.

Posted by ernie at June 6, 2005 07:57 AM