Humanism: the 10 Most Asked Questions Table of Contents
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4338 Reason Int CC.Indd
“For my whole Christian life I’ve been saying, ‘My heart cannot rejoice in what my mind rejects.’ Today’s New Atheists seem to be saying something like that: that we should only believe what’s within the bounds of evidence and sound reason. For them, that means we should choose atheism, but in reality nothing could be further from the truth. True Reason explains clearly and deeply how New Atheists have both missed and misunderstood the evidence that exists, and why Christianity is by far the better choice for the thinking mind and worship- ing heart.” —Josh McDowell, Author and Speaker “With a clear message and respectful tone, True Reason challenges and con- vincingly refutes the claim of the New Atheists to own reason. The contribu- tors persuasively argue from history, science, and philosophy that the Christian world view is not only reasonable in itself but also provides the necessary founda- tion for reason. If you love reason, True Reason explains why Christianity is the best worldview for you.” —Michael Licona, PhD, Associate Professor in Theology, Houston Baptist University, Author of The Resurrection of Jesus “More than a year before he joined our staff, Tom Gilson came alongside Ratio Christi to help lead dozens of students to the atheist Reason Rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC. They entered a modern-day ‘lions’ den’ to share Christ’s love and truth, giving away bottles of water and excerpts from True Reason’s first edition. Armed with logic and True Reason, these students engaged in conversation with anyone who would listen. -
Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins Talk Ethics in Oxford Keeping Public
BHA news BHA news www.humanism.org.uk Issue 3 2011 Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other? — Attributed to George Eliot Keeping public services fair, inclusive, and secular The BHA is at the forefront of the to provide those services through its campaign to keep public services ‘Poppy Project’. The Salvation Army, an shared, inclusive, and secular. Since we evangelical organisation, has previously published our report and policy paper declared to parliament that it would on public service reform, Quality and be ‘impossible’ for it to be ‘religiously Equality: Human Rights, Public Services neutral’ in the provision of public and Religious Organisations (http:// services. The Salvation Army’s position tinyurl.com/Q-EReport) in 2007, we have statement on homosexuality also details been working hard for legal and policy homosexual behaviour as ‘self evidently changes to ensure that religious groups abnormal’ and condemns gay people to a cannot discriminate when they provide life of celibacy. public services. We’ve also been trying We believe that it is deeply to publicise the issues at stake, which, ones. In fact, many religious groups which concerning that the government has in light of more public services being wish to take on the delivery of public considered it appropriate to stop contracted to religious organisations, are services may be particularly conservative, contracting with an organisation specialist getting evermore serious for employees, evangelical, unrepresentative, or in working with victims of sexual service users, and the public alike. -
To Download This Guide in PDF Format
OPENING MINDS CHANGING HEARTS A Guide to Being Openly Secular A Beginner’s Guide to Becoming Openly Secular. Copyright © 2015 Openly Secular. Some Rights Reserved. Content written by Lori L. Fazzino, M.A., University of Nevada, Las Vegas Graphic design by Sarah Hamilton, www.smfhamilton.com This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. More information is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Openly Secular grants you permission for all non-commercial uses, including reproduction, distribution, and adaptation, so long as you provide proper credit to Openly Secular and provide others with the same rights you are receiving. ABOUT THE OPENLY SECULAR CaMPAIGN Openly Secular is a coalition project that promotes tolerance and equality of people regardless of their belief systems. Founded in 2013, the Openly Secular Coalition is led by four organizations - Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, Secular Coalition for America, Secular Student Alliance, and Stiefel Freethought Foundation. This campaign is also joined by national partner organizations from the secular movement as well as organizations that are allies to our cause. OUR MISSION The mission of Openly Secular is to eliminate discrimination and increase acceptance by getting secular people - including atheists, freethinkers, agnostics, humanists and nonreligious people - to be open about their beliefs. www.openlysecular.org SPECIAL THANKS We would like to thank PFLAG, www.pflag.org, and the Secular Safe Zone Project, www.secularsafezone.org, for allowing us to adapt pieces of the Be Yourself: Questions and Answers for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth and the Secular Safe Zone Resource Guide for Allies for this text. -
Free Will, Sam Harris Combines Neuroscience and Psychology to Lay This Illusion to Rest at Last
“Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it. In Free Will, Sam Harris combines neuroscience and psychology to lay this illusion to rest at last. Like all of Harris’s books, this one will not only unsettle you but make you think deeply. Read it: you have no choice.” —JERRY A. COYNE, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, and author of Why Evolution Is True A BELIEF IN FREE WILL touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. “In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates—with great intellectual ferocity and panache—that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. If he is right, the book will radically change the way we view ourselves as human beings.” —V. S. RAMACHANDRAN, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, UCSD, and author of The Tell-Tale Brain “Brilliant and witty—and never less than incisive—Free Will shows that Sam Harris can say more in 13,000 words than most people do in 100,000.” —OLIVER SACKS “Many say that believing that there is no free will is impossible—or, if possible, will cause nihilism and despair. -
10PF3-Religious Issues.Pdf
2010/2011 Public Forum Topic Analysis Resolved: High school Public Forum Debate resolutions should not confront sensitive religious issues. Writers & Contributors John Lewis, Sean Mumper, Todd Rainey, Sarah Spiker, Christian Tarsney Editor: Glenn Prince Managing Editor: Mike Bietz Publisher: Victor Jih 10PF3-Religious Issues Page 1 of 112 www.victorybriefs.com Table of Contents Table of Contents 1 TOPIC ANALYSIS BY JOHN LEWIS 2 TOPIC ANALYSIS BY SEAN MUMPER 16 TOPIC ANALYSIS BY TODD RAINEY 24 TOPIC ANALYSIS BY SARAH SPIKER-RAINEY 38 TOPIC ANALYSIS BY CHRISTIAN TARSNEY 48 GENERAL EVIDENCE 67 PRO EVIDENCE 72 CON EVIDENCE 90 10PF3-Religious Issues Page 2 of 112 www.victorybriefs.com TOPIC ANALYSIS BY JOHN LEWIS Resolved: High school Public Forum Debate resolutions should not confront sensitive religious issues. It might seem paradoxical to debate a topic about confronting sensitive religious issues when discussing that topic requires the confrontation of sensitive religious issues. Nevertheless, prepare for the meta-debate, or the debate over debate. This topic will force Public Forum debaters to consider what their event should look like: what sort of issues they would like to discuss, how those issues should be discussed, and ultimately, what the purpose of debate is in the first place. Instead of sitting on the sidelines while their coaches determine the course of Public Forum, this topic puts control of the event directly in the hands of the debaters. Along the way, debaters will discuss issues like educational policy, the separation of church and state, the treatment of religion in a pluralistic society, and the enduring importance of religion to modern life, for better or worse. -
The New Atheism” February 2012 Glasgow Unitarian Church
Jim Millar “The New Atheism” February 2012 Glasgow Unitarian Church Introduction My topic this morning is “The New Atheism”. It is not my intention to discuss the merits or demerits of Atheism as a theological position, but rather to look at the phenomenon that has been labelled “New Atheism” which has emerged in the last decade. Atheism is of course not new in itself. For example the Greek philosopher known as Theodorus the Atheist lived around 300BCE and it was in the 19 th century that Frederick Nietzsche reliably informed us that, “God is dead.” So who then are these New Atheists? While there are many writers in this field, by far the most notable are those referred to by Richard Dawkins as “The Four Horsemen”, alluding to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. These are; Richard Dawkins , the British evolutionary biologist, author and emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. His most notable work in this field is the 2006 publication The God Delusion . Sam Harris , the American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and co-founder and CEO of Project Reason. He is the author of The End of Faith: Religion Terror and The Future of Reason , which was published in 2004. Daniel Dennett , the American philosopher, writer, cognitive scientist and Professor at Tufts University. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2007) is his most famous work on this subject. Finally the late Christopher Hitchens . Hitchens was an English American author, essayist and journalist most notable in this field for his 2007 book, God Is Not Great; How Religion Spoils Everything. -
Sam Harris on Religion in Peace and Conflict
1 UPPSALA UNIVERSITET Department of Theology Master program of Religion in Peace and Conflict Masters thesis, 15 hp VT, 2017 Supervisor: Brian Palmer Sam Harris on Religion in Peace and Conflict Abstract This thesis discusses the works and views of Sam Harris on topics related to religion in peace and conflict. A particular emphasis is placed on the topics of reason, atheism, terrorism, Islam, and morality. Using content analysis of a wide variety of works of Harris, including books, articles, talks, and podcasts, his main views on the aforementioned topics are presented and commented on. Moreover, through an analysis of Harris’s techniques of argumentation, it has been found that some of the main techniques include: humor, thought experiments, comparisons, simplicity, and sophistication. Keywords Sam Harris, atheism, religion, peace, conflict, reason, Islam, morality RAFAL JENNEK 800604-0000 [email protected] Rafal Jennek 2 Contents 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 3 Choice of the topic .................................................................................................................................................... 3 Why Sam Harris ......................................................................................................................................................... 8 About Sam Harris ..................................................................................................................................................... -
ATHEISM – Paths to Humanism a Lot Of
ATHEISM – Paths to Humanism A lot of people think that atheism is a recent idea. But religious disbelief actually has a long and fascinating history. Just as a student of Christianity would want to know about a few rather significant things that happened 2,000 years ago, someone who wants a better understanding of atheism likewise needs to know what atheism has been up to for the past 30 centuries or so. Atheism in the distant past and in different cultures People tend to think of certain times and places as completely uniform in their beliefs. India is full to the brim with Hindus. The Greeks all worshipped the gods of Olympus. Everyone in Medieval Europe was Christian. Right? A closer look shows all of these claims to be misleading. Just as political “red states” (Republicans) and “blue states” (Democrats) in the United States are really all various shades of purple, every place and time in human history includes a lot of different beliefs — including atheism. That’s not to say all points of view have the same chance to speak into the cultural microphone. Religion in general and the majority religion in particular tend to call the shots and write the histories, especially prior to the late 18th century. Add to that the fact that atheism has often been punishable by imprisonment or death, and you can see why atheists in certain times and places tend to whisper. But the voices are there, including some in the distant past and in cultures both in and out of Europe. The thread of atheism in the ancient and medieval world is a story that very few people know. -
Faithless: the Politics of New Atheism
SECULARISM & Kettell, S 2013 Faithless: The politics of new atheism. Secularism and ISSSC Nonreligion, 2: 61-72, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/snr.al NSRN NONRELIGION RESEARCH ARTICLE Faithless: The politics of new atheism Steven Kettell*1 The emergence of ‘new atheism’ during the course of the last decade helped fuel an upsurge of interest in issues around religion. But scholarly analysis of new atheism, particularly its political dimensions, remains embryonic. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining the politics of new atheism across a variety of themes related to politics. These include the causal factors underpinning its emergence and development, its organisational structure and composition, the political strategies pursued by its proponents, and the various internal tensions and conflicts that these dynamics have produced. Introduction One area that has been peculiarly absent from studies of The early years of the twenty-first century thrust issues new atheism, however, has been its political dimension). around religion to the forefront of public and political The point is exemplified by a recently edited volume on debate. One of the defining features of this was the emer- new atheism, purporting to offer a rounded examination gence of a more activist form of atheism, known as the of the topic, which includes work from “the fields of reli- ‘new atheism’, which sought to openly challenge and criti- gious studies, sociology of religion, sociology of science, cise religious beliefs and to promote the virtues of reason, philosophy, and theology” (Amarasingham, 2010: 2), but rationality and science. Fueled by a series of best-selling contains nothing in the way of political analysis. -
PDF Document
STAND TO REASON Solid Groundtop 1 A Foundation for Building Ambassadors Celebrating 20 Years of Ministry July/August 2014 IN THIS ISSUE: Quick Summary • The Brighter Side of Evil • Good without God? • Goodness and Grounding • Readers and Writers GOD, EVOLUTION, AND • Science as Morality MORALITY PART II • “Flourishing” Falters • Bait and Switch Missed PART I? Click Here to Download CLEAR THINKING CHRISTIANITY There Are In this month’s edition, I explain why challenges from atheists like, “We can Apps for That! be good without God threats,” and, “If there were no God, would you still LEARN At be good?” completely miss the point. It’s the same reason Christopher www.str.org Hitchens’s famous dare—“Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever”—misses the mark, too. STR WEEKLY BROADCAST Tuesdays 4–7p.m. PST Listen and call with your questions or comments, click here LISTEN LIVE ON STR’s APP You Can Help Stand to Reason The kind of analysis I offer in this Solid Ground is often missing in the broader Christian community. The result is that empty LISTEN TO THE PODCASTS challenges—like those promoted by Sam Harris—go unanswered and gain traction in our culture. That’s why Stand to Reason is STR’s Podcast Page so important. And that’s why your support makes such a big difference. Your generosity helps us train tens of thousands to SOCIAL MEDIA defend classical Christianity with arguments that are both gracious and compelling. Please consider a gift of any amount this month to support this vital work that’s bearing fruit in the lives of so many people. -
EA Equip Mag Mar12.Indd
In Focus 1 ISSUE 12 / MAR 2012 IN THIS ISSUE The New Atheism: Why? Greg Clarke Equip. The Global Atheist Convention and the Hard Questions Denise Cooper-Clarke Is Religion Dangerous? Greg Restall Can We Be Good without God? Ian Packer The New Atheists and the Arts Kristi Giselsson Book Review: > The Moral Landscape Gordon Preece Keeping the Rumour of God Alive 2 InEquip. Focus MARCH 2012 Editorial Published quarterlyquarte by Australian EvangelicalEvang Alliance Inc. Comedian Dane Cook tells a story of a young man standing next ABN 54 056 007 820 PO Box 175 to him who suddenly sneezed 44 Rutland Rd Box Hill Victoria 3128 somewhat violently. Taking the Tel 03 9890 0633 Fax 03 9890 0700 ‘high road’, as he calls it, he uttered EA’s Vision Email [email protected] the phrase, ‘God bless you’. The www.ea.org.au man looked at him and, in a condescending tone, said, ‘Uh, » Local churches and ministries Editor – Gordon Preece yeah. I’m an atheist’. Cook, bemused, wondered, ‘What am understanding and exercising Board Chair and Acting EA Director – I supposed to say when an atheist sneezes? ‘When you die, their God-given mission: global, David Wilson nothing happens’?’ national and local Equip is the offi cial journal of EA We have moved from a world in which a few centuries » Australia. Its purpose is to promote Christians thinking and living Alliance concerns, inform and ago, as Charles Taylor puts it in his magisterial A Secular as disciples of Jesus in every encourage readers about evangelical Age, “it was virtually impossible not to believe in God” to part of their lives initiatives at home and abroad and inspire thinking and action concerning one in which belief has become merely one option among » Australian society communication of the Gospel in many. -
Pembacaan Dekonstruksi Pada Buku the End of Faith Karya Sam Harris
ADLN - Perpustakaan Universitas Airlangga BAB I PENDAHULUAN 1.1. Latar Belakang "The New Atheism" adalah istilah yang dimunculkan baru-baru ini untuk menggambarkan gelombang pemikiran yang memuat sebuah kritik tajam terhadap klaim-klaim intelektual dan dampak-dampak moral yang dimunculkan oleh kaum beragama. Identik diasosiasikan dengan Richard Dawkins, salah satu ateis yang sangat populer di Barat, gerakan ini juga memuat tulisan-tulisan para ateis lainnya. Bentuk-bentuk feenomena seperti meningkatnya fundamentalisme dan ekstrimisme beragama di awal abad ini, konflik agama yang tak berkesudahan di Timur Tengah, indoktrinasi agama yang dipaksakan bahkan kepada anak-anak yang pada dasarnya belum cukup umur untuk beragama, beragamnya keyakinan agama dalam mendefinisikan Tuhan beserta implikasi-implikasi moral melalui kepatuhan dalam menjalani perintah-Nya, dan konflik antara ilmu pengetahuan dan agama adalah alasan-alasan bagi mereka yang bernaung di bawah bendera “The New Atheism” ini untuk mempertanyakan dan membicarakan ulang perlunya manusia akan Tuhan dan agama. Sam Harris, melalui bukunya The End of Faith, telah memberikan peranan dan kontribusi besar pada gerakan ini dalam menekankan dampak destruktif agama pada umat manusia. Buku ini sangat menarik, pertanyaan-pertanyaan dan isu-isu yang diangkat pada dasarnya adalah hal-hal yang sebenarnya menjadi pikiran setiap orang saat ini, walaupun terdapat kecenderungan bahwa banyak orang enggan untuk memikirkan isu-isu tersebut secara serius. 1 TESIS PEMBACAAN DEKONSTRUKSI PADA BUKU THE END OF FAITH... BAGUS WIJOSENO ADLN - Perpustakaan Universitas Airlangga Sam Harris, atau lengkapnya Samuel B. Harris, dikenal karena kontribusinya dalam literatur agama dan filsafat non-fiksi. Dia telah menghasilkan banyak buku dan menulis banyak artikel yang mengadvokasikan skeptisisme rasional dan The New Atheism.