Ask The Atheist
When will I believe in god? When I can get the guy on the phone. The same goes for Santa and the Easter Bunny.
I'm going on TV as the "Ask The Atheist" guest on a show that's taping today, airing in December, called Faith Under Fire. In that spirit, I'll recommend (again), a FANTASTIC book, The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror, And The Future Of Reason, by Sam Harris. Also, here are two Web sites for the rational, skeptic.com and the-brights.net. And here is a thematic little joke:
One day, the zookeeper noticed that the orangutan was reading two books - the Bible and Darwin's Origin of Species. Surprised, he asked the ape, "Why are you reading both those books?""Well," said the orangutan, "I just wanted to know if
I was my brother's keeper or my keeper's brother."
And here's a quote from Harris' book:
Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him for all eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.
And a question: Can any god-believers really say, as Harris puts it, that "religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance"?