Last week Michael Shermer preached on the virtue of atheism. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Joel Kontinen
Last week American atheists gathered in Washington D.C. for a rally that sounded very religious. Known as the Reason Rally, it at least partly consisted of secular sermons in which the word God was substituted by “reason”.
Dr. Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, was one of the speakers of the event that occurred just before Easter - and the Pope’s visit to Mexico and Cuba.
Shermer’s talk was a sermon on the benefits of freedoms that actually are blessings stemming from Christianity. He probably knows this but does not admit it.
“Instead of enslaving people because they were a lesser species, we expanded our biological knowledge to include all humans as members of the species,” Shermer said, very much in command of Orwellian newspeak.
Actually, it was Darwinian evolution that (for instance in Darwin’s Descent of Man and Hunter’s Civic Biology of the Scopes Trial fame) argued for many races of man. The Bible has always taught the brotherhood of all descendants of Adam.
“Instead of treating women as inferiors because a certain book says it is man’s right to do so, we discovered natural rights that dictate all people should be treated equally,” Shermer went on to say, forgetting that Christianity teaches the equality of all people in Christ.
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” the apostle Paul writes in Galatians 3:28 (NIV).
But let us allow Shermer to continue:
“And so as we rally here today to celebrate reason, let us also remember that we must never let down our guard, for there are those still who would prefer to live in a Medieval world of superstition and dogma. There is no guarantee that reason will triumph over ignorance.”
Many would agree that one of the worst instances of superstition and dogma is a belief in a world where natural processes are assumed to turn nothing into everything.
Shermer goes on to say:
“The force behind this moral arc is reason and science. To that end let us ‘Thank Reason’ for our blessings of liberty.
Thank Reason for our democracy.
Thank Reason for our rights.
Thank Reason for our prosperity.
And Thank Reason for our freedom.”
The last time true believers in atheism said or heard something very much like this was in the French Revolution. With religion out of the way, very soon the men with an invention known as the guillotine began to show where this “reason” could lead to.
Source:
Shermer, Michael. 2012. The Moral Arc of Reason Reason Rally, March 24, 2012, Washington D.C. Skeptic.com.
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