From The Archive is a special Friday feature. It features posts from my earlier (now-deleted) blog: Stuff & Nonsense and a few items from previous versions of A Tangled Rope that I feel deserve reprinting here, mainly as a way of archiving them. The dates are only approximate, I’m afraid, and there is a possibility that some links may no longer work (although, I will try to remember to test the links before republishing the piece).
Silly Norm –
Normally I would find myself in general agreement with the estimable Norm of Normblog fame, but this time I must disagree most heartily indeed.
Norm says:
As I've said before, the rationalist and secular critique of religion is one I entirely share. I have done since I started to contemplate these matters seriously. I do not think there are any good evidential or other reasons for belief in a supreme deity, much less a benign and all-powerful one. But to speak now, in the face of a historical experience stretching over millennia, as if religion is no more than a silly mistake of silly people - answering to no real human concerns, meeting no deeper needs, all just froth - is (not to put too fine a point on it) silly.
However, that is just the thing. To me - and quite possibly many other non- and un-believers - continued religious belief in the face of what seems like more than overwhelming evidence to the contrary does seem - to be polite - a little bit silly, if not downright perverse.
Maybe it has been answering to real human concerns, meeting deeper needs for millennia, but so what? It doesn't mean that it is right, and should be immune to criticism, including ridicule, just by virtue of its history, or through the number of its adherents, or how earnest those adherents are.
There are many things once earnestly believed in the past that now seem ridiculous - a flat-Earth, the harmony of the spheres, astrology, divine right of monarchs, phrenology, spiritualism, communism, Tony Blair and so on and so forth.
It is way past high time that religion should added to The Very Big List of Silly Things, and then consigned to the dustbin of history.
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