Hvorfor jeg ikke er religiøs:

Jeg går til bekendelse... Jeg er lidt af en nørd hvad angår større lommefilosofiske spørgsmål om religion og selvforståelse. I den anledning kom jeg i går ind på fora.tv, som har en masse spændende foredrag.
Et af dem var med Sam Harris, en stoisk ateist, som advokerer for mindre religiøs fanatisme. Under det timelange foredrag sagde han følgende:

If you consider Christianity, the entire doctrine is predicated on the idea, that the the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true.

This textual claim is problematic because every one acknowledges that the gospels followed Jesus' ministry by decades and there is no extra biblical account to his miracles, but the truth is quite a bit worse than that, the truth is that even if we had multiple contemporaneous eye witness accounts of the miracles of Jesus, this still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred.

The problem is that first hand reports of miracles are quite common, even in the 21st century. I have met literally hundreds at this point, western educated men and women, who think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. All the powers asscribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those described to Jesus. I actually remain open to evidence of such powers, but the fact is that people who tell these stories desperately want to believe them.

People who believe these stories show an uncanny reluctance to look for non miraculous causes. But it remains a fact that Yogis and mystics are said to be walking on water and raising the dead and flying without the aid of technology, materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future. In fact all of these powers have been described to Sathya Sai Baba, the south Indian guru, by an uncountable number of eye witnesses. He even claim to been born of a virgin, which is not all that uncommon a claim in the history of religion or in history generally. Ghengis Khan supposedly was born of a virgin, as was Alexander.

But Sathya Sai Baba is not a fringe figure, he is not the David Koresh of Hinduism. His followers threw a birthday party for him recently and a million people showed up, so there are vast numbers of people who believe he is a living God. You can even watch his miracles on YouTube - but prepare to be under whelmed.

So consider as though, for the first time, the foundational claim of Christianity. The claim is this, that miracle stories of a sort, that today surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba, become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century roman empire. We have Sathya Sai Baba's miracle stories attested to by thousands upon thousands of living eye witnesses and they don't even merit an hour on the discovery channel, but you place a few miracle stories in some ancient books and half of the people on this earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around them.

Does anyone else here see a problem with that?

Uddraget af talen er en smule redigeret, men den kan ses i sin helhed her: Sam Harris: Between Faith and Reason

I det hele taget har jeg svært ved at tage religiøse mennesker alt for seriøse. Det er lidt som, når nogen i al alvor påstår, at de har set et spøgelse eller en UFO. Man skæver til personen og trækker mentalt på skulderen.

Her er et legendarisk eksempel på, hvad jeg mener. Det er, ikke tilfældigt, med Sam Harris, og han er i færd med at diskuttere religion med en rabbiner på en scene i et jødisk tempel: