I was just reading a brilliant conversation between Sam Harris, atheist and intellectual, and Rick Warren, Christian. From the article, The God Debate:

WARREN: Why isn’t atheism more appealing if it’s supposedly the most intellectually honest?
HARRIS: Frankly, it has a terrible PR campaign.
WARREN: [Laughs] It’s not a matter of PR.
HARRIS: It is right next to child molester as something you don’t want to be. But that is a product, I would argue, of what religious people tell one another about atheism.

It is my opinion, and I’m not alone, that atheism is the most persecuted religious belief in American today. My own mother has wondered aloud what keeps atheists from murdering and raping innocent people. In the mind of many people of religious faith, ethics are the exclusive domain of the faithful and atheists, having no fear of eternal punishment, are free to do as they please. I left that conversation amazed that fear of damnation is the only thing keeping people of faith from committing horrendous crimes. Of course, the truth is that faith does not prevent those things. Anyway, Harris was right in that the public relations battle is being won mightily by fundamentalists.

Tags: atheism, faith, religion

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 6:35 am and is filed under Family, Play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.