(November 29, 2017 at 11:45 am)Brian37 Wrote: The more I read all the different threads/posts about "debunking" this religion or that religion I keep thinking, "why aren't more skeptics taking a global view"?
Three books I think address in really decent terms the superfluous nature of ALL religions in our species history.
1. The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins..... While it does focus on the big three monotheisms it does explain also in later chapters where religion comes from in evolutionary terms as a result of flawed perceptions.
2. God The Failed Hypothesis, Victor Stenger
3. The New Atheism, Victor Stenger.......<---- This book says there is no separate but equal and that science DOES have something to say about any and all God/god/s claims. It also in later chapters compares the motifs in several religions including those in Asia to demonstrate that claims of good and morality exist in all religions, which should show the reader that our sense of morality, isn't coming from the writing itself, but is in our evolution.
Even Hitchens has said, and I agree, our species 200,000 years ago didn't have even writing, or modern housing or farming. Our species lived in a very dark age of lack of modern knowledge back then. Back then everything scared the shit out of us as a species, so we created gap answers to explain why nature did what it did, and attached human like qualities as to being in charge of that but with super natural powers.
So sure Christianity is what atheists deal with the most in the west, but it still isn't the only one in our species history, all of them worldwide are all rooted in superstition and mythology and gap answers.
I really enjoyed God The Failed Hypothesis, although I've only heard it as an audiobook when I was working. I'm definitely going to have to read The New Atheism, are there more book by Victor Stenger you'd recommend?
Although on a similar note of what you first described about that book I'd recommend Faith vs Fact: Why Religion And Science Are Incompatible by Jerry A. Coyne (author of Why Evolution Is True) in which he makes a very solid case as to why it's inaccurate to say that science and religion can coexist and that they are fundamentally incompatible on virtually every level.
"History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets." -Yuval Noah Harari