PZ Myers at his best
I can’t believe I missed PZ’s wonderfully moving article a few weeks ago.
When someone weeps over a dead child or creates a great poem, it should matter not at all what some priest imagines his pantheon is doing. Take your eyes off your hallucination of heaven—what’s real are that woman’s tears, that child’s triumph, that grain of sand, that bird on wing. The meaning is derived from the reality of what we see and feel, not some convoluted vapor and self-serving puffery about an abstract concept like “god”.
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There is some great work in that Bible Fish quotes, some wonderfully lyric writing, and it reflects a few thousand years of people straining to make sense of their world. What diminishes it is not the atheists who reject the answer it gives — that there is an all-powerful magic man behind the universe — but those who accept it, who seek meaning in rote recitations of its words without concern for how the minds of human beings could find some solace in the struggle to explain. Instead of a representation of thought, it’s treated as a recipe book for salvation. Perhaps Fish should turn some of his pious tut-tutting against the blind believers who want nothing but an answer, rather than against those few who can still appreciate the question.
This is him at his godless-yet-empathic best! Another one of his now-classic (a few months ago — in Internet time that’s classic… :P ) posts is here.
Local cache of the articles:
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