(It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others-while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity-so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?ĭepending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough-and even miraculous enough if you insist-I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. I've been accepted in most of my challenges to debate: Rabbis, Baptist ministers, in one case a Buddhist nun … professors of theology and others are generally willing to take me up on it … I've been very gratified by the way the religious believe I've made a case that has to be answered.“About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. I've had a lot of reviews in the religious press say, 'Look, we can't laugh off criticism like this. The reception to the book has actually, on the whole, been fairly generous. Well it would be idle for me to say that a Quaker is as bad as say a member of the Mahdi army … but I do think that all religions make the same mistake in that they surrender reason, which is our most precious faculty, to faith, which is very vague and abstract. And because it's a large claim on a very major subject, it is likely to lead to fanaticism. People who say they know what God wants, they claim to know him in person - that's more than anyone could possibly claim.
A religious person is someone who goes further than believing the religious process is true.
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