Silly Little Country

Ominous advertising - but maybe it is not so bad

The CBC has been advertising an upcoming show lately with the catch-question:

Is it possible to be a good person if you don't believe in God?

To be honest I would have thought what needed investigation is whether it is possible to be a good person and believe in God; for me, basing one's ethics on a fantasy seems rather flimsy. It allows one to to invent a God that authorizes the murder of those who do not believe in my invention as non-innocent, or to use the schoolroom to humiliate weekly those who choose not to attend Sunday School (the latter is a direct personal experience - and it was not really humilation, though was so intended, and might have been if the process had been taken as other than ridiculous).

This was well observed in a Pharyngula post today, which cites Richard Gayle (and his post is worth reading in general, as well as the commentary so far - he cites yet another great JFK speech):

People whose faith requires them to disregard facts are deluded. The delusions of faith have resulted in millions of deaths throughout history. Oe would have hoped that the Enlightenment and the following centuries would have lessened the power of these people. Looks like they are a strin strain of humanity that will always be with us. God did not provide the natural world around us to fool us or to decieve deceive us. We do not have the intellect we have to waste it on idiotic delusions about a geocentric solar system. Anyone who choses to believe the multiply-translated words of a document whose provenance is not wholy wholly known while ignoring the facts of the world we live in is a waste of humanity

That's a little rough but the principles make sense to me.

But back to the CBC. I caught the last ten minutes of the show being advertised. Now I want to see the whole thing.

Clearly put together by Rob Buckman (an interesting Toronto figure I once spent part of an evening chatting randomly with in a lovely bar here) it is rather sympathetic to the secular point of view - in fact the 'humanist' one (which I have always found a bit doctrinal :-) ). The CBC can still surprise me.

The CBC promotional page finishes with this observation:

But after horrific events such as Sept. 11 or the Tsunami disaster, some people will still ask "Where is God?"

It reminded me of what struck me as a sad letter to some editor after 9/11, in which the writer asked "Where was God in these events?" I wanted to scream - "Sitting in the cockpit with those boys egging them on into the twin towers and Pentagon."

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:46 PM