WARREN: Who's doing the selecting?
HARRIS: The environment. You don't have to invoke an intelligent designer to explain the complexity we see.
WARREN: Sam makes all kinds of assertions based on his presuppositions. I'm willing to admit my presuppositions: there are clues to God. I talk to God every day. He talks to me.
Science is not a mass of presuppositions. Presupposition (according to wikipedia): an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Also, Warren is walking into Pat Robertson's territory with the "He talks to me" meme.WARREN: ...A lot of atheists hide behind rationalism; when you start probing, you find their reactions are quite emotional. In fact, I've never met an atheist who wasn't angry.
HARRIS: Let me be the first.
WARREN: I think your books are quite angry.
Posing questions and attempting to answer them in a reasonable way is not anger. Questioning the Bible is something that is anathema to Warren and his ilk.Later:
MEACHAM: Rick, Christianity has conducted itself in an abjectly evil manner from time to time. How do you square that with the Christian Gospel of love?
WARREN: I don't feel duty-bound to defend stuff that's done in the name of God which I don't think God approved or advocated. Have things been done wrong in the name of Christianity? Yes. Sam makes the statement in his book that religion is bad for the world, but far more people have been killed through atheists than through all the religious wars put together. Thousands died in the Inquisition; millions died under Mao, and under Stalin and Pol Pot. There is a home for atheists in the world today-it's called North Korea.
I'll end this here by saying that Warren's bullsh*t shows a total lack of knowledge of world history as well as history of Christianity. TOTAL.
Points:
- The Crusades were the result of religion and greed and anti-Semitism. Jews were killed by knights ON THE WAY to Jerusalem. Knights were told that if they died in battle, they would immediately go to heaven. Pilgrims following the Crusades were told that they would have their souls wiped clean from sin. Jerusalem was knee-deep in blood.
- The first genocide of western civilization was the intentional eradication of Christian "heretics" called Cathars. Over 100,000 people perished in the span of ten years.
- Hundreds of thousands (perhaps up to a million) died during the Inquisition. Witch-burning lasted right up to the nineteenth century. As many as 100 hundred thousand people were burned as witches.
- The statistics of who killed who is actually reverse: "Religious wars" killed more than Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot put together. Almost all of Europe's 782 wars (in the last 800 years) involved religion and both sides of each war declared that "God is on our side."
- The great Tei Ping Rebellion in China was caused by a man who said that he was the brother of Christ. The total of lives lost was approximately 40 million.
- Before Cortez came to the shores of Mexico with his Catholic missionaries, there were approximately 25 million Meso-Americans. One hundred years later, there were only 1 million. Native American Indians were used as slave labor for the California Missions.
And last: "I don't feel duty-bound to defend stuff that's done in the name of God which I don't think God approved or advocated." If not ministers of Christianity, then who? There are a LOT of apologies to be made by Christianity for millions of deaths, but it is the arrogance of people like Rick Warren who absolve themselves of any sin simply because they say that they personally did not do it themselves.
Just a thought.
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