Life's Biggest Question?

"In a progressively more secularized world, the only religious people in the world seem to be fanatics"

Is God Real? I'm sure many of us might have debated the question at some point in our lives. I'm not here to drill in my opinion or bore you to boredom heaven with facts. Oh wait! This is a blog and I am supposed to give opinions and facts!

Sam Harris, the bestselling author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason has some pretty interesting and solid points to make about well, religion terrorism and reason.

Now, all of us are familiar with the Religion vs Science and the whole 'If the human body were to be one of God's intelligent design products, where does the appendix figure?' argument. What Harris talks about is the reason behind a person's belief. Hope turns into belief as long as you have a convincing argument supporting it he says. This is plausible as far as science is concerned and indeed he makes an excellent point saying there is no Christian Physics and Muslim Mathematics. But what happens when we start treading on the slippery religious and moral grounds? What distinguishes belief from hope?

The Tibetans have been oppressed and flogged for centuries. Do we see Tibetan suicide bombers running amok in Tiananmen Square? Yet, politicians and thinkers alike wouldn't dare discuss issues like this let alone topics like atheism. Coming to atheism, stats say that half of Great Britain and almost 80% of Sweden and most parts of Western Europe consists of atheists. I'm not saying we should have more atheists in India, but we don't even seem to be anywhere near an intelligent debate on the subject. I'd love to see Sam Harris face off with the likes of Praveen Togadia and Ashok Singhal!

One this is certain - religious debates are never boring! Or is it just me?



Newsweek has an interesting debate between the evangelist Rick Warren and Sam Harris here

Technorati Tags: Athiesm, Terrorism, Religion, Sam Harris, Rick Warren