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A Good Year for God

It’s been a better year for God. After withering literary assaults on the Almighty from the academic Richard Dawkins and the essayist Christopher Hitchens, believers have hit back.
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Those of us who think that science and religion dwell in different domains, and who recall that Socrates argued that science did not teach you about morality or meaning, find that our case is undermined by the literalists and fundamentalists in every religion. There are Christians who know all about the fire and brimstone of the Book of Revelation, but seem not to have heard the instructions about generosity in the Sermon on the Mount. … Where the atheist assault is often correct is in pinpointing the amount of harm frequently done in our world by such fundamentalists. Right-wing American attitudes about their country’s place in the world are invigorated by fundamentalist dogma.

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