Mama Told Me Not To Come!

Pretty much how I feel about these articles

Give credit to Raw Story; they tried to put the best spin on this article that they could.  First, the headline reads:

Religion has a smart-people problem: The shaky intellectual foundations of absolute faith

From that, one might expect a distinction in the article between "faith" and "absolute faith."  The subheading (on the home page) encourages this:  

Religious belief the world over has a strenuous relationship with intellectualism. But why?

But the article fails to even grapple with William James' conclusion that faith is far more than "believin' what you know ain't so."*  Instead, all you really need to know about it is contained in the final paragraph:

Why is all this important? Because human beings need their childhood to end; they need to face life with all its bleakness and beauty, its lust and  its love, its war and its peace. They need to make the world better. No one else will.

Faith, in other words, is an escape from reality, and everyone who disagrees is stupid and childish and blinkered and deserves to be left behind by "progress."

I'm kinda thinking the childish one is not the believer.

I won't go into a detailed rebuttal of the arguments claims, because it's not worth it.  Here, as the only example worth citing, is the penultimate paragraph of the piece:

Besides, faith without reason doesn’t satisfy most of us, hence our willingness to seek reasons to believe. If those reasons are not convincing, if you conclude that religious beliefs are untrue, then religious answers to life’s questions are worthless. You might comfort yourself by believing that little green dogs in the sky care for you but this is just nonsense, as are any answers attached to such nonsense. Religion may help us in the way that whisky helps a drunk, but we don’t want to go through life drunk. If religious beliefs are just vulgar superstitions, then we are basing our lives on delusions. And who would want to do that?

Faith is defined as being incompatible with reason because reason is defined as being incompatible with faith (where you start is where you finish).  Why is reason incompatible with faith?  Apparently not for the reasons that reason cannot define beauty, or truth, or love (Why do you love someone?  Can you give reasons for it?  If not, aren't you simply deluding yourself.  Grow up!  Put aside childish things!).  The very definition of reason is not even elucidated here, much less argued; it is simply taken as a given, and as being equivalent to being an "adult."

Given how areligious Donald Trump is, that must make him the most adult person in the room.  Given how much reasoning led to things like slavery and racism and poverty, I'm not sure "reason" is a guarantee of prosperity or even survival.  It certainly doesn't have an unblemished track record of making the world a better place.  We will observe Dr. King's birthday in a week; he combined reason and religion to make the world a better place.  The abolitionist movement was centered in religion, as was John Adams' fight for the slaves on the Amistad (look it up).  Take Christopher Hitchens' critiques of Mother Teresa at face value if you want (I don't), but she certainly "faced life with all its bleakness and beauty, its lust and its love, its war and its peace," and still tried to make the world a better place.  What efforts have the rest of us made that are comparable.  Indeed, what efforts did Mr. Hitchens make?

Human beings do need to take responsibility for improving the world, but in the place of this ignorant diatribe I would offer the example of the Hebrew prophets, who never shied away from the responsibility of the children of Abraham for their condition; and I would offer the words of a French Jew who considered himself an agnostic, at best, if not an atheist:  "Religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all."

Hardly the words of a child.

*Just to bring that quote to the table:

The freedom to ' believe what we will ' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, " Faith is when you believe something that you know ain't true." I can only repeat that this is misapprehension. In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider.

I mean, if you can't even reference James on the subject, how "reasonable" are you?