I call bullshit. Trendy bullshit, I’m sure. But bullshit all the same.

It reads like an attempt to glorify what was, essentially, a bunch of ignorant people seeking some influence and protection from natural forces they feared and could not control.

“What is lightning? I don’t know, must come from a god or a spirit. It’s scary, let’s keep the spirit pleased so it doesn’t kill us.”

Nooo, we’re supposed to elevate this by talking about schizophrenics and ‘grappling with psychological demons’.

But at the end of the day, it’s just human minds trying to fill in the gaps of their knowledge in order to reassure themselves, and making shit up to do so.

You don’t need to be schizophrenic to do that.

Julian, maybe you should, you know, research these things before you talk about them? Cassirer’s Language and Myth might be a start.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s122770.htm

While Socrates was innovative and perhaps revolutionary in his view of religion and reason, he certainly wasn’t a Hitchens-style atheist.

Socrates–who was no atheist.

See Mark McPherran’s book:

http://www.psupress.psu.edu/books/titles/0-271-01581-0.html

Using Socrates as his hero undermines Hitchen’s thesis that religion corrupts everything.

This is certainly not true. There is no evidence and no good reason to believe that religion sprung from a proto-scientific grasping in the dark. The reasons for the impulse to the supernatural are much more psychological. Primitive people, through shamans and witchdoctors, people we would call schizophrenic today, were grappling with psychological demons and forces that they viewed as exogenous to themselves. These people became the village medicine men and taught people about the spirit world and it’s intimate involvement with our daily life.

Then of course there is the perenniel awesome fact that we are able to communicate as sentient beings with each other, through space and time. Storytelling, probably the main activity (along with jokes) driving along the invention of language, naturally addresses this most curious question of Where did we come from and why did we come from there and where were we when we were born? The most interesting stories were about this. Obviously when confronted with lightning people will resort to their cosmology to explain it, but not the other way around.

That atheists are ever blind to such simple facts about what it means to be human goes a long way to explaining the ease with which atheist tracts are brushed aside.

Maybe to a structuralist. This is a just-so story.

Even if you don’t acknowledge such shallow criticism, how does this work in a modern context? Do any of the billions of religious people with access to a basic scientific education today really derive any religious feeling from a fear of thunderstorms?

Even those for whom the majesty of the natural world informs the religious experience are just as likely to be in awe of the beauty of a butterfly or a raindrop as of lightning.