In a Letter to a Christian Nation New Atheist Sam Harris comments:
If we ever do transcend our religious bewilderment, we will look back upon this period in human history with horror and amazement. How could it have been possible for people to believe such things in the twenty-first century? How could it be that they allowed their societies to become so dangerously fragmented by empty notions about God and Paradise?
Peter Bolt observes that when it comes to making ethical decisions Harris sets a 21st century approach against a 1st century approach and mocks at those who would even consider adopting the latter stance. Of course, there is considerable irony here for, as Bolt observes, in the ancient world people mocked at Christians because to them their Gospel smacked of novelty. Bolt responds to Harris:
This is powerful rhetoric in a world that remembers the 19th-century philosophy of inevitable progress and that still reels under the 1960s destabilization, in which change became the only constant. But what is its logic? Surely good logic tells us that the classical assumption is wrong: how can the chronologically prior always be better than the chronologically recent? But the same logic should also tells us that the opposite claim is equally false: how is the chronologically more recent always better than the chronologically prior? Surely truth is truth, no matter how dusty or how shiny it is.
Source: “Everything old is new again” in The Briefing (October 2010) 5
Posted April 14, 2011
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