Wired has an interesting article this month about the ‘new’ atheists, who hold that religion is not just wrong, it’s evil. Wired’s cover tag line reads ‘No Heaven, No Hell, Just Science.’ The article is based on interviews with scientists Richard Dawkins and Sam Haris, and philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Right after 9/11, at least one secular then-colleague at The Independent in London said that 9/11 proved it was time to outlaw religion. Veteran observers of Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Gaza and everywhere else that extremists claimed that God was telling them to kill innocents, or steal land or commit whatever horror said it was time to end religion, citing centuries of horrors from the crusades and Inquisition to suicide bombers and the 9/11 pilots.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and, really for a couple years now. My therapist recently commissioned me to write about my faith, an essay tentatively tited ‘The Rules of the Universe’ (title suggested by my analyst). The essay, which I’m writing using Google’s Writely (how better to learn this new class of app?) starts with a quote from Albert Einstein: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

Spinoza is Baruch Spinoza, a rationalist philosopher and ethicist of the 17th Century, who was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for his view that God was not personal but, rather, the mechanism of nature. He also believed that the Bible was metaphorical and allegorical. Anyway, this should, at least, liven up the blog a bit: religion and politics usually inspire controversy…

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