What some people wrote at the New York Times in 2014 about god-soaked fucktards.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/31/opinion/how-we-view-and-experience-faith.html

David Brooks is correct that there is hostility between secular and “orthodox religious believers” in America today. An important distinction must be made, however.

A secular person is much more likely to feel anger or frustration not because of what the fundamentalist religious person believes, but because of what religious beliefs drive that person to do. Suicide bombings, denying civil rights, exporting fear and loathing to other countries, bombing abortion clinics, “honor killings,” elimination of accurate science in education — these are examples of toxic behaviors with broad impact that have been justified by religious faith.

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David Brooks writes, “There is a strong vein of hostility against orthodox religious believers in America today.”

Really? Is it not rather that there is a strong vein of hostility among orthodox religious believers against all those who disagree with them, and that their aggressive attempts to enforce their views have produced a consequent backlash? That women want control of their own bodies, that educators want to teach legitimate science — none of these had anything to do with religion until religion stepped in to impose itself on our civic life.

And does Mr. Brooks really imagine that secular people are “curious about how believers experience their faith”? Why would we be? We know that the intensity of Augustine’s experience is nothing but neurons firing, and we can experience that miracle in every moment of existence.

We have no need of faith in that which we do not and cannot know; that which we do know and can know is amazing enough.

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David Brooks paints a beautiful picture of the religious experience — one that recognizes the sublime, sees beauty in the ordinary, feels love and hope in the curious spirit of humanity and seeks truth in a world with no instruction manual. We should all live life in this way.

However, a secular view of the world is not free from these experiences. Favoring fact over superstition, and skepticism over cosmic certainty, in no way inhibits us from an earnest desire to live a good life, or the experience of love, wonder, passion or beauty in the ordinary.

Indeed, to learn about the origins of life or the universe is to see a genetic relative in a blade of grass, a future civilization in the atoms of a dying star, and empathy, passion and imagination in the biochemical reactions of a network of neurons. As Charles Darwin said, “There is grandeur in this view of life.”