Arts & Culture
What the Angry Atheists Get Wrong
By Peter Bebergal / July 23, 2007
Recent polemics by proud and angry atheists have gotten many of us—faithful and skeptical alike—thinking better of belief in God. Books like Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and most recently, Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great argue that it is simply unreasonable to believe. Science can debunk the historical or biological claims of any sacred text, they say, and religious morality contradicts the modern zeitgeist. Even when the scriptures do present us with a moral innovator, faith alone rarely compels believers to live accordingly. These angry atheists reserve some of their sharpest criticism for religious moderates, arguing that a reasoned and critical respect for religion simply provides comfort to the enemy. The slope between Jimmy Carter and Jerry Falwell—or, for that matter, between Reza Aslan and Osama bin Laden—is simply too slippery. Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens are not wrong. Religion is often ugly and irrational, and the sins of religious people are often a function of what they believe. But we part ways with Dawkins and his fellow atheists when they argue that the root of the problem isn’t extremism, but belief itself. In this, fundamentalists and atheists are not much different. Historically, those religious extremists who make unyielding truth claims for their own specific beliefs—say, that God is One, or that God is Triune, or that there is no God but God—respond to threats to those claims by trying to destroy other faiths. Equally dogmatic atheists, who believe that religion demands, even of its most liberal adherents, at least a basic belief in God, respond by demanding the end of faith itself.
We see it all differently. Religion need not start with belief, but rather with an understanding that encounters with holiness in the world demand—and have always demanded—a metaphorical structure to contain them and give them meaning. In other words, religion should take its myths seriously, but not literally, with the self-conscious awareness that behind these stories are actual worldly encounters with something amazing and often terrifying. In making meaning of what we perceive, religious myths bring us together. And when belief takes the back seat, moral innovation, the best that religion has to offer the world, can become the final measure of the virtue of faith. We begin with the premise that actual belief in God is not necessary to the religious imagination. It is within the religious imagination, in fact, that the very idea of God arises. Whether or not God actually exists, what makes God even possible is that through our encounters with others and the world, we are called upon to imagine something entirely beyond ourselves. We shape an idea of the holy. In his somewhat dated but still enlightening book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto describes the irrational moment that precedes belief. He finds that moment in our encounters with what he would call holiness, or the mysterium tremendum. For the ancients, holiness could be found in a thunderclap or a herd of bison just as often as in a moment of birth or death. So too for us moderns: From the deepest reaches of the cosmos to the twisting depths of a strand of DNA, creation still blows us away. (And no doubt, faced with a herd of charging bison, we’d still be scared to death.) Abraham Joshua Heschel agrees. In God in Search of Man, Heschel writes: “Faith is preceded by awe, by acts of amazement at things that we apprehend but cannot comprehend….We must learn how to see ‘the miracles which are daily with us’; we must learn how to live in awe, in order to attain the insights of faith.” The primal notion of the holy is not about ethics and morals, or even miracles, but more simply, terror and awe. Such encounters may generate the emotions of supreme empathy, compassion or love, but even these, in and of themselves, contain no moral instruction. Only as religious thought evolves further—through myths or religious laws—does the moral condition famously known as “fear and trembling” become associated with God.
Religion begins when people share these ideas of holiness, usually through the telling and retelling of myths. Assuming others encounter the world as we do—that is, they occasionally find it awesome, too—and that they possess the same imagination, it makes sense that we might begin considering whether there is some social value to our encounter with the holy. Beyond any individual experience that inspires thoughts of holiness, “we need myths,” writes religion scholar Karen Armstrong, “that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness.” Religious faith, then, depends on the decisions any of us make—or, as children, the decision we have made for us—to align ourselves with particular set of metaphors and perhaps one greater myth.
In describing encounters with holiness and the transformation of such encounters into something of transcendent value, Heschel, Otto, and Armstrong are primarily concerned with moments before belief. So even after communities form and specific beliefs begin to drive the way we see the world, actual belief itself does not come until we’ve already formed religious social contracts, or ethics. After all, religion is only sustained in society. God may (or may not) actually exist without people. Religion cannot. Once myths are written down and compiled, and begin to shape morality—when awe becomes aligned with guilt or our conscience booms from the clouds as the voice of God—religions start to form around the scriptural charge: do good and fear God. This is when a system of myths turns into the kind of religion to which Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are so fervently opposed. Again, the atheists aren’t wrong. Unquestioning faith in God—the yardstick by which both atheists and blinkered fundamentalists seem to measure religious commitment—is not the best true sign of religiosity. After all, once belief becomes the supreme virtue for religious communities, the absolute notions of what is “good” and how literally we fear God start causing problems. Just as an encounter with holiness can never mean “feed the poor” or “love your neighbor,” Otto would argue it also never means “kill the infidels.” Humanity is responsible for feeding, loving, and killing. Religion expresses our own desires, not the desires of God.
Belief can separate individuals from the rest of the world—from the heretics and the infidels. But communities cannot possibly depend on any of their members believing in precisely the same way. Such control would be impossible. So belief matters less for organized religion than the common recognition that a set of rituals, liturgy, and community actions invoke holiness in a meaningful and generally cohesive way. Central to faith communities’ cohesion around worship and broader practice is religious language. And unlike the language of science and politics, the purpose of religious language is to mythologize, to offer those who speak it a connection, at the most basic level, to the “eternal” cycle of new beginnings. This is where both the fundamentalist and the atheist get it wrong. A Christian fundamentalist reads the book of Genesis and says, “It says here the world was created in six days, so it must be true.” The fundamentalist, attempting to speak scientifically, commits the grave intellectual error of proof-texting inside the selfsame text. The atheist reads the book of Genesis and says “It says here the world was created in six days. Only a fool would believe this nonsense.” Refusing to admit that the scripture may hold some greater metaphorical truth, like the fundamentalist, the atheist can only read Genesis one way—as a misguided historical account of the beginning of time. But fundamentalist believers and non-believers alike would do well to remember that Genesis is not about belief at all. It’s a mythic vision that relates an encounter with the majesty and wonder of the world. It also has to deal with human suffering and temptation, and like any good myth, uses a foil, a trickster by way of a serpent, to explain the sins of humanity. Modern religious adherents have no one but their ancestors to blame for this confusion. Torah began a process that the Gospels and Epistles, the Koran, and most recently, the Book of Mormon continued, demythologizing our encounters with holiness by firmly placing them in history. For example, although Pesach attempts to eternalize the Israelites’ Exodus through ritual, the liberation of the slaves feels firmly situated in history. Today, at least on the surface, most religious celebrations commemorate historical events—Christmas the most notable in America. And as such, it is very seductive to read the myths behind these commemorations literally.
Myth can be understood, then, as the religions imagination sans belief. Judaism understands this more intuitively than Christianity, because its development was closer—historically and culturally—to classical understandings of mythology. Certain pieces of the Jewish scriptures, especially Genesis, maintain that classical mythic quality, with its focus on the eternal. “In the beginning…” is perfectly ahistorical. Christianity, though, firmly divorces itself from the classical world by grounding its story absolutely in history. “In the time of Caesar Augustus,” which opens Jesus’ birth narrative, is perfectly historical.
Moreover, beyond simply focusing on one historical life, the Christian story abandons the mythic by prioritizing myth’s enemy, eschatology. Eschatology looks to an end of time within history—for Christian millennialists, often within their own lifetimes. Myth implies eternity. Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, and to save her Demeter stops the rains and creates the seasons. This cycle becomes eternal because the deal Demeter makes with Hades to rescue her daughter is forever binding. Likewise, Osiris continues, over and over and over again, to die and be reborn. Search though they might, religious seekers are never going to find God. Proving God’s existence is a worthless and truly unholy enterprise. We need to redirect our efforts away from believing so much in God, and toward understanding what God can mean. We must recognize that religious stories maintain their greatest potential in assigning, through metaphor, eternal meaning both to natural events and our encounters with the world—birth and death and all that comes between. (Of course, it’s crucial to remember that no matter the truth claims myths seem to make, they exist as expressions of our religious imagination—what Dawkins might describe as an evolutionary by-product—and have no necessary relationship to scientific truth.) Remythologizing these stories—in a sense, consciously reimagining myth as myth—would attach them again to the eternal. Ritual would regain its force as our tie to the endlessly recurring cycles of life. And never again would we hear that deathly and banal phrase, That’s just a myth. Myths are not lies. They are, to borrow a phrase from Joan Didion, the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. Even the bible tells us so. Heschel’s idea that awe comes before faith is found appropriately with the first commandment, which requires that we love God, not believe in Him. The religious claim that belief is irrelevant—and the assertion that such a claim is actually biblical—depends on the further and equally biblical claim that ethical behavior is necessary to the religious life.
Grounded at the outset in the irrelevance of belief, which may itself have been the authors’ way of honoring the metaphoric nature of myth, the Torah did not simply leave the Jews to fend for themselves, but offered a collection of 613 mitzvot, or commandments, that established Judaism—and it follows, both Christianity and Islam—as a religion of action. Whether or not you agree that these commandments are actually helpful, or even entirely proper—homosexuality, for example, is proscribed by commandments 157-159—to be a Jew, the Torah says, you are not required to believe in the holy, but you must live holiness. While we surely should stand in judgment over evils once considered proper—slavery, for example, is and always has been a sin—it stands to reason that ethics would change over time. And if what makes us religious is not our belief in the holy but living holiness itself, it also stands to reason that religious life would involve developing ethical positions to allow us to deal with modern problems. While it might make good sense, as commandment 501 states, “not to insult or harm anybody with words,” and we still do not require defendants or their relatives to testify in court (575), we may rightly take issue with courts killing sorcerers (552) or the commandment to wipe out the descendants of Amalek (598). To be religious is to take on the responsibility of not just claiming and living by a set of ethics but also allowing those ethics to adapt to the world and its circumstances—in fact, demanding they do. As religious moderates, we find nothing more troubling than the belief that “faith alone” is what ties us to God and makes us believers. In this scenario, God seems needy and jealous, not at all a model for ethical living. This is not to say that we can’t believe—only that it doesn’t really matter. Emphasizing belief threatens to make religious action irrelevant. Atheists and religious people alike would do well to remember that it’s ethics and not belief that has, from the earliest moments of religious life, bound faithful people together. And it’s here still today—in stories of faithful friendships, the births of the children, the cycles of life and death, and the moral innovation necessary to make our synagogues and churches more inclusive—that the meaning of God is found.
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idoevdme http://snsfpdhr.com uadpmqeh bnacwqss
I repeat, LOL. You kids spend way too much time reading the funny pages and diddling your xBoxes. Just admit that you need this sort of support mechanism to make your persional life have meaning. don't make up these sily elaborate tomfooleries to try and make it all sound reasonable. Get over yourselves. You're as much a part of the problem of ignorance as the fundis
"The atheist reads the book of Genesis and says “It says here the world was created in six days. Only a fool would believe this nonsense.” Refusing to admit that the scripture may hold some greater metaphorical truth, like the fundamentalist, the atheist can only read Genesis one way—as a misguided historical account of the beginning of time."
Dawkins in particular does not say that scripture cannot be read as a metaphor - he simply wonders who is to determine what is metaphorical, and what instead is to be taken literally. I disagree that atheists are the other side of the coin to religious fundamentalists (at least the ones that I have read who are not so shallow as to simply argue that "these things written in your book didn't really happen"). I enjoyed this article, though, and look forward to reading your book.
For a number of reasons it seems Bebergal & Korb haven't read Dawkins' book. Dawkins makes very clear what he means by the word religion. B&K here use another meaning of the word. That makes their article rather pointless.
I'm sorry; I'm still learning how to use this blog.
That last comment of mine, "Yasher Koach" was meant specifically for Gaby's comment, "The problem is not God," and not for the feature in general.
Again, Yasher koach Gaby. I think you draw an important distinction between "religion" and "God" — a distinction with which, as I've said, I'm in agreement.
Thank you. I'm beginning to understand (and find myself in agreement with) the Bright point of view.
All "truth" is fundamentally prejudice. That is, Absolute Truth — being perfect and infinite — is unknowable by the imperfect and finite mind of man.
Therefore, what is "true" for me may be untrue for you; and what is "true" for you may be untrue for me, and neither of us is in any position to judge the other except according to our prejudices.
In other words, what some people want to call "The Search for Truth" is actually nothing more than a contest of egos.
And I don’t see why people get so up in arms about Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. They are obviously not talking down on religious liberals and those who have religious feeling but don’t really believe there is an all powerful father figure in the sky who has an all consuming worry about what we do in our bedrooms. Dawkins has even referred to himself as a deeply religious non-believer. I would say the same about myself.
Perhaps even more to the point than "religion doesn't require a belief in God" is that belief in and inner knowledge of God not only doesn't require religion, but is aided by its absence.
In other words, an alternative point of departure is what we describe in Neo-Sabbatian Kabbalah as "God set free of religion," which is a more inner than outer, individual than collective approach to knowing God directly — an example of which is found in the difference between the Zohar vs. the Talmud wherein the former points INWARD to personal gnosis while the latter points OUTWARD to religious practice.
Putting all pretense at modesty aside, I discuss these issues in a series of live talks I've given and which can be downloaded at http://www.donmeh-west.com/zohar.shtml
First of all, I would call myself atheist, in the sense of not believing in any god or deity. I don’t need a religion to be a good person. If I had to choose a name for my way of living, I would certainly choose buddhism – which _is_ much more a way of living, i.e. a religion without a belief in God.
The problem is that more than 99,9% of all members of the Christian/Moslem/Jew-complex don’t care about living holiness, but they simply don’t accept any way of religious living apart from _their_ way. If you don’t wear their batch, you’re bad. Period. This is what we “angry atheists” are fighting against. We are fighting against guardians that tell others what to think, whatever they are called. Sometimes they are called religious leaders, sometimes politicians. Their aim is always to control other people’s minds.
Reflection or meditation is not what they want.
God is their argument, their weapon, their slogan, their election campaign. Belief is not important for them. A fight against God(s) is a fight against this false usage of God(s), not against the belief itself.
I’m a little unclear on why you make the assumption that people must work out without contradiction their commitments and justify their practices in terms of reason. While there are clearly moments for such justifications, it strikes me that this is not how most people live their lives. Not only is life rife with contradiction, but we engage in numerous actions which are embodied as opposed to discursive, and which are not only meaningful, but fundamentally lose or alter their meaning when put into language. (art, music, ritual etc)…when we explain these things, we change their meaning(s) through the act of explanation.
If, on the other hand, you are suggesting that there is something about religion specifically (i.e. its roll in genocide, colonial expansion, racism, etc) which requires us to work out contractions in our commitments lest we cause more violence, then you seem to be prescribing that religious people resolve contradictions (I assume it is a contradiction with “logic” which you are referring to), rather than (as you claim) describing a contradiction which must be resolved. This also seems strange, not only because you prop up “reason” where “God” once stood as a means of legitimation, but that religion has often been put to as much good use as evil (civil rights movement, catholic liberation theology, etc).
Which brings me to my next point—your insistence that “religion” is somehow a separate entity which we are capable of isolating (as separate from politics, economics, nationalism, race, etc.), describing, and then judging. I think it might be more helpful to look for the ways in which religion intersects with other aspects of society and culture; particularly when we are trying to explain why some might be “extremists” and others “moderates” (terms which are relative, and context dependent themselves).
Particularly in a place like jewcy, I’m not sure what pushing people to reject religion achieves, aside from challenging the inspiration and motivation which buttresses people’s life projects and creative capacity. Such projects and capacities need not come from religion, but why not extend your argument—why not strip down and force people to work out the contradictions which mark all their identities and practices? I think you’ll soon find you’re left with an empty vessel, the liberal ideal or the “sovereign self” who can create their identity and existence out of nothing. This idea is spurious at best (even as articulated by Marx) and has often served as a cover for those who actually have the power to impose their vision of the world onto others so that it ceases to be a vision at all, but reality itself.
We need things like religion–not as a bounded, ridged set of instructions, guidelines, identities, etc–but as a source of creativity, identification, and change. We should certainly be self-reflexive, and wary of those contexts in which religion plays a role in power and domination; but to jettison the entire project seems, to me at least, somewhat rash.
Do not submit your crap to StumbleUpon’s atheist category. Submit your propaganda to Judaism category. So we atheists won’t have to put up with your disgustingly primitive reasonings which looks only ridiculously pathetic.
The assertion:
‘To say that myths express truth, perhaps in a way that nothing else can, is basically a sales pitch by religious people to persuade doubters to stay in the faith.’
is, in my humble opinion, shortsighted. I would not consider myself a religious person by any means, but I would say that I am spiritual. My faith in Christianity unraveled when I was in High School, but once I started reading Campbell, among others, I began to see WHY it did. The debate between blind faith, and reasoned dissent is an important one, but as was mentioned in the article, they are both capable of missing the point.
Campbell wrote in “Thou Art That” that he was asked onto a radio show to discuss myth and metaphor, and when he asked the DJ for an example of a metaphor, the DJ replied, “My friend John is very fast, therefore, john is like a deer.” Campbell countered that that wasn’t the metaphor, the metaphor was “John is a deer”. The DJ said that that was a lie, and therein lies the problem.
as was asserted above, myths cannot be concretized if they are to retain their power. Campbell talks about them being “transparent to transcendence”, that when they are working properly, they point towards (or, seen through them are) truths that cannot otherwise be put properly into language. Language is otherwise too static to express these ideas. It is the “mysterium tremendum et fascinas” of existence. I have absolute faith in science to describe our world and everything in it, but it cannot hope to adequately express the raw primal experience of what it feels like to be ALIVE. It too, in a sense, is a type of mythology. Because it gives coherence and form to the world. One can stand in awe in a gothic cathedral, when reading a myth from the orient, when faced with the grandeur of a supernova, or when unraveling the complexities of a DNA helix, but through them all runs the same thing.
Nicely put Steve Beck
I am an atheist. My parents were agnostic Jews who had the grace and decency to allow me and my brothers and sister to make up our own minds about religion. They never asked us to go to temple, and we didn’t go. Three of us are atheists, and my late brother was a loopy New Ager. If someone asks me if I’m Jewish, I will say that I am in the sense that my parents were, but that I do not believe in “god” or practice Judaism in any way. I am not even familiar with most of the rituals and practices, and have no interest in them at all except as a matter of intellectual curiosity.
Very few religious people take their “holy” scriptures as being completely mythological. How many Jews consider as mythology the “fact” that they are chosen people or consider Abraham or Moses as fictional characters? And if, as I do, someone considers the torah to be almost totally fictional, is it now sensible to practice Judaism, because now all we’re doing is centering our lives on valuable myths? I don’t think so. I don’t need myths to give meaning to my life. If a myth says that life is fleeting or that love can be mysterious, the myth tells me nothing that I don’t already know, so why bother with it, unless you wish to amuse yourself with stories? To say that myths express truth, perhaps in a way that nothing else can, is basically a sales pitch by religious people to persuade doubters to stay in the faith. Plus, more than a few myths are false. How about the one that says a savior is on his way to save us?
Being a member of a community is nice, but to follow ridiculous rituals and to mouth meaningless phrases in order to belong is far too high a price for me to pay.
I don’t know if you could call me an angry atheist, but I certainly am disappointed that so many of my fellow human beings are so deluded and blinkered by religious belief and the feeling of a need for religious participation. I firmly believe that Dawkins and Hitchens are right in what they say, and if they’re angry, I can clearly see why.
I'd been active in the Jewish community for long enough that people were surprised when I stood up before the congregation and made it official, but I had felt like being an atheist and being a Jew were incompatible for a long time. Learning to set aside the dominant culture's childish Anthropomorphic Omniscient Voyeur metaphors for God and coming up with meaningful ways to comprehend the incomprehensibility were necessary before I could accept Judaism–and far more difficult than internalizing the need to pick up a hallah on Fridays.
So although I'm a rather observant member of my community, I'd still call myself an atheist: not in an anti-theist believe/deny way, but in an a-theist relevant/irrelevant way. Any talk about God is too big and too small simultaneously, and I'm very wary of people who speak confidently about their closeness to God or their knowledge of God's will. God doesn't enter into my life in that way, and if others are experiencing that, well, that's fine, but leave me out of it.
But I'm also thrilled that my son the liturgist has just asked me to copy-edit his siddur.
It’s more important than feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. The author is correct in saying that atheists and religious fundamentalists tend to share and important trait in common. They both believe that reality adheres to concrete truths. There is no problem with this belief, it is demonstrably true in any arbitrary set of situations. Either the toast landed butter-side up, or butter-side down. The ovens temperature is at a certain level right now, not any other. You are happy, or sad, or annoyed, or confused, etc, at this instant, not anything else. God has a certain set of rules, or another, or he doesn’t even exist to begin with. The world is a certain way. The trouble is in how you figure out how the world is in difficult situations, such as the question of gods. Human knowledge is inherently non-absolute, we cant be absolutely 100% sure of anything, and most things we know don’t even reach near that mark. A suitable system of thought for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and verification would take this into account. I would also contend that that knowing the truth requires evidence, observations, that anyone can see and test, because anything else is too easily made up. I’m going to cut to the chase and just say it: science. It is a system that allows easy to fool, short-lived people like us the ability to determine the most truth that we can, and the correct any mistakes once we realize they are there. Approaching the world scientifically doesn’t make you a Vulcan, the sense of awe is not lost in understanding, but multiplied: a mighty oak is even more awesome when you realize that each of its trillions of cells has tens of thousands of kinesins lugging around sacs of protein more than 100 times its own mass. Well, it is for me. To wrap up, finally, I want to address this article, which is neither literalist nor scientific. I believe that it is untrue to say that we need some ill defined sense of “holiness” to make us feel human, connected to each other, and moral. I agree that there are “metaphorical truths” in the holy books, just as there are metaphorical truths in Harry Potter. The fact is, moral codes can, and are (I would argue most of the time) obtained from combining the golden rule with practical truths, augmented by an acknowledgment of our shared human quirks. Dang, I’ve rambled, I hope that my transitions weren’t too abrupt, and I thank you in advance for reading this whole thing.
Thanks for the article. I have had some experience being proselytized by Yeshiva Orthodox and while they “had me” for some time, ultimately I was inspired to break with them and to move to a completely secular point of view. Unfortunately, this does not leave much room for spiritual growth, and so I am very glad that your article helped me to attend and appreciate a Tisha B’Av service yesterday. It was at the Spanish & Portuguese synagogue in NYC (http://www.nyc-architecture.com/UWS/UWS015.htm) which is an inspiring place in itself. Keeping in mind that I need not read things in a literal way allowed me to connect with the text in a deep way. Thanks again. Good luck with the book.
A few years ago, my partner and I started our Belief system on our bedroom wall. We called it the Great Wall. My partner, a then-Atheist, slowly began to unravel her belief in God, whatever that meant (at the time, and still, God exists because only a Great God could have created chocolate ice cream).
We demonstrated our beliefs by putting bits and pieces of our travels on a wall in our bedroom. Not silly tchotchkes, but a little piece of tile from a seminary in Seville, Spain, a buddah that someone had given me when I was pregnant, a set of prayer beads from a funeral of a dear friend. Over time, my partner began to discover what her faith in God was. She slowly moved from an atheist perspective to small reminders of the things she did believe in. Piece by small piece, we began to fabric together our faith.
Today, my former Atheist partner is full of fath: the one she built. It embodies all the pricipals of solid Jewish foundations, with belief in things I find silly like angels walking on earth (her dad, she believes), to blind belief in things being okay somehow, and a tinge of anger for things that are unjust. She underlines her now very strong faith with a big red underlining of her engineering mind and has complete faith that there are more things to add to our Great Wall.
A wonderful examination and tribute to the melding point of the rational and the faithful.
I greatly enjoyed your article. To often we confuse the teachings of our holy scriptures with the teachings of the church. Pick up a copy of The Irrational Athiest when it comes out. It breaks down and the arguements of the new athiests in a secular. The author is Theodore Beale and I believe you would enjoy his articles as well.
It's interesting that you end your discussion of the location of the meaning of god, and where it is found. Your declaration of where this so called god is found does not convince anyone or anything. I may declare that god is located in my pinky, that does not make this a worthy idea, rational, or in anyway important enough to teach to anyone else. If you find the idea of the Jewish god so interesting as to find its meaning in the "in stories of faithful friendships, the births of the children, the cycles of life and death" then so be it. But this god is no friend of mine, just like Zeus or Thor no longer find many friends among the people of the world. Religious moderates are a contradiction in terms. This may take a while for you to accept, but logically it is a an inevitability that those who are intellectually honest will have to come to terms with.
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