Religious faith is under assault. In books and movies and on television, militant secular critics attack religion with a renewed vigor. These "new atheists" repeat a two-part mantra: that religious faith is hopelessly irrational and that those possessed of such faith are responsible for the hatred and bloodshed that has plagued humanity. Abandon religion, they urge us, and the world will at last live in peace. In Defense of Faith examines this proposition in the context of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition and asserts that, far from encouraging hatred and violence, the Judeo-Christian tradition has easily been the most effective curb upon the dark defects of human nature and our best tool in the struggle for humanity. From the Christian activists who fought to stop the genocide of Indians in South America and their ethnic cleansing in North America, to the abolition of African slavery on both sides of the Atlantic, and on to modern human rights activists from Martin Luther King Jr. to the rock star Bono—In Defense of Faith rebuts the fashionable arguments against religion and presents the strong and lasting record of the Judeo-Christian idea. History has not been as kind to the atheist model: every time it is put to the test, we have reverted to the most base, violent instincts of our selfish genes.
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1 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 172.
2 Tacitus Histories 5.5.
3 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1997), 118.
4 Ibid., 97-98.
5 Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006), 18-19.
6Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).
7 Edwin Black, War Against the Weak (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), 108-122.
8 Cited in part in Black, War Against the Weak, 120 and in part in Albert Alschuler, Law Without Morals (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 24.
9 Cited in Alschuler, Law Without Morals, 26.
10 Ibid., 27.
11 Ibid.
12 Black, War Against the Weak, 122-123.
13 Cited in Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, “The Elementary DNA of Dr. Watson,” Sunday Times, October 14, 2007.
14 Ibid.
15 Black, War Against the Weak, 52.
16 Paul Lombardo, “Eugenics Sterilization Laws,” hosted in the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement of the Dolan DNA Learning Center of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory (www.eugenicsarchive.org).
17 Black, War Against the Weak, 185-205; John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 300-330.
dp n="389" folio="368" ?
18 Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 169-170.
19 Ibid., 170.
20 Ibid., 172.
21 Ibid., 172-173.
22 Ibid., 181-191.
23 Ibid., 173.
24 Paul Zielbauer, “Princeton Bioethics Professor Debates Views on Disability and Euthanasia,” New York Times, October 13, 1999.
25 Ibid.
26 Amartya Sen, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,” New York Review of Books, December 20, 1990.
27 Amartya Sen, “Missing Women—Revisited,” British Medical Journal, December 6, 2003, Vol. 327.
28 Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Center, Human Development in South Asia 2000: The Gender Question (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6.
29 Gautam N. Allahbadia, “The 50 Million Missing Women,” Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics, September 2002, Vol. 19, No. 9.
30 United Nations Population Fund, “Gender-Based Violence: A Price Too High,” State of World Population 2005,www.unfpa.org.
31 Shuzhuo Li, “Imbalanced Sex Ratio at Birth and Comprehensive Intervention in China,” presented at the Fourth Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Heath Rights held in Hyderabad, India in October 2007.
32 Credit for coining this term is typically given to Mary Anne Warren, author of the 1985 book Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection.
33 Cited in Eric Baculinao, “China Begins to Face Sex-Ratio Imbalance,” MSNBC.com, September 14, 2004.
34 Howard French, “As Girls ‘Vanish,’ Chinese City Battles Tide of Abortions,” New York Times, February 17, 2005.
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Chapter One
Our Morality: Selfish Genes and Cultural Clout
1 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3.
2 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem [1963] (reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 252.
3 Ibid., 135-136.
4 Ibid., 136.
5 Ibid., 33.
6 Ibid., 114.
7 Ibid., 116.
8 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man [1879] (reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 148.
9 Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 37- 40.
10 Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” New York Times, January 13, 2008.
11 Ibid.
12 Cited in Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 56.
13 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2.
14 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 217.
15 Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 163.
16 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 141.
17 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2.
18 Ibid., 200-201.
19 Ibid., 3.
20 Ibid.
21 Wilson, On Human Nature, 153.
22 Marc Hauser, Moral Minds (New York: Harper Collins, 2006), 44.
23 Ibid., 420.
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24 Cited in Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice (Camb...
Table of contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Introduction
ONE - Our Morality: Selfish Genes and Cultural Clout
TWO - The Judeo-Christian Idea: Transcending Our Selfish Genes
THREE - The Judeo-Christian Idea Against Genocide
FOUR - The Judeo-Christian Idea Against Slavery
FIVE - Falling Backwards: The Abandonment of the Judeo-Christian Idea and the ...
SIX - The Rising: The Judeo-Christian Idea in the Post-War World
