Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

(Note to self: next time, remember to remember that Momus doesn't care about arguments, he just like to play. duh.)

Howbout "affirmists"? Or "persistants"

I prefer 'Momus doesn't care about arguments, but he likes to think.'

Why would Dawkins wish atheism to echo the somewhat propagandist conduct of a religion, particularly Christianity (though Christianity, or at least its true essence or meme – altruism – has all but been lost)? What’s wrong with having the courage of your convictions? Convictions imply ideas packed with emotion; hazardous and worthless! Septembereleventh came for courageous convictions. You catch more flies with jam than vinegar.

Watch out, Charles, there's a lot of baby in that bathwater!

Nick in pointing out the speck in my eye while ignoring the plank in his own shockah

You're paraphrasing Matthew 7 there in support of your claim to have 'logical reasoning' on your side. Somewhat... illogical, captain? I also can't really accept that because my argument went to a place you didn't expect -- the idea that intelligent machines may one day rationally fail to believe in their creators too -- it isn't rational any more. (If you had blamed me for talking like a bad sci-fi film, though, you might have had a point.)

These two interviews made me an admirer of Dawkins:

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/index.html

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/index1.html

How would we be better off without religion?

We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

What is so bad about religion?

Well, it encourages you to believe falsehoods, to be satisfied with inadequate explanations which really aren't explanations at all. And this is particularly bad because the real explanations, the scientific explanations, are so beautiful and so elegant. Plenty of people never get exposed to the beauties of the scientific explanation for the world and for life. And that's very sad. But it's even sadder if they are actively discouraged from understanding by a systematic attempt in the opposite direction, which is what many religions actually are. But that's only the first of my many reasons for being hostile to religion.

My sense is that you don't just think religion is dishonest. There's something evil about it as well.

Well, yes. I think there's something very evil about faith, where faith means believing in something in the absence of evidence, and actually taking pride in believing in something in the absence of evidence. And the reason that's dangerous is that it justifies essentially anything. If you're taught in your holy book or by your priest that blasphemers should die or apostates should die -- anybody who once believed in the religion and no longer does needs to be killed -- that clearly is evil. And people don't have to justify it because it's their faith. They don't have to say, "Well, here's a very good reason for this." All they need to say is, "That's what my faith says." And we're all expected to back off and respect that. Whether or not we're actually faithful ourselves, we've been brought up to respect faith and to regard it as something that should not be challenged. And that can have extremely evil consequences. The consequences it's had historically -- the Crusades, the Inquisition, right up to the present time where you have suicide bombers and people flying planes into skyscrapers in New York -- all in the name of faith.

But don't you need to distinguish between religious extremists who kill people and moderate, peaceful religious believers?

You certainly need to distinguish them. They are very different. However, the moderate, sensible religious people you've cited make the world safe for the extremists by bringing up children -- sometimes even indoctrinating children -- to believe that faith trumps everything and by influencing society to respect faith. Now, the faith of these moderate people is in itself harmless. But the idea that faith needs to be respected is instilled into children sitting in rows in their madrasahs in the Muslim world. And they are told these things not by extremists but by decent, moderate teachers and mullahs. But when they grow up, a small minority of them remember what they were told. They remember reading their holy book, and they take it literally. They really do believe it. Now, the moderate ones don't really believe it, but they have taught children that faith is a virtue. And it only takes a minority to believe what it says in the holy book -- the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran, whatever it is. If you believe it's literally true, then there's scarcely any limit to the evil things you might do.

And yet most moderate religious people are appalled by the apocalyptic thinking of religious extremists.

Of course they're appalled. They're very decent, nice people. But they have no right to be appalled because, in a sense, they brought it on the world by teaching people, especially children, the virtues of unquestioned faith.

Are you saying if parents belong to a particular church, they should not teach their children about that religion?

I would say that parents should teach their children anything that's known to be factually true -- like "that's a bluebird" or "that's a bald eagle." Or they could teach children that there are such things as religious beliefs. But to teach children that it is a fact that there is one god or that God created the world in six days, that is child abuse.

But isn't much of parenting about teaching values to children? Just as a family of vegetarians will teach their children about the evils of killing animals and eating meat, can't parents who believe in God teach their children the values of a religious upbringing?

Children ask questions. And when a child says, "Why is it wrong to do so and so?" you can perfectly well answer that by saying, "Well, how would you like it if somebody else did that to you?" That's a way of imparting to a child the Golden Rule: "Do as you would be done by." The world would fall apart if everybody stole things from everybody else, so it's a bad thing to steal. If a child says, "Why can't I eat meat?" then you can say, "Your mother and I believe that it's wrong to eat meat for this, that and the other reason. We are vegetarians. You can decide when you're older whether you want to be a vegetarian or not. But for the moment, you're living in this house, so the food we give you is not meat." That I could see. I think it's child abuse not to let the child have the free choice of knowing there are other people who believe something quite different and the child could make its own choice.

Now, there are an awful lot of people who call themselves religious -- or some people prefer to use the word "spiritual" -- even though they don't go to church. They aren't part of any organized religion. They don't believe in a personal God. Some don't even like the word "God" because there's so much baggage attached to that word. But they still have some powerful feeling that there is a transcendent reality. And they often engage in some spiritual practice in their own lives. Would you call these people "religious"?

That's a difficult question. I probably would call them religious. It depends on exactly what they do believe. The first chapter of "The God Delusion" talks about Einstein, who often used the word "God." Einstein clearly was an atheist in the sense that he didn't believe in any sort of personal God. He used the word "God" as a metaphoric name for that which we don't yet understand, for the deep mysteries at the foundation of the universe.

Is this rhetoric or does it actually mean something? Something troubles me about the logic of the first two sentences.

The third sentence is rather too dictatorial for my liking.

still a dick:

...We who doubt that "theology" is a subject at all, or who compare it with the study of leprechauns, are eagerly hoping to be proved wrong. Of course, university departments of theology house many excellent scholars of history, linguistics, literature, ecclesiastical art and music, archaeology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, iconology, and other worthwhile and important subjects. These academics would be welcomed into appropriate departments elsewhere in the university. But as for theology itself, defined as "the organised body of knowledge dealing with the nature, attributes, and governance of God", a positive case now needs to be made that it has any real content at all, and that it has any place in today's universities.

what is the far left's beef with dawkins? they think he's too western or empirical or something?

my beef with him is that he's an anti-intellectual jerk

well, why?

is this a white guilt thing? like other races/cultures are still religious, so we're underhandely slagging them for believing?

He used the word "God" as a metaphoric name for that which we don't yet understand, for the deep mysteries at the foundation of the universe.

I mean seriously if he'd bother to READ any actual theology he would find this position of Einstein's is word for word - to the very letter - the position of various theologians from a variety of faiths, many of whom predated Einstein by hundreds and in some cases thousands of years.

he doesn't follow his own argument of the necessity of examining evidence. He readily admits he's never read Saint Augustine or Faruddin Attar or Gershom Scholem or whoever. The guy is a jackass.

Yes, because clearly theology from Babylon or indigenous populations is at issue, rather than Christian, Jewish or Islamic theology.

xxpost-Yeah, but Einstien didn't waste away his life chewing over the idea.

As with the other Dawkins thread, I'm still utterly unclear why anyone needs to be an expert on individual theologians to write off the belief in God. Theologians don't deal with proofs that would satisfy anyone looking for scientific evidence - which is, rather clearly, Dawkin's point of attack.

lots of stupid people on this thread

also, milo otm.

for instance, that book where he tries to argue that we should find the impersonal, mechanistic operations of the universe sublime and beautiful. it's soul crushing, why cant he admit that?
-- ryan (ryan), Monday, November 17, 2003 1:23 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

like was this guy kidding? lol sad sack

He also doesn't give any credit to organized religion's remarkable role in preserving and fostering scientific thought - without the Catholic Church we would in all likelihood have no records of large swathes of western knowledge, from Plato and Aristotle on down. Religion gave us literature and printing. It's played a unique role in developing the idea of basic human rights, etc. For him its all just "who are these silly savages believing in the all-powerful sky god, what a bunch of morons" - its a deeply arrogant reductionism at work.

x-post

shakey: giving credit to an organization for doing worldy, non-religious things doesn't mean you can't also think their belief system is a sham

their = its

I'm still utterly unclear why anyone needs to be an expert on individual theologians to write off the belief in God.

because its fucking lazy - you don't think, over the thousands of years of human thought, that Dawkins' line of attack has ever been considered/discussed/refuted by the very people who are obsessed with this particular idea?

x-post

He also doesn't give any credit to organized religion's remarkable role in preserving and fostering scientific thought - without the Catholic Church we would in all likelihood have no records of large swathes of western knowledge, from Plato and Aristotle on down.

As to the initial quote -

He's half right about where you could stick theologians, he just phrases it badly. I doubt that he'd argue that people wishing to study the nature of religion/religious traditions/mythology wouldn't have a place in the liberal arts.

He's saying that when you approach the subject as true believers, when 'teaching' has elements of 'witnessing,' you aren't participating in any kind of dialogue that would belong in another academic discipline.

shakey: giving credit to an organization for doing worldy, non-religious things doesn't mean you can't also think their belief system is a sham

that's totally true - but Dawkins doesn't stop at calling the belief system a sham, he actively accuses it of being the source of human misery. The very first page of the intro to his book introduces the oft- and very easily discredited canard that religion has been responsible for the vast majority of violence and oppression.

x-post

So Augustine found physical evidence of the existence of God?

It's not lazy to not read up on a bunch of theologians if you're coming to the table with the assumption that NOTHING they can say will persuade you (<--- that's the lazy part): it's an efficient use of your time.

xp ah, I haven't read the God Delusion. I stick mostly to his science-y stuff.

I like the idea that we'd somehow have missed the idea of printing without religion.

But Dawkins would merely reply that it was organized Christianity that played a role in losing that information to start with

This is not historically accurate. It wasn't Christians that regularly sacked Rome and essentially destroyed the Empire.

It takes some difficulty to say (with a straight face) that without the Catholic Church we'd never have, say, learned of evolution, doesn't it?

Depends how far you want to draw the line - if you want to draw the line between Aristotle and Darwin, the Church is right in the middle.

He's saying that when you approach the subject as true believers, when 'teaching' has elements of 'witnessing,' you aren't participating in any kind of dialogue that would belong in another academic discipline.

I don't disagree with this at all, dogmatists are no use in any kind of rational debate. But again, Darwin doesn't stop with a specific brand of belief - he writes off ALL belief.

x-post

I like the idea that we'd somehow have missed the idea of printing without religion.

religious impulse is essentially at the root of the written (and, much later, the printed word). before it, based on all the available archaeological evidence, people didn't have anything they felt compelled to write about.

As with the other Dawkins thread, I'm still utterly unclear why anyone needs to be an expert on individual theologians to write off the belief in God. Theologians don't deal with proofs that would satisfy anyone looking for scientific evidence - which is, rather clearly, Dawkin's point of attack.

you dont have to be an expert on individual theologians to write off a belief in god, but you DO have to be an expert to write off "theology" as a discipline

and honestly why is he trying to separate out "organized religion" from any number of belief systems that have contributed to shitty things in history?

So Augustine found physical evidence of the existence of God?

hey read him and find out. it'll be like a whodunit mystery!

eligious impulse is essentially at the root of the written (and, much later, the printed word). before it, based on all the available archaeological evidence, people didn't have anything they felt compelled to write about.

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 9:24 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

^^^ stupid. like, seriously dude?