Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

if people are engaged in those activities to the point where they have gods, rituals of worship, prophets, ecstatic experiences, etc... then why not qualify those things as religions?

eh you go girl

the japan example is pretty tight by any measure tho

i think for Dawkins, what distinguishes science is that it's a social system that transcends the blind spots that all those other systems are prone to have--at least that's the claim it makes for itself (like marxism, etc)--it's not only in the service of religious superstition that one may point out that science is not justified in this claim.

does Dawkins really ascribe proscriptive qualities to science?
I'm also a little skeptical of Bruce Lee being on that list of atheist artists -- spiritual but not religious?

and to point that lack of justification does not necessarily delegitimize science based knowledge claims, nor would it delegitimize marxist/materialist claims for the primacy of the economic, but it does limit them.

i think for Dawkins to advance a forward attack on religion means that at the very least he implicitly believes that it has something to say about the knowledge claims of religion, mainly to "debunk" them.

What does he spend time debunking exactly? It doesn't seem like you could mount a generalized attack on religions by picking apart individual falsehoods.

it seems like the current trend for that crowd is to scientifically "explain" beliefs in God (thus exposing them as false somehow?), and pointing out how religion excuses or encourages intolerance and bad behavior. his website is kinda interesting: http://richarddawkins.net/

"A Clear-Thinking Oasis"

i think one of the things about Dawkins that i do get and does make sense to me is this idea of fighting fundamentalism on its own literal-minded level--sure pointing out how silly the story of the Ark is does challenge a person who believes that stuff literally, and there is a weird back-handed empiricism to fundamentalists, and if Dawkins wants to points out "hey you're doing it wrong" that strikes me as on the level and fair.

i'm all for dawkins & co. going after creationists because at least on that front they know what they're talking about.

I'm pretty sure his critique of religion goes far beyond zinging creationist pseudo-science.

if people are engaged in those activities to the point where they have gods, rituals of worship, prophets, ecstatic experiences, etc... then why not qualify those things as religions?

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, June 2, 2011 5:45 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark

but people simply do not engage in the sorts of activities aimless was talking about "to the point where they have gods, rituals of worship, prophets, ecstatic experience" as a means of communication/communion/gnosis. marxism, capitalism, sports fanaticim (and so on) might enshrine heroes, involve ritual, and provoke ecstasies in their most ardent devotees, but this does not make them "religions", or even religious. it merely means that people invest very strongly in them. the equation of any strong belief with religion is a metaphor, and it only makes sense when we understand that. if you want to be literal about it, we might as well say that all religion is really just tribalism in disguise, and that the deities and ecstasies involved exist only to illustrate the superiority and centrality of the tribe.

I'm pretty sure his critique of religion goes far beyond zinging creationist pseudo-science.

― the three stigmata of a (Viceroy), Friday, June 3, 2011 1:15 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

not really!

OTM. dawkins' real enemy seems to be fundamentalist insistence on the real and true historical accuracy! or arrant nonsense. he's fighting against creationism, the young earth, The Historical Jesus, against the excesses, bigotry and danger of fundamentalism in general. problem is that he conceives of this crusade in "science and reason vs. idiotic superstition" terms, and seems happy enough to lump all religious belief in with the lunatic idiocy he despises. this strengthens the value of his arguments in the pop marketplace (where simplicity and volume are unquestioned virtues), but makes them hard to take if you prefer compassion and complexity to kicking ass and taking names.

"...of arrant nonsense."

I'm also a little skeptical of Bruce Lee being on that list of atheist artists -- spiritual but not religious?

― Philip Nunez, Friday, June 3, 2011 12:52 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

Well they have a pretty clear quote in there.

One of the big misunderstandings about atheism is that it means a lack of spirituality. At a literal level, it just means a lack of belief in God(s). Agnostic is actually the stronger term, because it means a lack of spiritual/religious belief in general.

The battle on the two terms has been lost so badly that it's hard to know whether to tell someone if you're one or the other.

yeah, it's funny how huxley's word, which originally meant exactly what most now think of as atheism, has come to describe simple doubt, a withholding of judgment when it comes to the divine. meanwhile, atheism, literally the lack of belief in god or gods, is now typically understood as something very similar to huxley's agnosticism: the rationalist rejection of all religious or spiritual superstition.

i'm comfortable with today's oddly inverted, definitions, though, cuz as you say, the battle's long lost.

I understand that bona-fide religions occupy a cultural privilege and space that things like sports do not, but in purely functional terms, I don't see how they are at a metaphorical remove. Maybe give an example of a culturally (or at least for tax-purposes) accepted religion that is more like sports fanaticism than actual religion.

Keanu Reeves on that list threw me, too. Poor atheist dude.

my argument (offered as devil's advocacy) is that sports fanaticism and religion are equivalent manifestations of a tribal impulse, and that tribalism is the real root of all social evil. to my mind, this makes more sense than insisting that philosophical absolutism is not only indistinguishable from religion, but is literally a form of religion. we have language that describes non-religious absolutism and fanaticism perfectly well. we needn't repurpose the word "religion" to describe these things.

Agnostic is actually the stronger term, because it means a lack of spiritual/religious belief in general.

uh, not really

That it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism. ["Christianity and Agnosticism," 1889]

doesn't really preclude also being a theist

i.e. "I don't really know, and have no proof, but I choose to believe anyway"

Agnostic is actually the stronger term, because it means a lack of spiritual/religious belief in general.
uh, not really

― unmetalled world (wk), Friday, 3 June 2011 04:10 (3 minutes ago)

yes really (in the literal sense).

But the meaning of the term has been altered and diluted to mean just a general sense of doubt.

But it says nothing about belief, just certainty of knowledge. Both now, and in Huxley's original intended meaning as far as I can tell.

What annoys me about the term is that a lot of atheists now use it to mean kind of a wishy-washy "undecided" stance.

There should be a term that means "I just don't give a fuck (about this topic)."

But it says nothing about belief, just certainty of knowledge.

yeah, but huxley was clearly trying to distinguish between "real" (empirically demonstrable) knowledge and what he regarded as pointless speculation. he almost certainly chose the root word "gnostic" because it describes esoteric knowledge gained through spiritual practice or agency. so to be agnostic is not simply to reject strong spiritual certainties, but to harbor a basic indifference to the idea of special spiritual knowing. agnosticism, as he defined it, is an insistence that all valid claims to knowledge must be independently verifiable, and that anything else is just so much talk.

my argument (offered as devil's advocacy) is that sports fanaticism and religion are equivalent manifestations of a tribal impulse,

man I wish you and Adorno could have posted on Facebook last night at the height of the Heat game

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13659394

kind of interesting: had pegged colley as a leftie, but it's a complicated world i guess

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/06/ac-grayling-private-university-syllabus

i mean what's funny here is all the high-horsery, like cash-crazy birkbeck et al are in some ways socially beneficial institutions

tbh if Jamie Oliver doesn't have a chair then i ain't interested

jesus christ is our lord and savior

man I was hanging out somewhere near some people who, during the course of their conversation with each other, it became clear, were "moderate conservatives from wisconsin"

they went on to say "osama, obama, what's the difference"

did they work in a lumber mill there?

also "as long as they believe christ is lord they're alright with me"

it blew my mind that they were in college

I haven't read this thread are people talking about christianity or islam

This only mentions Dawkins in passing, but it's interesting and tangentially related:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n11/galen-strawson/religion-is-a-sin

hah, i read that today, strawson needs to get murked

If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them.

oh fuck off

that read like a lot of gibberish to me tbh. also that sucker/succor pun was unforgiveable.

that's stupid, bad prose, awful

i'm reassured that everyone hates it, good work guys.

obvi the prose is 'legit' but if you're going to say something that (knowingly?) stupid, cut the formal 'we' shit

i scrolled through and laughed out loud at "theodicy, an unsurpassably disgusting practice". these guys are always such sourpusses.

you would not believe rotten.com's theodicy section
you can't unsee that shit

Yeah, Strawson's editorializing was a bit much, but the books sound interesting to me as an attempt to reconstitute the "good parts" of religion on strictly naturalist grounds.