Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

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.

http://gawker.com/5818993/richard-dawkins-torn-limb-from-limbby-atheists

I don't even really know whose side to take.

are you sure you don't know whose side to take?

Ugh. It's bad enough to read his comments on that blog, but then I'm unable to read them without hearing that voice which makes it 10x worse.

I mean obv Dawkins is being a dick. But the woman's initial complaint also seems kind of dickish, esp calling out some dude on her blog for what ultimately wasn't harmful behavior.

I'm pretty sure which side to take lol

But the woman's initial complaint also seems kind of dickish

totally beside the point.

yeah u right

Dawkins response - that she should shut up because other women have it worse - is just a stupid argument

But the woman's initial complaint also seems kind of dickish, esp calling out some dude on her blog for what ultimately wasn't harmful behavior.

It kind of is harmful behavior though, isn't it? Aren't you making the same argument as Dawkins? It ended well, so everything is cool?

eh, dawkins stepped in it.

skepchick felt creeped by the elevator proposition and wrote about it. fine. she's got every right to feel creeped by w/e, and there's always something a bit transgressive (or at least risky) about out-of-the-blue propositions. especially late at night when there's no one else around.

dawkins thought she was making something out of nothing, foolishly exaggerating this trivial non-encounter into a self-aggrandizing grievance. fine, that's his right, and it's not like the crime in question was so terribly severe. unfortunately, he selected a breathtakingly hostile and dickish means of getting his point across (surprise!), and the shit hit the fan.