Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

yeah but i think what im trying to say isnt that he should attack all bad things but that you cant really separate out religion from capitalism or philosophy or science, so games like "WOW WHAT WOULD IT BE LIKE WITHOUT CHRISTIANITY PROBABLY A LOT BETTER HUH" are just totally useless

i can't speak to Dawkins' criticisms of religions past; i haven't read the book. w/r/t present-day organized religion: would you say that Dawkins might be willing to expand his argument to include dogmatic schools of thought, in general? i seem to vaguely recall that he wasn't thrilled with nationalism, either.

xposts like what

saying "all theology is useless" is just about the DUMBEST FUCKING THING IVE EVER HEARD

Taking Dawkins to task for not being nice to indigenous Africans who retain animist beliefs is missing the point. As RW says, he's an evolutionary biologist whose everyday conflicts are with modern Islam and Christianity.

It's unfair to saddle him with having to make exceptions for every minor and historical belief.

dogmatic schools of thought

like, i dunno--sweeping generalizations like "all theology is free of content"??

modern Islam and Christianity

ya but dude these are STILL multiple, non-static concepts--my grandmother goes to church every sunday but she believes in a VERY different god than fred phelps

painting them all as loonies is fucking preposterous!!

-- max, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 5:40 PM (17 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

I'd say there's a lot of evidence of abundant religious lunacy and it's high time that religion be put under the same kind of scrutiny as other items out there in the marketplace of ideas. For most of human history, this was not allowed. And in a lot of places, it still isn't.

why aren't they the dominant institutions still?

see: Gibbon

theres a lot of evidence of abundant scientific lunacy, too! i dont have a problem with placing religion or religious ppl under scrutiny but doing with a brush as large as dawkins and no flair or desire for complexity or subtlety helps no one

dawkins is a fucking prick

THAT's my main problem with the guy, also with Hitchens when he gets on the subject. I don't have as much contention with the guy's particular opinions so much as the way he expresses them. I did get a kick out the jokes South Park made about him.

-- kingfish, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 5:32 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Extremely lame objections. You mean you just wish they'd say what they say in a nicer way?

max, you're totally right. however, milo is, too, in that dawkins sees fundamentalist islam/christianity as major threats to human development and well-being. and i would tend to agree.

no i mean i think thats fair! im not defending al-qaeda or suicide bobmers or james dobson... it just seems to me that the hardline atheism he espouses is just the flip side of the fucking coin--a total closed-mindedness, and an incredibly ignorant one to boot

riverwolf the trick is that the key word is FUNDAMENTALIST, not Christian or Islamic.

x-post

i mean in the case of al-qaeda it helps exactly 0 people to blame it on islam

no flair or desire for complexity or subtlety helps no one

-- max, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 5:45 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

Have you read Dawkins? It sounds as if you've heard a few soundbites.

Check this out; I'd never heard of Dawkins before reading this, but I think that throughout he makes some great points:

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

Personally, I see a belief in God as being a hair removed from a belief in ghosts and haunted houses. Clearly I'm not writing books about it - but I don't know why I have to give Christians/etc. a fair shake just because theirs is a socially-sanctioned belief.

Dawkins would agree, I think, that your grandma and mine aren't out to shackle the world with their beliefs, but that doesn't make the fundamental belief any more legitimate.

closed-minded doesn't seem like the right word, for some reason.

like, close-minded to the existence of God?

xp to max

are those the Salon interviews posted upthread (one of which I took to task for a particularly stupid line)?

stubborn and self-righteous seem more applicable than closed-minded.

But Milo, "belief in God" is, like religion, ALSO a complex and multiple idea. You might not believe in your grandmother's God, or my grandmother's God, but if you believe in "good" or "truth" I'd argue you believe in God in some (well, specifically in Plato's) sense.

closed-minded to the idea that religion or theology might be valuable or interesting or useful in some sense

right, that makes more sense.

reading the interview dally sent is sort of illuminating--dawkins is more subtle than a lot of his soundbites make clear, and hes careful to distinguish btw "good" and "bad" religion (which is sort of weird but ill let him do it)--i think the place where i really object is the idea that "belief in god" is "retarded" which to me takes a really limited and specific view of what the belief entails or might mean

like i was saying, to Plato "god" just means that you believe in an objective, external truth, or to Spinoza that you believe in some sense of "pantheism" or the necessary unfolding of the universe

i sort of assume that he means god = personal god that takes an active interest and hand in human affairs.

the necessary unfolding of the universe

^^^ sounds a lot like............science??

or, rather, a belief in "the necessary unfolding of the universe" does not have to in any way be inconsistent with a belief in science.

Max, that is not what Dawkins is talking about at all when he talks about religion. He specifically says that he's talking about belief in a supreme, supernatural being who created the universe, hears prayers, takes an active interest in human events, decides where your soul goes after you die, and has specific beliefs about what you should eat and who you should have sex with. He is not talking about god in the Platonian sense. It should be noted that Spinoza is a huge influence on modern Atheist thought.

At the point where God can be anything, you've moved the discussion out of the realm of western thought and culture, and made it an impossible issue to argue.

rw right and thats sort of my point i think! that spinoza would never have called himself an atheist, and its weird to me that dawkins cant just say "o well i believe in spinoza's god" like einstein did! instead he has to go off on "teacups around mars" or whatever

Bertrand Russell's point about teacups around Mars is an important one, because it can't really be proven or disproven that there aren't, in fact, tea cups in orbit around Mars. Not unlike the existence of god.

i dunno. plato and aristotle both seemed pretty sure that they had proven the existence of god.

and dally i can see that dawkins is usually careful abt his concept of god, but comments about theology like that irritate the shit out of me!

we all know NASA's probes have found the teacups all over Mars but they're COVERING IT UP

At the point where God can be anything, you've moved the discussion out of the realm of western thought and culture, and made it an impossible issue to argue.

this may or may not be the case, but what i mean to say is just that saying shit like "im an atheist" or "people who believe in god are stupid" doesnt make much sense unless you specify "im an atheist about THIS god," or "people who believe in THIS idea about god are stupid"

Well good for them.

Anyway, I think the current god or no-god debate is one of the better ones of new millenium. It hasn't happened before on this level, at least not in America. I'm very encouraged by Hitchens and Dawkins having stateside bestsellers on the subject. Maybe the one good thing to come out of GWB's wretched presidency is that people will be even more turned off religious fundamentalism of all stripes than they were before.

i mean, really, i don't really mind anyone's belief in God, as long as they're not in charge of anything

plus remember that augustine and thomas aquinas, probably the two most influential christian theologians, were scholars of plato (well, of plotinus) and aristotle, respectively--it strikes me that if dawkins cant be bothered to read augustine or aquinas he probably shouldnt read the greeks either!

rw do you mean that you dont want anyone to be in charge of anything, or that only ppl who reject every concept of god (this would be nietzsche, i think) should be in charge?

He spends a good amount of God Delusion systematically demolishing Aquinas's "proofs." Read the book before freaking out.

haha now i want to read it, ppl have spent a long time trying to outwite aristotle and aquinas and its VERY difficult

Max, we (you, me, Dawkins, Shakey, RW, etc.) were all raised in a Judeo-Christian culture that now has to include Islam (from the same tradition). There's no need to be absolutely specific all the time, because if someone was referring to an outsider belief system, it would be noted.

and dally otm: this is why, at the end of the day, i don't really mind that dawkins/hitchens are churlish meanies. xposts

xp ha, no, i just mean that people who take seriously the personal, supernatural God shouldn't be allowed to be in charge of, say, me.

yeah but milo w/in the abrahamic religions there's still a whole multitude of concepts of god ie augustine vs. aquinas vs. spinoza vs. avicenna vs. meister eckhardt vs. levinas vs. derrida--i still think that specificity is important

And the fact that they are meanies makes them all the more entertaining. Why would anyone want a mild and kind Christopher Hitchens?

He specifically says that he's talking about belief in a supreme, supernatural being who created the universe, hears prayers, takes an active interest in human events, decides where your soul goes after you die, and has specific beliefs about what you should eat and who you should have sex with

^^^ this is the main concept, max. the finer points maybe interesting and worth debating, but if a "belief in God" boils down to this, then that's Dawkins' major beef.

I would hope that the contention that monomaniacal assholes shouldn't be in charge goes without saying

x-post

you'd think so, right!

Just for the record: The original Sumerian writing system was derived from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. (That's from Wikipedia, so take it as you wish, but it accords with most early writing, which was used to store data. The entire idea of using writing to convey abstract thought was not an obvious jump, nor is it directly evidenced in the records for several centuries.

He specifically says that he's talking about belief in a supreme, supernatural being who created the universe, hears prayers, takes an active interest in human events, decides where your soul goes after you die, and has specific beliefs about what you should eat and who you should have sex with

this is a very very narrow conception of God and I think its highly debatable the percentage of people in the world who really literally subscribe to it

I mean basically I think its willfully naive and excessively reductionist to say that that's what a belief in God boils down to, cuz it really doesn't.