Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

Right, no one disputes that. Not even Dawkins. But what you're asking is that he annotate every statement to indicate that he's really criticizing X, but not Y and the Zs are okay too. When everyone involved realizes he's responding to the dominant religious paradigm.

Your demands of him are simply unnecessary.

I think god has AWESOME SNEAKERS. Seriously I was trying to imagine what a non-Mormon god guy figure might like and he was just SWEETASS SNEAKS and then clouds above that (didn't get very far before I fell asleep).

This is true.

This is why I'm not sure I could start my own religion.

When everyone involved realizes he's responding to the dominant religious paradigm

im not trying to play the asshole here, but i didn't realize that, and im still unconvinced that he is given dally's comments above that he "dismantles" aquinas (if hes attacking the "dominant religious paradigm," which isnt particularly aquinian or aristotelian, why is he also attacking aquinas?). ugh and honestly i dont think that my demands are "unnecessary"--what if i stood up and said "rock music is bad" or "black people are criminals" and then backtracked, saying, "i thought everyone understood i was only talking about certain conceptions of rock music or certain specific black people"

max OTM - also rhetorically even if that is what Dawkins is doing I think that's rather dangerous and short-sighted, as it reinforces and legitimizes the very conceptions of God he's seeking to undermine. By acting like those are the only ones - which they definitely are not, as I would hope is clear by now - he's ceding them a certain authority, which they don't have any real legitimate claim to.

I like Hitchens's oft-repeated point that religion is a product of humankind's infancy and is such our first and worst explanation as to whey we're here; and that more nuanced and complex moral instruction can be found in the literature Dostoevsky and George Eliot (for example), than the Torah, the Bible, the Koran.

UH.JPG

sheesh, missing articles above, but you get the gist

dostoevsky and eliot arent MORAL INSTRUCTION, bro

Dawkins vs. Aquinas

lolz that this is in the "life and style" section and not the "science" section hahahahah

anyone reading "crime and punishment" for a list of rules of how to live their lives is going to end up really fucked up

I agree with Hitchens too, and he's sharp enough to realize that one of Eliot's heroines, like, say, Dorothea Brooke, managed to eke out a tolerable existence THANKS to religion.

no one's saying that, max.

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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.

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 6:19 PM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

He's merely defining his terms. He's being accurate. I don't see him saying that's what "belief in god boils down to," he's stating the paramaters of his argument.

wtf does "moral instruction" mean then?

McGuffey Readers

I don't see him saying that's what "belief in god boils down to," he's stating the paramaters of his argument.

if those are his parameters, I personally don't disagree with him (altho I'm sure there are numerous rabid fundamentalists who do). The problem is he ALWAYS takes a reference to God to mean those specific characteristics (see his rather pathetic "attack" on Aquinas linked above) even when those characteristics are specifically NOT being referenced or ascribed to God. Its the "baby out with the bathwater", its myopic, its misinformed.

All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of an infinite regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God; omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.

notice how he moves, from one sentence to the next, from an essentially undefinable concept of God (the terminator of infinite regress) back to his own boogeyman conception of God. TOTAL BULLSHIT. very lazy.

wtf does "moral instruction" mean then?

I always think of Oscar Wilde: "The good end happily, the bad unhappily."

I mean that is some seriously deliberate misreading of Aquinas, its unbelievable.

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"We (Atheists) have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.--Christopher Hitchens in "God is Not Great

Part II and then I'll stop kut & pasting...

"Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, "I am so made that I cannot believe."

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness."--Christopher Hithcens, God is Not Great

oh that rascally drunk

I always think of Oscar Wilde: "The good end happily, the bad unhappily."

how much more complex & nuanced than the bible

so now that hitch has decided that "scripture" is different from "literature," why are we comparing the two categories? surely they have different aims?

fwiw claiming music and art and literature for atheists is beyond silly; if you ever get a bunch of creative people in a room and listen to them talk - about how it feels to create, where their ideas come frome, etc.- they all sound like a bunch of devotional mystics

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Shakey: All he's saying is that god is never an explanation, just an approximate explanation, because if you're going to believe in a creator, then it must have been created by something even larger and more complex, and on and on...that's why evolution is a much more satisfactory explanation than a supreme being, because evolutino allows for very complex ends from very simple beginnings, and requires no creator to get the process started.

Shakey I'm responding to this, above:

notice how he moves, from one sentence to the next, from an essentially undefinable concept of God (the terminator of infinite regress) back to his own boogeyman conception of God. TOTAL BULLSHIT. very lazy.

-- Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, October 2, 2007 7:03 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Shakey: he's not claiming art and literature for Atheists, he's saying where one can find meaning in life without god.

hitchens: dick; dawkins: dick

"We (Atheists) have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

good think he didn't mention dante or milton, that would have fucked his shit up. as for better art and music: are you fucking kidding you drunken warmongering cunt?

ive said it before, but anyone looking to crime and punishment for meaning in their lives is going to end up reading the bible anyway

no no no read what Aquinas is saying - unless things regress infinitely there has to be a termination point. that termination point is called God. for the purposes of this argument, there is no need to ascribe any other characteristics to God beyond that. If there is a terminus, call it God.

The other option is to accept that things regress infinitely, which is kind of beyond human comprehension (not coincidentally, another concept that is often associated with God - "the limit of human understanding")

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how much more complex & nuanced than the bible

Except Wilde meant it as an ironic joke. You don't get too many of those in the Bible.

the one guy:

I made a very bad mistake and inadvertandly left off the beginning of the sentence:

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: We (Atheists) have music and art and literature..."

the problem with that is, when Dawkins reads the word "God" his mind immediately conjurs the image of the white-bearded-father-in-the-sky listening to prayers and whatnot. One would hope he could avoid that particular trap, but apparently he can't.

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http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_244.html

Philip found Nathanael and said unto him, "We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." Nathanael said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" [Joke!] Philip said to him, "Come and see!" [Boom!] Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and said of him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed in whom there is no guile" ["Hey, here's an honest Jew"--joke]. Nathanael [not getting it] said to him, "How do you know me?" Jesus answered him, "Before Philip called you, I saw you yesterday, standing under a fig tree." Nathanael said [losing his cool], "Rabbi, you are the son of God! You are the king of Israel!" Jesus answered him, "Because I said I saw you standing under a fig tree, believest thou?" [Big joke! Gets laughs!] "You shall see greater things than these." [Release.] And he said to him, "Truly, truly I say unto you, you shall see the heavens opened and the angels of the Lord ascending and descending upon the Son of Man." [Boom!]

I don't know what the fuck you people are trying to refute here. I don't read for Moral Instruction, but there's a succor that I get from literature, in part because you don't get answers. It's frustrating too, naturally, but that's the rub.

succor = "Look at these people as stupid, troubled, and fucked up as me. Let's see what happens next."

No, in the Bible you get deep advice on how it's wrong to covet your neighbors's woman and/or slave.

Shakey: You're missing the whole point, Dawkins is purposefully talking a very specific kind of religious belief that continues to seriously fuck up the world. He's not talking about belief in "mystery," or "something more," or even people who consider themselves "spiritual."

Haha max I was just about to post that! :D

then why is he trying to refute Aquinas???!??

I said this on some other thread but I think Dawkins basic problem is with language and semantics - he has problems accepting or understanding conceptions of God that don't fit the fundie loony tunes model (see ref to Einstein and his conception of God way upthread. Dawkins has no problems with it, but apparently also doesn't think its valid or properly religious, even though it is SPECIFICALLY rooted in religious language and tradition)

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There's a succor born every minute.

*rimshot*

He tries to refute Aquinas because a lot of people believe Aquinias's proofs prove the existence of god, and they don't.

The Bible's full of great stories though. Part of my problem during the Stephen Dedalus uber-Catholic phase of my adolescence was reconciling my fascination with Greek mythology and the equally ridiculous stuff in the Old Testament. Except I had to believe in the latter.

He tries to refute Aquinas because a lot of people believe Aquinias's proofs prove the existence of god, and they don't.

But Aquinas' proofs about God have NOTHING to do with the silly fundie God you're saying Dawkins has a problem with wtf.

al i think we're in agreement, except for when you said that no one was claiming we should read dostoevsky for moral instruction when dally's paraphrasing of hitchens seemed to imply that

the one guy:

I made a very bad mistake and inadvertandly left off the beginning of the sentence:

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: We (Atheists) have music and art and literature..."

-- dally, Wednesday, October 3, 2007 12:14 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

yes that totally refutes my point about the history of western art and music being intimately bound up with the history of the church.

and literature if we're being honest. like it or don't but the english *language* -- and literature too -- owes a shitload more to donne and bunyan and the king james bible than to, say, schiller. this is historical fact more than a matter of taste.

Is there an emotional side to the intellectual enterprise of exploring the story of life on Earth?

Yes, I strongly feel that. When you meet a scientist who calls himself or herself religious, you'll often find that that's what they mean. You often find that by "religious" they do not mean anything supernatural. They mean precisely the kind of emotional response to the natural world that you've described. Einstein had it very strongly. Unfortunately, he used the word "God" to describe it, which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. But Einstein had that feeling, I have that feeling, you'll find it in the writings of many scientists. It's a kind of quasi-religious feeling. And there are those who wish to call it religious and who therefore are annoyed when a scientist calls himself an atheist. They think, "No, you believe in this transcendental feeling, you can't be an atheist." That's a confusion of language.

we went over this upthread where milo was talking about how no one reads Aquinas and the popular conception of God is the Left Behind-type and that that's what Dawkins is really aiming at I mean come ON

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That's a confusion of language.

Yeah, YOUR confusion.