Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

Nunez otm

Diff btwn most vocal atheists and most vocal religious (all p much dicks) is that at least the atheists are right, but tbh that should encourage them to nod, smile, whatever in arguments, which tbrr seems more a strength of the buddhism cru so i think i'll go buddhist

Smug masquerading as chill

i'm much more down with hitchens' focus on attacking actual religious figures and the specific harm they've done than i am with dawkins' "ok, here are some logical reasons why god CANNOT POSSIBLY exist" approach.

I find it just really difficult to see how someone could get as far as this - in terms of a fruitful academic, media and publishing career - and still, still, think you don't need to be fully knowledgeable about the holy text of a religion before being able to criticise it any meaningful way, to the point where you think ... you can draw analogy between the Koran and Mein Kampf *without having read either book*.

has no one explained to Hawkins that the Bible -- particularly the Old Testament and even the New until Acts -- is great fun to read? I read it in junior high at the same time as Greek mythology -- an invaluable decision -- and was floored by how batshit-awesome it is.

Tbf most ppl that use their religion in objectionable ways seem not to have studied the texts v closely neither

I mean, is there a more extreme 'death of the author' case than christ

"hmmm, i dont remember the chapter about gay marriage, but shit, who knows, we were on tour the whole summer of 1bc and i gotta be honest i got paul to ghost write a lot of that stuff cos we were makin all our money from live gigs in those days anyway"

Loaves and Fishes Tour '00

i found myself sort of agreeing with the general thrust of this... john gray interview... in vice media the other day (linked here by... cardamom):

But human beings need meaning in life.
I'm not denying that we as human beings can create meaning ourselves, but there's no ultimate meaning inscribed in the universe or in history. My advice to people who need a meaning that's beyond what they can create is to join a religion. On the whole, they are older and wiser myths than secular myths like progress.

Would you say the myth of progress is sort of a religion in itself?
Oh yes, it is. Our secular myths are just religious myths rebottled, but with most of the good things taken out.

So, in that sense, is contemporary atheism also a religion?
Atheists always turn red when I call atheism a religion. If atheism means what it should mean: to not have any use for the concept of God, then, in that sense, I am an atheist. But I'm not an evangelist. The fact that there were buses going around London saying, "There is probably no God" is completely ridiculous. You can definitely call atheists religious when they're being evangelists and trying to convert the world to their belief.

Are they ever successful?
No. The biggest conversions taking place at the moment are Africans to Islam and many Chinese to Christianity. So atheism is a side-joke of history compared with that. What we see today is rather a huge expansion of traditional religion. Atheism is a media phenomenon.

coming back round to existentialism ye gods

You sort of have to believe in a form of God in order to say "There is no God". Most atheists believe in a form of God that is not there.

i almost want to call it a need for clarity.

http://imageshack.us/a/img90/304/rolleyes.jpg

You sort of have to believe in a form of howard the duck to say there is no howard the duck

I was a teenaged atheist, and existentialist too (tho ill still defend the latter in many respects). I think the appeal was largely the way it brings into relief the hypocrisy of others and society in general and raises it to a nearly cosmological level. It's a pretense to having the scales drop from your eyes and it's a powerful feeling.

It's funny tho I often think Gnosticism could have the same appeal but perhaps it feels too occult and actually more challenging to the worldview of a typical young person. Atheism doesn't really require a radical re-orientation since we're all implicitly materialists anyway these days.

I still don't believe in "god" in any meaningful sense. I think that's a possibility closed to me. I do, however, have a lot of respect for and a desire to preserve certain traditions of religious thinking. These are powerful and important things that are not to be off lightly cast off in order to unproblematically embrace a naive 19th century style scientism.

otm

Yeah i've been enjoying reading up on the various prophecies of all the major religions lately, comin to the realisation that my fave fantasy writers had like zero original ideas tbrr

You sort of have to believe in a form of howard the duck to say there is no howard the duck

GODCORP, death of the author, etc

Our secular myths are just religious myths rebottled, but with most of the good things taken out.[needs citation]

the myth of the myth of progress. if abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, gay marriage, modern medicine & increased life expectancy etc are all myths then i'm happy to be living in la la fantasy land.

The ban on heated honey was the big one tho

Wait, which chapter of Leviticus was that?

the issue with the myth of progress isn't that progress never been made, but that society/history/humankind is necessarily inclined towards improvement/inevitable perfection - a myth which seems to be pretty heavily implied by the nu-atheist position, as well as in a lot of political discourses

that old Enlightenment nonsense

why do you believe that's a myth?

It places bias on the present and against the past. Not that the past was so great, but if we are the sum of our experiences and we are discounting the past as useless and obsolete, there are some good things we could be missing along with the bad things. Plus it gives the sort of Moral High Ground to whatever you are doing in the present/working towards, simply by virtue of it being the natural progression of progress.

Plus stuff like concentration camps and climate change.

Recency bias at work there tbh

outsourcing to sweatshops, more plastic, cheaper weapons, earlier slaughter weight, top heavy populations also "progress", which is just a word

curse these pesky words, we'd be better off without all of them.

See, idk if outsourcing to sweatshops isnt rly more than 'now not all factories everywhere are sweatshops'

ppl fetishise the past like every motherfucker in greece was a senator graping it up and voting between philosophies. I think perhaps this was not the case.

My dispute with the idea of inevitable progress is that just because things have had a general trend towards the good so far, doesn't mean they always will.

It's easy to think of situations (eg, nuclear war, climate change, shortages of raw materials, over-population) which could see a significant and difficult-to-reverse downturn.

who holds this idea of inevitable progress other than john q strawman?

jan q strawperson

http://www.edrants.com/segundo/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/stevenpinker.jpg

Pinker stresses, however, that "The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue".[5]

only the silliest person could contend that future prosperity + peace is guaranteed (or that anything that might happen in the future is guaranteed - life is unpredictable?)

Until we die, anyway

Dawkins and the average Dawkinsian may not believe in inevitable progress, but they would quite likely believe that if we were all good Enlightenment moderns rather than backwards religious types then such inevitable progress forever would be our reward.

a lot of my friends in math/physics are really into dawkins & co. it's a shame because these are really smart kids who could have killer opinions on everything but just need to, like, take a humanities class.

i read some pretty scathing reviews of that pinker book when it came around, seemed like it made some pretty dumb points. but i think there's a good point to be made in that a lot of widespread declinism attitudes are founded on pretty misguided beliefs because of media or whatever and it's reassuring to look at numbers, puts things in context. our capacity to destroy ourselves is now effectively infinite though so it's now disconcerting to think what will happen if/when that number starts to increase again

Dawkins and the average Dawkinsian may not believe in inevitable progress, but they would quite likely believe that if we were all good Enlightenment moderns rather than backwards religious types then such inevitable progress forever would be our reward.

Surely Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, is well aware of how many different ways a species can fail.

I don't know if the death of religion would result in inevitable progress forever but it would probably be a good start.

signed, STALIN

Its worth an effort surely signed me

how would you convince people to do things without religion?

(i mean things they don't actually want to do)

I would lolololol

Sorry, i'll just try that aglolololllolol nope