Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

eh arrogance is never a virtue imho. if yr saying I'm being arrogant on this thread (I can't quite tell), I apologize and will try to be more considerate.

no, not you, dude! I was referring to your remarks about Hitchens and Dawkins (tho' I suppose Hitch deserves the charge more than Dawkins).

If you can't be righteous, you can be self-righteous.

I think one of the things I find so irritating about Dawkins and other strident atheists is the implication of certainty, which goes hand-in-hand with a denial that there is anything in the universe beyond human comprehension. (They know FOR A FACT that there is no greater consciousness than humanity's at work in the universe? O RLY)

But let me be clear, I don't believe in the kind of God that Dawkins is so obsessed with (nor do I believe that that is the most commonly accepted conception of God, as Dawkins seems to repeatedly assume). I don't believe there's some supra-human intelligence that worries about what we wear/eat or literally listens to prayers etc. The problems with these kinds of conceptions of God does not stem from some inherent fault with the idea that there is some larger force than human intelligence at work in the universe - the problems stem from the overly literal/fundamentalist interpretation of ancient texts, interpretations which have been aggressively fomented for (more often than not) very predictable and human reasons (concentration of power, repression of dissent, etc.) Dawkins should properly identify his issue as being with fundamentalist fairytales, and not with the idea of God in a broader sense.

I don't trust anyone who says they KNOW metaphysics does or does not work/exist/etc.

Dawkins has stated explicitly and repeatedly that he can't prove there is not god.

xpost, obv.

Dued he is no Zeno.

Dawkins has stated explicitly and repeatedly that he can't prove there is not god.

well then he probably shouldn't call himself an atheist.

oh for Christ's sake Shakey, that's just stupid.

nor do I believe that that is the most commonly accepted conception of God

Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans and Methodists are ~72% of the American population (and for much of Europe and the UK there are similar numbers of traditional Muslims, Jews and Christians): which of those are heavily influenced by "God is, like, this eternal energy source that lives inside us all, man"?

I'm not kidding at all. I've met comparatively few fundies/literalists in my life - the vast majority of folks seem to have much more fluid and malleable religious beliefs.

x-post

oh for Christ's sake Shakey, that's just stupid.

hahahaha that's priceless

have you ever lived in the midwest, shakey? even people i didn't consider fundies or literalists definitely believed that jesus DID exist and that he was the ACTUAL son of God, and that prayer might actually work.

Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans and Methodists are ~72% of the American population (and for much of Europe and the UK there are similar numbers of traditional Muslims, Jews and Christians): which of those are heavily influenced by "God is, like, this eternal energy source that lives inside us all, man"?

I dunno, do some research - I'm certainly not willing to accept the validity of vast generalizations about the deeply personal beliefs of widely diverse populations.

x-post

also, fwiw, i think a lot of those people operated on the (lazy) premise that it's better to believe and be wrong than it is to not believe and be wrong. c.f. my mom, who takes a sort of "what's the harm in believing in jesus" sort of tack. at least you won't go to hell.

i bet this attitude is endemic in many, many populations, regardless of creed.

I haven't lived in the midwest, no (travelled through it but that's not the same thing). We have our fair share of right-wing Christians on the west coast too, mind you (much of Oregon springs to mind, I have family there) and then there's large swathes of SoCal... I dunno, sometimes I think really rabid atheists just haven't ever met reasonable, decent Christians (or Muslims, or Jews). I met some surprisingly open-minded and engaging Jesuits in India that really made me rethink my rather deep antipathy to Christianity, for example.

x-post

oh i like jesuits, for the most part. very intellectual, by and large, and seem to take the big questions serious enough to actually ask them. vs. christians by default who are either (a) too lazy or (b) too afraid to scrutinize their faith.

So I think the problem on everyone's part is sample size, then.

Dawkins has stated explicitly and repeatedly that he can't prove there is not god.

-- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, Wednesday, October 3, 2007 11:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

well done someone read their popper.

hahahaha that's priceless

One can believe there is no God without believing that one can prove this - 'can't prove a negative' is pretty basic, isn't it?

I've met comparatively few fundies/literalists in my life - the vast majority of folks seem to have much more fluid and malleable religious beliefs.

Fluid and malleable has fuck all to do with the definition supplied. Fluid and malleable means that "hey, maybe this evolution stuff has merit" - not "God is, like, totally this concept of man's inner spirit of goodness and healing, man, not a deity, man."

I was laughing at the use of "for christ's sake" in that particular context

One can believe there is no God without believing that one can prove this

this doesn't sound very scientific. sounds dangerously close to "faith" as far as I can tell.

i tend to get the feeling people who make a big thing about their atheism to the point of pissing on people who aren't for being simple-minded (example given: long-term establishment lickspittle and turncoat christopher hitchens) are either only recently atheist or are aggressively defensive about their own way of getting through. with hitchens it's booze. don't know what fuels dawkins; perhaps sheer zeal -- never very attractive.

idea you could "prove" god does or doesn't exist isn't worth arguing over.

If anything, your argument appears to be more of a closed system than Dawkin's - that a (for example) Christian who believes in a humanistic deity, power of prayer, place in Heaven, etc. is necessarily a 'fundamentalist/literalist' without 'fluid and malleable' beliefs. Which is just absurd.
God, prayer, Heaven, Ten Commandments, etc. are the religious beliefs of the vast majority of Westerners.
Those are not hard-line James Dobson beliefs - they're mainstream. The fundies and literalists go much, much further.

this doesn't sound very scientific. sounds dangerously close to "faith" as far as I can tell.

An atheist sees and is offered no empirical proof of the existence of God. Ergo, there is no reason for him to believe that a God exists.

But this atheist cannot prove that God does not exist. This is impossible. If your demand is that all atheists must be willing to argue they can prove a negative, then no atheists exist.

You're walking a strange line between the most tired New Age Burning Man hippie spiritual nonsense and the most tired evangelical Atheists Drive Like This nonsense.

I respectfully disagree. Like I said, generalizations here are dangerous. Take the example of my dad - converted to Judaism as an adult and has been a rather devout Jew, served as President of the Temple, received the Crown of the Good Name, etc. I was surprised to recently learn that he's never considered prayer to really be "effective", that he doesn't think God is "listening" or anything like that, that it was just something done as part of a kind of character-building ritual. He goes to a mainstream Temple in southern california - but by your assertion he is somehow an anomaly. I think this type of variance in belief and faith and whatnot is quite common, actually.

x-post

If your demand is that all atheists must be willing to argue they can prove a negative, then no atheists exist.

which is exactly why the very term is pretty stupid and probably shouldn't be used.

also pls to point out what Burning Man Hippie Shit I've espoused on this thread

maybe the "burning man hippie shit" is from when we talked about spinozistic pantheism? i didnt mean to imply that i think most americans hold that view, just that its a fairly common way for educated americans to believe in or deal with the concept of god that doesn't involve them believe in george burns smoking cigars in the sky. shakey's dad is just as good an example, as is pretty much every "religious" person ive ever met; frankly, youd have to be pretty isolated from most of mainstream society to never think about, question or engage with your faith or your belief in god, even if its not using the kinds of explicitly philsophical terms used by priests & rabbis & mullahs & whatever clerics.

this isnt to say, either, that i dont think a lot of ppls conceptions of god--anthropomorphic & human-concerned or no--are totally dumb, its just that i think that those conceptions of god are dumb on their own merits and not because they involve the concept of god.

also the idea of a "human" deity is made v. v. complicated in christianity by jesus & his own possible humanity/divinity so it may not be the absolute best example of a characteristic of god that dawkins finds dumb

altho on the other hand it sort of goes with what im saying--not even specific characteristics of the "bad" god enumerated by dawkins are easy to pin down and define!

which is exactly why the very term is pretty stupid and probably shouldn't be used.

also pls to point out what Burning Man Hippie Shit I've espoused on this thread

And yes, your father is not the standard believer. (For one thing, less than 2% of Americans are Jewish.)
A super-majority of Americans pray daily. 35-40% pray multiple times daily. 90%+ profess to adhere to religions in which divinity takes on some human form and prayer is not 'meditation.' Where's the evidence that they're just claiming adherence, but really aren't too sure about all that Heaven stuff?

I think the issue of someone questioning their faith or moving away from their professed faith on certain points is a red herring - that has nothing to do with the central beliefs that they are binding themselves to.

Every poll I've ever seen indicates that not only do westerners overwhelmingly consider themselves Christians, they maintain the core beliefs about the Father and the Son. I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that most Muslims don't believe in the supernatural aspects of their religion.

max swiftly breaks Shakey's pending record of three self-posts in a row.

i am drunk, and will contribute nothing but this: i met an "old testament christian" tonight, who believes that god is just and vengeful and will nail you if you do shit wrong.

he has a tattoo in hebrew that reads "SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING."

(i don't read hebrew)

Ok, I'll ask the obvious question--what's the difference between and being an "old testament christian" and being Jewish?

rabid atheists

I am an atheist (not sure if I'm rabid) and have met many reasonable, decent Christians (or Muslims, or Jews) but I'm still an atheist.

Just saying.

I am an atheist (not sure if I'm rabid) and have met many reasonable, decent Christians (or Muslims, or Jews) but I'm still an atheist.

reasonable decent Christians, Muslims and Jews - good they exist but *still a problem* in that they provide cover for the fundamentalists by not actively speaking out against them and thus protecting them in the interests of "unity". better world would obv be one where Rowan Williams says to the fundamentalists who object to gay clergy "Go on then leave, you homophobic assholes! Go and form yr own church, see if I care, good riddance to bad rubbish!" but it's obv not gonna happen.

Dawkins on that same subject:

Q: But don't you need to distinguish between religious extremists who kill people and moderate, peaceful religious believers?

A: You certainly need to distinguish them. They are very different. However, the moderate, sensible religious people you've cited make the world safe for the extremists by bringing up children -- sometimes even indoctrinating children -- to believe that faith trumps everything and by influencing society to respect faith. Now, the faith of these moderate people is in itself harmless. But the idea that faith needs to be respected is instilled into children sitting in rows in their madrasahs in the Muslim world. And they are told these things not by extremists but by decent, moderate teachers and mullahs. But when they grow up, a small minority of them remember what they were told. They remember reading their holy book, and they take it literally. They really do believe it. Now, the moderate ones don't really believe it, but they have taught children that faith is a virtue. And it only takes a minority to believe what it says in the holy book -- the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran, whatever it is. If you believe it's literally true, then there's scarcely any limit to the evil things you might do.

Q: And yet most moderate religious people are appalled by the apocalyptic thinking of religious extremists.

A: Of course they're appalled. They're very decent, nice people. But they have no right to be appalled because, in a sense, they brought it on the world by teaching people, especially children, the virtues of unquestioned faith.

He is a bit of an idiot sometimes, c.f. they brought it on themselves. He needs to understand that if he's going to persuade people of his point of view, he needs to tone down the rhetoric sometimes.

its funny/ridiculous/sad that Dawkins is prepared to argue that moderate or mainstream religious parents' indoctrination of their children in the importance of faith somehow supersedes or trumps their similar indoctrination on the basic moral tents of every religion (namely that its wrong to kill, steal, lie, rape, etc.) Like, its their fault that extremist children pick up on one tenet but not the others. That's facile and overly simplistic.

The part where you argued that belief in a Creator is not actually a mainstream religious belief

what, where did I say this?

better world would obv be one where Rowan Williams says to the fundamentalists who object to gay clergy "Go on then leave, you homophobic assholes! Go and form yr own church, see if I care, good riddance to bad rubbish!" but it's obv not gonna happen.

Obv. not because they're the only people who are actually joining the Church