Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

Yes

How so? Genuinely curious.

Load all messages

Lol

Because he's a white British dude who doesn't spare Islam either? Seems like a simplistic view.

Unless I'm missing something here.

did you load all the messages?

Yes, and I read them all a minute ago.

Οὖτις, nowhere has Dawkins stated that people from Middle-eastern or Maghreb backgrounds are intrinsically, genetically inferior. He's just said that the culture surrounding Islam is, in sum, an inferior culture.

Maybe its cultural bigotry, but it isn't racist.

I mean if you get him at the right moment he'll go on for hours about the terrible evils of Christianity, but on the other hand he's prone to unguarded comments like the one up there about Christianity being somewhat harmless compared to other religions.

There are plenty of atheists who disguise their racism as opposition to specific non-Western religious dogmas but I am not convinced that the latter necessarily implies the former.

I assume he meant that Christianity is relatively toothless in its modern incarnation.

Ur taking that part of the scripture wherein outis pronounced that Dawkins was a racist very literally

On the one hand, mea culpa. On the other hand, you should be wary of this phrase because it comes from the Confiteor.

Xp Most pervasive racism isn't people going around literally saying other races are inferior, it's usually this kind of between the lines, tossed out stuff.

Cracking down on ambiguity just to be on the safe side comes with its own set of problems but ymmv.

Re: Islam vs Christianity and which is The Worst, there's an interesting book by Steve Bruce, where he does some accounting and comes to the conclusion that Islam and Roman Catholicism of all religions have tended to be tangled up in authoritarian politics more often than others (but with the caveat that all religions turn up all over the political map). Which he argues pretty convincingly but the reason it's convincing is because he's not really interested in which is The Worst Religion

But saying Dawkins isn't racist because he hasn't literally asserted the racial superiority of some group is itself cracking down on ambiguity

If u ask Richard Dawkins which religion is the Worst Religion he consistently answers the one w a majority of brown ppl as adherents. This is not a coincidence. This is a conclusion that he argues w out empirical evidence, and w remarkable consistency. He regularly praises (and makes excuses for) the institutions of British empire, such as the Anglican Church. This is also not a coincidence.

I’m on my phone so thats as succinct an answer yr gonna get from me

From a purely theoretical point of view (assuming such a thing exists), The Worst Religion is the one that is least amenable to a non-literalist reading. In practice, however, it varies from context to context, in time and space, and much of this Worstness is inseparable from extra-religious politics, i.e. The Quest for Power in general.

xps

I didn't say Dawkins isn't racist, by the way. I said I'm not convinced that he is.

That's a fair point Outis, especially if the sweepstakes cover all historical periods.

Dawkins is not making a good faith argument, theoretical or not, about Worst Religion. He is making one that looks and sounds racist in its underpinnings and consistency.

That said, a case could be made, along the lines of Marcel Gauchet, that Christianity is the religion that leads away from religion and hence the religion that sows the seeds of atheism. If the latter is your end-goal, I can see why you'd favour Christianity.

But I doubt that's Dawkins's argument (I haven't read him and nor do I intend to).

Judaism has a way deeper tradition of non-literalist and intellectual rigor than xtianity imo but i am biased.

I agree with that. But that's precisely why Christianity more readily dispenses with the Book.

From a purely theoretical point of view (assuming such a thing exists), The Worst Religion is the one that is least amenable to a non-literalist reading. In practice, however, it varies from context to context, in time and space, and much of this Worstness is inseparable from extra-religious politics, i.e. The Quest for Power in general.

xps

― pomenitul, 25. december 2018 22:07 (thirty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Anyone who thinks like this would conclude Islam was The Best Religion after spending two minutes with the Quran...

'This is the book of which there is no doubt' – its claims to inerrancy are self-referential from the get-go. It even goes so far as to explicitly eschew self-contradiction: 'If this book were from other than GOD, they would certainly find much variation and contradiction in it.'

That's not the first Surah, that's the one called THE COW, which has this story about a Cow:

And when Moses said to his people: Surely God commands you to sacrifice a cow. They said: Dost thou ridicule us? He said: I seek refuge with God from being one of the ignorant. / They said: Call on thy Lord for our sake to make it plain to us what she is. (Moses) said: He says, Surely she is a cow neither advanced in age nor too young, of middle age between these (two); so do what you are commanded. / They said: Call on thy Lord for our sake to make it clear to us what her colour is. (Moses) said: He says, She is a yellow cow; her colour is intensely yellow delighting the beholders. / They said: Call on thy Lord for our sake to make it dear to us what she is, for surely to us the cows are all alike, and if God please we shall surely he guided aright. / (Moses) said: He says: She is a cow not made submissive to plough the land, nor does she water the tilth, sound, without a blemish in her. They said: Now thou hast brought the truth. So they slaughtered her, though they had not the mind to do (it).

Anyone can see you get nowhere trying to deal with the Quran literally.

But lol, you have your anti-Islam quotes at the ready. Very telling.

No literal reading of a purportedly holy book gets you anywhere, but an exceptionally high degree of self-referentiality makes for additional complications. Incidentally, that line is near the very beginning of the book – it's the second verse of the second Surah. And the first Surah consists of merely 29 words.

The 'very telling' is a pretty shitty assumption on your part, by the way. I think the Quran is a beautiful text and its unique hermeneutical challenges are fascinating to me.

You can get pretty far with a literal reading of Leviticus. And that's a part of both the Jewish and the Christian bible. There is nothing like that in the Quran, though it at times seems like it would want to. It quite obviously lacks the editing.

It's been noted many times already on ilx that in any Venn diagram of Christianity, biblical literalism would be a much smaller circle within the larger whole. It is ridiculously easy to target biblical literalism as internally inconsistent and rationally insupportable, but thinking you've pulverized "religion" or "Christianity" as a result is childish. Dawkins exemplifies that kind of childish inability to grasp the essence of religion.

There's also the 'Mother Book' verse, which espouses a more Platonic view of the Quran, implying that the book as you know it (originally written in Arabic) is a mere copy of another Book, one that is beyond human language.

I think the 'intensity' of these self-contradictions (a good thing imho) is in a sense greater than that of either the Jewish or Christian Bibles. Due to its apparently stable authorship and shorter genesis, the Quran comes across as more coherent and self-contained than its predecessors' sprawling fragments. It seems to be aware of this risk, which it seeks to actively mitigate through self-referential statements that only serve to exacerbate the ambiguity (at least as far as I'm concerned – a believer would no doubt have a completely different take on this).

But then again, the fact that there are no less than four distinct Gospels – four witnesses, each one unreliable in his own right – that often contradict each other hasn't prevented generations of Christians from subscribing to a literalist reading of the Bible.

xp

What any religious text says on the page will always in real life go through a whole load of editing and interpretation (both official and personal), which doesn't mean that a quote from the page is completely useless, but ... limited use, imo. Whether we're trying to position the religion as positive or negative.

xp

I really don't get how you can say the Quran is the most coherent text if you've read them all? Yeah, the Torah is composed over a much longer period, but that final editing is pretty tight. And for all the contradictions, the four gospels are remarkably similar, and are pretty obviously based on similar sources (like, say, oral or written testimony about the actual life of Jesus...) The Quran, on the other hand, seems unplanned, chaotic, verging from idea to idea, subject to subject, without at all cohering. Nor trying to.

Anyways, cardamon otm, in the end the shape of religions has a lot more to do with how much it has been adapted to serve the interests of autocracies, imo. And, well, it's hard to argue against Islam very quickly turning into a caliphate.

Obviously the best religion is one that has no basis in a text at all and thereby completely sidesteps questions of interpretation, literal or otherwise e.g. voudoo

Xp to self.

But back to the point: there are, for example, Christian militias in Africa who rival their Islamic militia competitors for violence and abuses of human rights; there are in America, and Dawkins knows there are, extremely potent right wing Christian groups some of whom are like African or Middle Eastern militias, just white, and as it were waiting in the wings for the conditions to come right.

Obviously what he says in the article is a throwaway, but it's also a give away imo

Taoism has a text that negates itself. Zen has texts that attempt a similar negation. Most animism is purely orally transmitted.

I really don't get how you can say the Quran is the most coherent text if you've read them all? Yeah, the Torah is composed over a much longer period, but that final editing is pretty tight. And for all the contradictions, the four gospels are remarkably similar, and are pretty obviously based on similar sources (like, say, oral or written testimony about the actual life of Jesus...) The Quran, on the other hand, seems unplanned, chaotic, verging from idea to idea, subject to subject, without at all cohering. Nor trying to.

I'm not saying it's the most coherent text. I'm saying it's the most consistent in its drive towards formalist rather than narrative coherence due to its greater emphasis on self-referentiality as well as, tangentially, its purportedly single authorship and shorter compositional period. In repeatedly doubling back on itself, it asserts its status as the Book of Books even more forcefully than its predecessors. It strikes me as more aware of itself, as it were, which makes sense given its historical position relative to the the other two scriptures. Incidentally, I don't agree that the Torah's final editing is tight and that the Gospels are remarkably similar, but that's a minor quibble – I see where you're coming from. Anyway, I'm fascinated with the Quran's attempts at tempering its own chaos. Whether these attempts are successful (and whether they need to be) is a different matter.

Of course the reading – and especially its political variant – is the most important thing. But I'm not convinced that a text is merely what you, the reader, make of it. Maybe I'm biased, but it seems overly dismissive of its singularity, its rhetorical force, which does at least create a context, no matter how feeble, for how you may or may not exert power.

Does Dawkins ever talk about this stuff btw? Or he is always like 'you contradicted yourself there, lulz I pwned you again'?

He tends to think literalism is the intended reading of religious texts, and that people who follow the religions in a non literal way are faking it or making excuses.

The idea I think is that ancient times people were all ignorant and superstitious, and must have intended these texts as literally true, because they were really stupid.

Yes that is a key problem w his thinking

I do wonder sometimes whether the key ingredient to becoming a public 'intellectual' is relinquishing nuance and strawmanning the shit out of your opponents, thus making yourself look like a smug cretin, which you probably are anyway.

Yup. He's also an example of post 9/11 literature.

'But I'm not convinced that a text is merely what you, the reader, make of it.'

Sure. What it says on the page does matter, and we will struggle to 180 it, but ...