Cute.
Here’s a hint: if the behavior in question harms absolutely nobody, even the person who exhibits that behavior, it’s not reprehensible.
Something tells me you’re not really as confused as you’re pretending here. “Durrrrr, I don’t understand why it’s okay to say that the KKK are assholes and we won’t tolerate them, but if you say the same thing about people who sing in the shower, folks get all upset!”
It is rather amusing that you’re still persisting in your strange bit of rhetoric where, in order to oppose bigotry, one must be fine with Nazism. Because pointing out that bigotry is bad means you can’t be opposed to bigots or else you’re endorsing bigotry itself, or something. This actually seems to make sense to you.
It’s interesting that you seem to want a world where bigotry is just fine. Or at least, it’s fine for you to be bigoted against the ‘right’ kind of people whose only sin is to think differently than you do.
More because you said that “bigotry is still bigotry if it’s directed at the followers of a philosophy, like Liberalism or Christianity, or even a hobby like stamp collecting.”
I was just making a joke, but not a particularly funny one.
On a more serious note, I can’t quite grasp why you think Der Trihs is a bigot. If I read you correctly, your understanding of the word ‘bigot’ is partially informed by the following tenet:[ul]
[li]One who hates all members of a group solely because they hate the attributes one must necessarily possess to be included in that group, cannot be called a bigot.[/ul][/li]
Put another way, statements like “I hate all Arabs because all Arabs terrorists” are bigoted while statements like “I hate all Nazi’s because all Nazi’s are anti-semites” are not. This position makes a lot of sense, and I can’t reconcile it with your antipathy toward Der Trihs.
In order to be a Christian, one absolutely must believe certain things. One must, for instance, believe in God and immortality. On top of that, one must also believe in the divinity of Jesus. Both of these beliefs are irrational. All religions are founded on irrational beliefs.
If someone hated irrationality in all its forms, he would necessarily hate all manifestations of religion. If someone were fearful of irrationality, he would necessarily be fearful of all religious people to the extent that they were religious. Moreover, he would be fearful of their proven proclivity for acting irrationaly based upon deeply held, yet unfounded beliefs. Der Trihs is clearly such a person and, ergo, he is not a bigot.
But herein lies the problem: accusing someone of being a bigot is itself a bit of rhetoric. You’re using the label in a very arbitrary fashion where someone is a bigot if the target is sympathetic and not a bigot if a target is not sympathetic. Thus, it becomes all about the target, and not the personality of the alleged bigot.
Besides, “you’re a bigot” is useless except as a means to try to dismiss someone without addressing their arguments. It’s a convenient label which implies all that person’s feelings on a particular subject are tainted, and thus unworthy of analysis.
When you mentioned the “reprehensibility” standard, you made it clear that bigotry wasn’t bigotry (and thus, “just fine”) when directed against the right kind of people.
The kicker is that you can only claim to know that Yahweh exists and you have some inkling of what Yaweh’s rules are. There’s not a lot of reason to value your opinion over anyone elses.
What consititutes “true” Christianity is also just your opinion. If someone isn’t worshiping Jesus as you think they should that’s your opinion and not much more.
See, what scares me is that you evidently sincerely believe that, and do not see its absurdity.
To my mind it is not really all that different from ‘sure those homosexuals over there may act like you and me now, if if we don’t watch out, they will revert to their natural habits of pedophilia’.
So it is logical to treat Aunt Sally, who attends church fundraisers for AIDS and sincerely believes in Jesus, as if she was a Nazi? Because she might wig out and burn Der Trihs at the stake, given half a chance?
See, the problem with this sort of anti-religious bigotry is that on its face it appears highly irrational itself - its an absurd paranoia that, in this thread at least, appears to be getting a free ride from some.
Surely you can see the difference - Nazi ideology is one of extremes, by its nature; religious ideology is not. There are millions of sincerely religious people out there (in the US, a majority of the population), and treating them all as if they were potentially Fred Phelps is more akin to “hating all Arabs because they are Terrorists” then “hating all Nazis for being Nazis”.
It’s interesting for sure but a long way from conclusive. Too many variables to claim causality.
Believers, such as Sojourners, are playing a significant role in not letting the religious right dominate the conversation. I tend to agree with Obama, in that, people’s beliefs may effect their vote but the dialog has to be in language that everyone can relate to. That leaves out “it says so in the Bible”
Again, causality? Not to mention a very religious democracy that lots of people flock to.
Not my point at all.
Believers or non believers ought to be able to discern the difference between their opinions and facts. You might even expect atheists , who claim be to all about facts and evidence, to be better at separating opinions and their unsupported theories, from those they have evidence to support.
If they aren’t then they’re really no different from the believers in their approach. That’s what DT does consistently. He continues to do it even after be challenged repeatedly and consistently being unable to defend or provide evidence for his pet theories. Smells like fundamentalism to me.
And what scares me is that you do not take history into account. There is no history of radical homosexuals coming into power and restricting the rights of others, but we have ample evidence of what happens when radical religionists take control. Mind you, not everyone has to be radical to make the situation “Hell on Earth”(so to speak)-all it takes is for the moderates to think that “going with the flow” might work out to be better for them.
On a more serious note, I can’t quite grasp why you think Der Trihs is a bigot. If I read you correctly, your understanding of the word ‘bigot’ is partially informed by the following tenet:[ul]
[li]One who hates all members of a group solely because they hate the attributes one must necessarily possess to be included in that group, cannot be called a bigot.[/ul][/li][/quote]
Close, but you’re not including the dictate that the quality not only has to be universal in the group, but something that is truly reprehensible. Crimes against other people, racism itself, things like that. Saying, for instance, “All stamp collectors collect stamps, so we can hate them” is still bigotry.
Bryan is stuck on not understanding why hating Nazis isn’t bigotry, but opposing people like Polycarp and Zoe for their religious beliefs and nothing else, is.
I’ve already argued why agnostic theism can be about aesthetic sand not epistemology. As such, calling aesthetics “irrational” gets into Ayn Rand territory. (Sorry, that’s close to a low blow but it’s the truth, and it reminds me of Rand’s insistence on which music was ‘rational’ and which was verboten.)
The long and the short of it, on that front, is that some can say (for example) "I know that there is no proof of it, and it can not even be tested, but there being a higher power and some form of permanence to the essence of individual humans fits in more with what I believe is the most aesthetically reconcilable view of whatever exists beyond the Universe. I, personally, cannot believe that this is all there is to reality, but I accept that others may not feel the same and I accept that the laws of physics hold sway in the Universe. "
Well, first, saying that you hate irrationality is saying that you hate carbon-based entities. All people are irrational to a certain degree some of the time. We’re not Vulcans. So I call bullshit on the claim that Der really hates irrationality, and would point out that he hates religion and justifies his hate by claiming he’s against irrationality. If you follow his own posting on this message board, as well, you’ll notice that he is, himself, highly irrational on a great many topics.
Second, as such, there is no justification for ‘fearing’ irrationality. Let’s say, for instance, that someone spends more than they can afford so that they enjoy the
short term at the expense of crushing debt later in life. Most folks would agree that’s irrational. Should we fear people who use their credit cards too much?
There’s also the fact that, no your average Christian does not in fact have a proven proclivity for acting irrationally upon their deeply unfounded beliefs. Most of them, actually, act rather rationally despite their religious beliefs. They wear seat belts instead of trusting angels to look out for them, for instance. In fact, the argument you’re presented is pretty much a textbook standard fallacy of composition (e.g. "some but not all Christians make dangerous decisions based on their faith —> Christians have a proclivity for acting irrationally based
on their beliefs.) and then a textbook example of the fallacy of division (e.g. "Christians have a proclivity for acting irrationally based on their beliefs —> you can’t trust any individual Christians because they might wig out and institute the Auto De Fe again).
Fine, then - how about ‘sure all those leftists may seem like well-meaning believers in democracy, but history teaches that, given half a chance, they will sit by and let guys like Stalin or Pol Pot take over, and bring on the gulags and Killing Fields. I’m not saying they are all radical Communists - but they may just “go with the flow” so to speak. That’s why I hate them’.
Reasonable, or laughable? You decide.
To my mind, the fallacy is one of either assigning the worst characteristics to members of a very diverse group, or asserting, slippery-slope fashion, a predeliction for the worst characteristics - the notion that guys like Phelps represent the most religious type, the type that other seemingly more acceptable religious people tend towards, given half a chance – whereas in reality, there are many quite distinct types: not all religious people wish to establish an Inquisition, and not all religions are the same.
Imagine again the example of Leftists. Are you really of the opinion that a US Democrat is just “Stalin lite”, that (say) Obama given his choice would quite literaly tend towards acting like Stalin if he wasn’t constrained somehow? What would you think of someone who believed this was true, and lived in fear of Obama’s KGB?
I’m waaaayyy too late to this thread to read all 5 pages and then pick a guy to argue with, as seems to be tradition here, so I admitedly only read the OP, and I only want to say thank you for that, MaxTheVool.
I actually find Dawkins to be remarkably patient. I am just as irritated by irrational people as he is, and I am surprised he was able to stop himself from ripping Deepak Chopra’s head off in a BBC special I saw. Seriously, a medical doctor prescribing pseudoscience? I can see if the doctor does it specifically to take advantage of the placebo effect, but Chopra is a quantum nutjob.
But aside from that, I found that he allows the nutjobs in his shows to speak for themselves. He goes to them with the camera in tow, politely asks them leading questions and lets the quacks quack for themselves.
If you don’t think people are capable of being rational and recognizing when others are being irrational, well, you must be either religious, stupid, or both :smack:
