Oh, I wouldn’t say that. I’ve got lots of hate for specific religions, too.
Granted, there’s a few I have nothing but admiration for, too. And some I just think are silly, without any hate or anger.
What, exactly, would that be?
Warning of possible violence from an outside source is hardly the same as preaching violence or legalised intolerance and ignorance yourself, and Dawkins certainly doesn’t do the latter.
Anyway, I find the focus on violence to be oversold. IME, when Dawkins is talking about extremism, he’s often talking about the anti-evolution crowd (not always, don’t snow me under with countercites, people, I know it depends if he was doing a God Delusion book tour or a Greatest Show one).
As the foremost popularizer in the field (pace Gould, RIP), you can see how that particular insanity would be kind of personal to him, no? But he certainly isn’t accusing *them *of violence, merely of violating the young and impressionable.
I never said ignorance. I said acceptance and tolerance… but yes I think we’re moving away from that.
I personally would hate living in a world with just atheists… sorry, but atheists can be pricks sometimes. At least some religious people will invite you over for pie when punch their sons face in when I was 8.
“Away” how? In the West, acceptance of atheists has never been greater. Elsewhere it’ll follow in time. Do you think atheists are less tolerant than they used to be? I don’t really see it. I think they’re now able to go public with some criticisms of religion that would not have been tolerated in the past. But that doesn’t mean they’re less accepting, it means they’re not feeling as much pressure to be polite.
Acceptance and tolerance are fine qualities, but when it comes to religion this apparently means you’re not allowed to criticize them at all. I accept and tolerate that there are many people in my country with political ideas that I think are short sighted and sometimes even dangerous. That doesn’t mean I should keep my mouth shut. That just means I’m not going to force them to change or irritate them more than is needed to make my point in public.
From my experience there are people who are nice and there are people who aren’t. Their religion has nothing to do with it. For every super nice but religious friend I have (and I’ve got a few who are super nice), there are just as many who are aggressively intolerant and they often find it convenient to use their religion as justification.
Yes, atheists are capable of intolerance, but atheism in and of itself doesn’t promote that.
The point is, you can’t make arguments for or against religion based on how nice and polite theists and atheists are. I’d rather try to raise my children to be genuinely nice rather than scare them into being nice with promises of a fiery hell awaiting them.
My feelings for Mr. Dawkins are not a secret, but I don’t view him as dangerous. He’s more just irritating, as he tends to remind me of arrogant teenagers who think that they’re vastly more intelligent than everyone else on the planet. Dawkins is clearly extremely impressed by how amazingly smart he is, which is what leads him to get suckered by so many urban legends and pseudoscience. But other than demanding that religious parents not be allowed to raise their own children (which is what he demands in The God Delusion no matter how much his fans deny it) he’s never advocated violence, and I don’t think there’s much chance of that demand being passed into law anytime soon.
Dangerous atheists would be the ones like Robespierre, Afonso Augusta da Costa, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin, Adolp Hitler, Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, Mao Tse Tung, Slobidan Milosevic, and the many others who have used mass violence in their failed attempts to destroy religion. I cannot take seriously the claim that atheists only go bad when they’re communists. Just consider Korea. Most people probably know that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il violently persecuted religious believers in North Korea. Fewer people probably know that dictator Park Chung-Hee did the same in South Korea. It’s clearly not communism that’s the problem.
Although Dawkins does seem to have some minor problems with acknowledging the fact that this has happened. In The God Delusion he announces on page 1 that all Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres are the fault of religious people. Actual Josip Broz Tito, the dictator of Yugoslavia who massacred hundreds of thousands of Croats and Muslims, was an atheist, just like most Marxist dictators. How exactly his crimes against humanity became the fault of religion is something that only Dawkins can explain.
You can’t tolerate people who think that lumps of cells have more rights than you, or that people, through their behavior, will live forever after death in a lake of fire. These people cannot be reasoned with. If Dawkins is dangerous, it is only because the people he’s fighting against is dangerous.
I’m not going to debate your comments about the contents of Dawkins’s books, since I’ve already seen too many of your “creative” interpretations in other threads.
I do take issue with your description of the Kims as atheists. I cannot accept that anyone who’s officially more or less a God or the son of a God in a state where the (dead) God is the official head of state is an atheist. I’m also not convinced that Hitler was an atheist, but that’s been done to death.
Errr, whatever floats your boat, but you’ll never get me to agree with such a laughable statement. There is a WORLD of difference between teaching kids Creationism in science class (we’re not talking about a Comparative Religions class, here) and teaching them Evolution.
That old study showed atheists to be in general more law abiding than theists. But people are ignorant about other things also - Karl Rove is an atheist, much as I wish I could excommunicate him.
What Dawkins really does is to argue against special pleading for religion. You know, that faith stuff, that god lives outside the universe stuff, that we’re not bound by the rules of evidence stuff. He seems to have started writing about atheism in part due to the nasty letters he gets from creationists. Attempts to teach creationism and downplay the teaching of evolution is something very directly attributable to religious people for religious reasons.
I think the reason people hate Dawkins so, as opposed to Gould and Sagan, is that he goes to the heart of religious beliefs while they nibbled around at the extreme edges
Am I the only one who finds it funny that there are people in these forums claiming that teaching children creationism is comparable to teaching children evolution when the tagline of these forums is “Fighting ignorance since 1973”?
Though, of course, it’s taking longer than we thought.
Robespierre was a deist and it is not very clear what Hitler was; however, signs (that even he painted) point to Hitler as being a very peculiar Christian.
I believe that a couple of atheists right here on SDMB have advocated the killing of non-atheists for that reason alone.
It wasn’t religion that caused 9-11. It was intolerance and the distortion of religion. Do you think that most Muslims supported what the Jihadists did? Your words also show an unintentional distortion of religion. Your posts show a possible intolerance of something that doesn’t even exist except in your own distortion. Again, I don’t think that this is intentional on your part.
Haven’t you figured out YET that everyone thinks his reasons ARE reasonable and accurate? That includes the Jihadists! So who gets to decide if the reasons really, really, really are justified?
In his defense, religion DOES cause a lot of catastrophes. It’s got a track record, after all. It’s not like Dawkins is speaking about pure theory; he’s got the evidence to back him up.
Yes, yes, it’s always just the bad apples. Fact is they did it over religion. They believed they were carrying out God’s work. It was religiously motivated. If the world had decided to become atheist five years before, 9-11 would not have happened.
