Almost spooky in it’s pre-cognition…
That’s the problem right there. No one should believe in evolution. They should be aware of what evolution says, and the evidence for it, and accept evolution for that reason.
If you had said there was no difference in teaching the Bible and teaching Huckleberry Finn, I’d agree. But evolution describes facts about the world. It can be tested and verified. The Bible gives no more historical facts than a (bad) historical novel, and distorts most everything. The problem is that people act as if it were true. Teaching actual facts about the Bible would have a lot of Christians up in arms.
I’ve been here for a while 
But for all the hyperbole and paranoia, here:
I think is a fair point.
I don’t think (as Trihs hints) that it’s a deliberate strategy to support extremism on the part of the moderates, but as long as the moderates assert that it’s somehow insulting and bad manners (or worse; my typically liberal European country has seen proposals from mainstream political parties to upheld and extend the blasphemy laws, for example) to critique religion the net effect is that extremism is being protected and criticism is repressed.
Couldn’t it also be argued the other way? The extremists make the moderates look more extreme.
Also, am I getting that the lack of public denounciements of extremist views or actions is a tacit approval of the extremists? I’m not sure that’s a connection I would be comfortable making or a road I would travel. Because not for nothing, it seems that RO by the moderate theists is much less sexy on air and in ink than the support of them.
In other words you are more likely to see the dancing in the streets in support of an extreme act than you would be to see someone denoucning it, IMHO.
I don’t remember Dawkins making that point, but this is Sam Harris’s main point.
The moderate attitude to extremists is interesting. They certainly do not support them in any way. But sometimes they claim that the extremists are such a small factor that they can be ignored (which goes against many polls and the balance of power in places like Texas) or they say that extremists distort religion, despite never being able to give a test to determine who is distorting the true meaning of the Bible and who isn’t.
The real problem is that I think they know in their heart of hearts that any kind of sieve that would strain out the justifications for the extremists position would also sieve out the justification for their’s. A true commitment to evaluating the evidence they can accept in the same way that they evaluate the evidence they can’t accept would likely result in them winding up as believers in the universe or nature as god - a position with none of these problems. That’s what a lot of Dopers have done, to their credit.
I didn’t intend any such hint. After all, if they are doing that they are extremists themselves; just more subtle ones. You know; the sort of people who do things like egg on people with rhetoric about how the Jews/abortionists/whatever are Satanic monsters, then pretend horror when someone actually goes and kills people.
The problem isn’t that the moderates are deliberately covering for the extremists; it’s that the same standards that justify the moderates can just as easily justify the extremists. As I said several times; there’s just as much reason to believe that God wants you to kill people as to believe that he wants you to go to church. The arguments that condemn the extremists as irrational apply equally to the moderates. The moderates by claiming that their beliefs are justified, are claiming that the equally irrational beliefs of the extremists are justified.
Look extreme to who? Me and a few other atheists. The moderates don’t look extreme to most people - even though they are - because they are the norm. Just like in a society where 1% of the population calls for the execution of left handers, the majority that just wants them kept in ghettos doesn’t think of itself as extreme. The fact is, regardless of how popular it is religion is demented; it’s ridiculous and baseless and incoherent. It’s all extreme; some varieties are just less violent than others, is all.
What? Our entire society is permeated with the support of theism.
I’ve never read Harris, but I have read Dawkins; he does make that point.
Well, no. I could maybe be persuaded that current moderates do indicate a general shift away from violent genocidal literalism over the last X000 years, but that does not mean that the insistence of the “moderates” - which usually means nothing more or less than “a substantial majority of believers in any popular religion”, no matter what their particular views - are doing anybody a favor by claiming a freedom from criticism of their actions, their beliefs or the objects of their beliefs.
It’s easy to grant that kind of exception to someone who’s doing no more evil than the average Joe, and in a polite social setting, that’s fine. But when that sort of exception is made into law, or when it’s stated that people who don’t hold to that exception in a completely open and public debate are somehow “dangerous” (like the OP apparently thinks), you are setting up a system where religious belief can and will be used to justify any action with impunity from outside critique. Witness too the internal investigations of the Catholic Church into the current boom of allegations of child abuse in the Netherlands - oh no, we’ll take care of it ourselves, no need to involve the law. Organizations like to present a public face of complete order and agreement. Religions are just good at organizing things so that they get to keep up the pretense.
Sure. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s a problem the religious will have to work out for themselves. I’m not going to give them automatic exemptions for being the “good/uncorrupted/undistorted” kinds of believers when the only evidence for that is that they haven’t explicitly agreed with that particular action or view. I’m not blaming my perfectly nice Muslim neighbors for the 9/11 attacks. I just think that religion tends to keep its discussions - when there are any - behind closed doors, or alternatively (and we see that even in this thread) claim that the evil doers were “not really [insert faith here]”.
Yeah. So get off your ass
I’m sorry if I misread your previous post.
I can see what you’re saying here, but I don’t think it’s just as rational to believe for example that God wants you to go to Church on Sundays as it is that God wants you to murder the infidel. For one, going to Church once a week won’t put you in mortal danger and doesn’t involve over half of the population of the county (with all the predictable results concerning your own wellbeing and that of your family). A fairly irrelevant belief can be sustained without much evidence. A belief that demands extraordinary measures and dangers should require very good evidence.
Yes indeed.
Why is it less rational to believe that God wants to you make massive self-sacrifices for His benefit? Most religions teach this. Martyrs are praised in mainline christianity too, you realize.
The sort of rational analysis you’re doing is, from a religious perspective, cherry-picking and perverting the dogma with an eye to selfishly game the system. Done under its own rules, religion takes the rationality out of the question entirely, leaving you with a book that says both “go to church” and “kill the infidel” with equal (zero) support. Theistically, the argument for one is no better than the argument for the other.
I was going by the youtube title. The title of the show is:
The Root of All Evil? - The God Delusion
I’m not saying they don’t have exactly the same evidence, I’m saying depriving other people from their lives, their health or whatever or effectively killing yourself requires more evidence than denying yourself a sunday off. From a rational perspective.
Yet orders of magnitudes more people go to Church on Sunday than shoot abortion doctors or give all their wealth to the destitute and wait for the rapture. There’s no reason to assume believers in practice don’t see the difference. My guess is, they’re either not all that sure about their beliefs, or they do indeed selfishly pick and choose what they think is practical and sustainable.
Not to absolve Dawkins on that entirely, but he’s stated he objected to the “Root of all evil?” title, and the broadcaster who funded the program pushed it through. If you read the book, it’s certainly not cast as if religion is the only source of evil.
So your point is that when religion has a weaker hold on its adherents, it’s not as dangerous as when the religion is a more powerful influence? I’d agree. Most people are not fanatics. (Not that you need to be a fanatic to do something that’s convenient for you, like marginalizing gay people.)
Thing is though this reads to me as an argument that religion is more dangerous, not less: the more we can supplant it with rationality the better, until it disappears entirely, for all our sakes.
Interesting. I don’t know, even by reputation, of anyone who thinks a lump of cells has more rights than {an adult human being}. The most rights anyone’s prepared to extend to said clump is the right not to be summarily done to death; if you truly think you live your life with fewer rights than that, I pity you.
‘No abortions, not even for medical reasons!’
Well, then I think I stated my case convincingly overall.
But I want to state one caveat, mostly directed at the kinds of arguments that ITR Champion likes to make: getting rid of religion (voluntarily and convincingly) will not get rid of barbarism. It’ll just remove one important irrational reason for committing or condoning stupidity, hate and violence. There’s no reason it can’t be replaced by something just as bad and irrational. It just increases the chances that things will get a little better.
I don’t see it. Rationality is inherently rooted in evidence; by definition, rationality is the act of using reason to arrive at conclusions. Belieiving that an invisible man on the sky is giving you orders to do things is unreasonable.
Going to church on Sunday is certainly innocuous, while committing acts of terrorism is evil. They aren’t morally equivalent in any way. But one isn’t any more rational than the other; they both proceed from a belief in the infallabile truth of various books of mythology.
The thing is, whatever believers may claim, I don’t actually think even a percent of them thinks their respective holy books are infallible and unambiguous. All of them pick and choose, based on a mixture of reason, moral judgments, personal preference, creative interpretation, peer pressure and ignorance of the actual text.