Ha! Possibly… I was eating at the bar we talked for a while about sports,
then he tries to sell me a religion. I think it was because I didn’t yell, I said it very quietly, bartender wasn’t around. Maybe he cried because he found someone he COULDN’T save.
Still, doubt is the key. (To paraphrase Gekko…) Doubt is good. Doubt works.
I doubt I can trust everyone in CA, so I’ll lock my front door. I doubt I’ll win a million $$$ by picking the right online balloon, so I won’t click. I doubt there is an afterlife. I doubt religion is all it’s cracked up to be. I doubt I should walk around South Central at 3:00 am and be safe. I doubt Nadya Suleman can support her kids.
Doubt = common sense, so throw doubt in the ring, let 'em box.
Write a book and talk about it, since that’s pretty much all he can do.
Incorrect. The mistake here is yours; you are confusing damage with trauma. The person raised to be religious will most likely suffer less than the victim of molestation; but they will probably be much more twisted. They may in fact not suffer at all directly; that won’t keep them from inflicting harm on themselves and others because of their delusions. How many people has Catholicism, for example, been responsible for inflicting suffering and death on over the years, as opposed to child molesters ? I’m sure it’s crusade against condoms in Africa alone has killed more people than were molested by priests.
That has nothing whatsoever to do with what Dawkins was saying: he was expressly discusing individual suffering, not “inflicting harm on themselves and others” because of their beliefs.
One can easily hold the opinion that Catholicism has overall been a baleful force for harm in the world and still find Dawkins’ argument full of hooey.
He said “damage”; being made more harmful to oneself and others qualifies as damage. And self inflicted suffering is still suffering.
You are essentially defining away most of the harm caused by being raised religious as counting as harm, then pretending that means being raised religious is less harmful than it is.
Okay, for NOW Dawkins is not taking any concrete action to stop me from raising my son in the Catholic Church, because he figures there’s nothing he can do to stop me.
Given his druthers, what WOULD he do about abusive parents like me?
Hmmm? If dangerous loons like him ever had the secular power to implement their agenda, just what WOULD he like to do about those of us who teach our children religious values he disapproves of?
If religion is as evil as he proclaims, he has a duty to do more than flail his arms. Let him spell out his plan: WHAT should be done to Christian parents who dare take their children to Church?
He’s already doing exactly what he thinks should be done, given all the factors. He’s trying to educate people on what he sees as the dangers of religion and the truths of science. Imagining that he’s just secretly waiting for the moment to agitate for laws restricting people from raising their kids in their faith is just that – imagination. If you have any evidence at all that he advocates such, then you might have a valid reason to worry. Otherwise, this whole discussion seems to have missed a crucial difference between child molesters and religious parents – intent.
Dawkins’ statement that religion can sometimes cause greater long-term damage than sexual abuse does not mean he thinks religious people are morally equal to child molesters – which is why he compared the effects rather than the people. He is capable, like most sane adults, of recognizing that reasonable people can disagree over firmly held convictions, so running around trying to hammer your convictions into law against the general moral sense is wrong. It’s clear to me from his books and interviews and lectures that he views his job as convincing other people that he’s right, not enforcing his position on them regardless.
Sigh. I’m clearly talking about real abuse, not being made to do one’s homework. I’m also assuming the parents have at least investigated, to see if the issue was real, but that might be asking too much.
Any parent who has had to go back on a promise has gotten an accusation of abuse of trust. Yes, that is one of the issues in abuse, but not the only one. I doubt too many kids have been traumatized by missing a visit to the zoo.
Is there an expectation that an adult teaching or supervising a child will not say things to deeply upset the child? I would suspect the people in question here would say that traumatizing the child is worth it to keep her from hell. But even teaching about real risks does not have to be traumatic, not that young. When I took Driver’s Ed they showed us one of those films which graphically illustrated the kind of crispy critter you may become by being in a car wreck. I wouldn’t show that to an 8 year old, even to encourage her to put on her seatbelt. The fact that the teacher in the Catholic case is scaring the student about a fantasy makes it even worse.
Putting aside the bullshit about times tables, how can we measure the impact of a situation except by looking at the response of the person it is done to? Say a person enjoys being insulted, because he likes to parry the insults, and another is deeply disturbed by them. Do you think it is right to treat those people the same? If the second person responds by withdrawing for a week, do you deny the impact on him because the first person isn’t affected at all, and comes back for more? Respect? Not treating people like individuals, with different sensitivities, is a gigantic lack of respect in my book.
Sadly, I’m pretty sure you are right. Which ties in nicely to Ensign Edison’s point. I think what Dawkins is trying to do is to sensitize people to the effects of religion on people. Hitting and demeaning children - and women - used to be considered normal or even amusing. Scaring the crap out of kids in church, traumatizing them, seems to be considered normal now. People get that the physical abuse is wrong, not the mental abuse.
Richard Dawkins endorsed this piece by Nicholas Humphrey.
Read it and tell me it is NOT a call for censorship of parents, for restricting what parents may or may not teach their children.
There are only two possibilities here:
1- That Richard Dawkins, like Humphrey, really IS a fascist who wants to take children away from their parents and reprogram them the “right” way.
2- That Dawkins is full of beans, doesn’t really mean a word he’s saying, and spouts off such rubbish only to sell books or to get a round of cheap appluasue from an audience that already thinks his way.
I mean bottom line the only reason we respect anyone else’s beliefs is so that people don’t kill each other over them, as seems to be the norm rather than the exception throughout history.
Yes, he does say that all people who believe in God commit murder and other unspecified evil things. To say “[Group of people A] does **” means that all people in group A do B, according to correct English usage. Hence if I say “My children went to the mall” that means all of children went to the mall, not just one or a few of them. If someone says “black people are stupid” then that’s a lie, even though there are a few stupid black people.
So Dawkins does, indeed, say that all religious people commit murder.
In answer to your last question, no.
Your basic logic goes like this. You argue it’s wrong to associate all of any other group for murders committed by members, by right do so with religious believers, because non-believers don’t commit murder “as a group”, while religious believers do. That claim is utterly preposterous even by atheist standards. It is not true that all the world’s religious believers congregate and make common plans to commit murder. If you’d like to present evidence of such a thing happening, I’d like to see it. If you’d like to present evidence that all religious people, by dint of being religious, commit murder either directly or indirectly, you’re welcome to present it. But to classify Christians as murderers because of the actions of Islamic extremists is nonsense because there has never been any joint action between the two. (Indeed, to state the obvious, without Christians to stand up and freedom and democracy, Muslims would rule much more of the planet, if not the entire thing.)
And your only evidence is heresay from one web page, so no, he didn’t indeed say what you’re claiming. And as is you usual MO around here, you ignore requests for a backing up of claims. Are you ever going to tell us where Sam Harris spreads “hatred or lies towards religious people?”
In my english language, this is not correct. People will say “my children went to the mall”, even if one of the kids didn’t. People will say “young people shop in my store”, even if a few billion youngsters haven’t been. And people will say “Fat people get diabetes”, when there are in fact a couple of fat people who have dropped from heart attacks instead.