Nope, but believing in the necessity and “goodliness” of these in my case is heavily supported by my religion. They are intertwined. One is supported by the other.
Yet the fundie atheists seem to call me delusional?
Neither of your comments are associated with religion, then. If the religious opposition to stem cell research also included NIH support of cancer research, then we could talk. We’ve had plenty of research funding debates (not recently) so I don’t think we need to get into that here.
No one disputes that religion motivates people to do things - both good things and bad things. But many of the good things could be motivated for non-religious reasons, while some of the bad things might be stuff that a person would never think of doing unless he believes god wants him to. Neither is any justification for god belief. Maybe someone is motivated to donate to orphan relief in Africa because the are hot for Angelina Jolie. That’s not a good justification, though something far more supportable that god belief, IMHO.
And Dawkins being too clever not to be fully aware of this, I have to wonder what he’s really thinking. It isn’t difficult to determine the person best positioned to benefit from the crystallization of atheism into something more tangible and influential.
Although I find most of the theological underpinnings of modern mass-market religions to be unpalatable, I wouldn’t suggest that we eliminate those who do mission work! I do think that if we upgrade our critical thinking skills, over time, as a community, that approximately the same proportion of the population will be motivated to help their fellow man. I think the notion that human empathy is driven by fear of damnation and hope for everlasting glory is cynical nonsense.
If you were going to pick one or the other, I recommend you choose based on whether your orientation is more towards social science (Harris) or physical science (Dawkins).
I agree with some of what you are saying; if an atheist is seeking to disprove the god thesis, concentrating on a Christian god doesn’t cut the mustard.
That being said, the atheist is under no rational obligation to offer up an alternative to a creator/first cause. All the atheist has to say is ‘I don’t know’. Not knowing something is not the basis for positive evidence in favor of something.
Further, it hasn’t been shown that the universe definitively had a first cause (or would require one). I was reading a book written by a physicist who speculated about a consistent self causing universe, for instance. The book was about Time Travel and the author was named “Gott”. Now, I don’t know the physics, so I can’t say how feasible his theory really is - my point in bringing it up is to say that we don’t need to be committed to a ‘created’ universe (this could change, if my understanding is wrong though).
As it is though, I think the idea of god creating the universe is rhetorical nonsense - it seems to be contradictory and incoherent.
The necessity of “goodliness” is supported by the human condition. The fact that your religion supports good work doesn’t mean that good work can’t exist without it.
How would you propose to go about “disproving” the god thesis except by defeat in detail - in other words, address each religious claim individually?
For instance, we might show that a bi-omni god is logically inconsistent, but some religions might not claim that their god or gods are bi-omni. The Greek gods, for instance, were hardly omnipotent.
I’m not entirely certain that there is a way to disprove all versions of god. I agreed with the poster because you can’t say that god doesn’t exist and then back it up with an argument against a specific god - since that only represents one out of many.
My best guess would be something akin to what you are suggesting; ie an argument that shows the basic attributes that most of the gods have are incoherent.
That still wouldn’t disprove them all though.
**Edited to change ‘refute’ to disprove.
What is this human condition? Can you empirically prove that it exists? Is this just the Social Contract? Are you SURE that it supports goodliness, without supporting other more negative activities?
I totally agree that good work can exist without religion, and if I seemed state that - it was based on poor phrasing on my part. I also argue that great evil can exist without religion - and that is why I completely disagree with the hypothesis that eliminating religion would lead to net positive improvement in society.
Completely outside of my personal faith, I believe that religion as a whole is a net contributor to society (at least society in the USA). When I take that and add in my personaly faith, I personally find something even more than just an actuarial calculation of net income.
The title of the thread is “Richard Dawkins’ brand of atheism.” Throughout the thread, posters have echoed Dawkins’ assertion that religion is (I’m paraphrasing here) a pox on humanity and a barrier to advancement of civilization and science, and therefore should be destroyed, and the sooner the better. I was pointing out the uselessness of such discussion, and observing that it appears to me that people who talk about the destruction of religion lack an understanding of how deeply religion runs through the human mind and spirit.
Better we should follow the advice of the original poster and learn how to work hand-in-hand with the vast majority of religious moderates to keep civilization and science on the advance.
Thanks - I will pick up the Harris book (since my hard science education pales in comparison to the fuzzy side of me).
You may be correct in your proposition regarding helping - I don’t know. I DO know that my desire to help is strengthened through my faith and through my religion. Perhaps that could be substituded with a philosphy and organization (Kiwanis or Rotary, assuming they have no official religous component).
I don’t act out of fear of Hell. I act out of a desire to be Christian, which is defined partially through good acts (and predominantly through faith and the acceptance of God’s grace). Since I already have the Faith, I am now just trying to live up the standards set a couple thousand years ago.
I never said it didn’t support negative activities; in fact I believe it does. But so does religion, so how does religion enhance our world experience over and above what man does?
Again, speaking outside of personal faith…
I BELIEVE that religion offers a structure around a philosphy that helps guide people towards good actions.
I BELIEVE that without structure, man reverts to acting like a selfish animal (cue Lord of the Flies comments).
The question is: why does that “structure” have to involve the idea that irrational or unsupported beliefs are laudable and necessary for the structure to function? Clearly it is not the case that people who lack religious belief lack moral structure.
We constantly hear the idea that religious belief has some special property as far as making morality and moral sentiment possible. But I’ve never heard any sensible justification of this claim.
(Speaking as an agnostic/atheist…)
This is a poor analogy. Whether or not there is a teapot in the orbit of Saturn is a statement that COULD be confirmed or disproven, and which makes concrete statements about things (planets, orbits, teapots) that we understand fairly well, can study, can learn about, can apply science to.
“The universe was created by a conscious force”, on the other hand, is something that we have no idea how to even BEGIN attempting to confirm or not.
(That’s why, much as I enjoy mocking the overly religious, I think the “flying spaghetti monster” argument is somewhat flawed. If someone says “there’s a human-looking man up in the clouds who created this particular book”, then they’re making strong and groundless claims, just as strong and groundless as the proverbial FSM. But if someone says “I believe that God is a unifying presence around the entire universe” or some equally vague statement, that’s not really in any way analogous to the existence of a creature with measurable characteristics like “flying” and “monsterhood” and “spaghetti-ness”.)
Well, I am not sure what you mean by irrational in my personal case, though I can understand that some other religions (not mine, of course! 
) might have some odd beliefs.
As for unsupported, I will let others play the historical Jesus game and fun with it.
To answer your real question (as opposed to jumping on side comments)…
I do not think that man is inherently moral. I think that morality has to come from somewhere. This is what I mean by needing a core philosophy that outlines what is proper behaviour, and then justifies it. It seems to me that organized (and disorganized) religion provides a moral philosophy along with a structure and set of rules to make it easier to follow. The concept of a God helps man organize his thoughts and remember that he is being watched and will be judged, even if nobody human sees him.
This system has been rather effective. People seem to respond well to it. Why does AA need 12 steps? It works.
Why do many of us need religion? It works.
Please note I am trying (and no doubt failing) to remove the part of my brain that not only appreciates the structure of religion but also embraces it through a personal belief when writing these.
The deeper it runs the more serious and intractable the problem.
The religious moderates are a more serious problem then the fundies. The moderates give cover and legitimacy to the wacko fundies. Most people don’t care what fundies say and do because most of them are utter nutjobs. The moderates, OTOH, are accepted by society because they display intelligence and critical thinking. As long as there are so many religious moderates, organized religion will be the status quo. Once the moderates get it out of their systems (IMO that’s happening at a consistent rate, albeit very slowly) the fundies will be so marginalized that the whole game will be up.
The fundamentalists will never work this whole thing out for themselves because they don’t have the tools to do so. So be it. The moderates do have the tools, yet they choose to continue believing in sky pixies and the like. That’s quite vexing, and it prolongs the pain and misery that the entire civilization must endure.
Seriously— has any god-believer ever directly answered that kind of question? I would love to hear the answer.
In my response to magellan01 I gave a kind of inductive argument as to why it made sense to believe there are no gods. I put “disprove” in quotes because few if any atheists claim to know a way to disprove all gods - or any god, for that matter, unless that god is defined in such a way to be logically inconsistent.
I’m not sure I’d try to use the incoherency argument - are the properties of a god required to be coherent, which I assume is weaker than logically consistent?
Practically speaking, though, attacking one god at a time works fine, since your average theist already rejects all gods but one. Assuming he does this for some good reason (a stretch, I grant you) knocking out his god should turn him into an atheist.
I’d go further and say that not being afraid to say “I don’t know” is one of the defining features of rational thought. There’s plenty of things in the universe that we might never know, and I’m okay with that. I’m certainly curious, and I’m glad that there’s lots of people who are much cleverer than me trying to find out answers to some of of those Big Questions. Simply saying “God did it” doesn’t satisy my curiosity in the slightest.