I Love Me, Vol, I, delusional people are in positions of power and can directly affect my life. They have used my money to shed the blood of my countrymen without just cause. They have slaughtered the innocent. They have unjustly imprisoned and tortured fellow human beings.
The best thing I could do would be to quit paying taxes, but I haven’t the courage.
If people have beliefs that I think are delusional, I’d better go slowly. How do I know that I’m not the one with delusions? They are so intelligent and they seems so certain. But more importantly, they aren’t trying to force me to believe what they believe.
It is not my business what someone else believes as long as that person is not trying to be pushy about her or his beliefs.
Der Trihs believes that Christians are pushy, against gay rights, against gender equality, anti-abortion rights…what am I leaving out? But the reason he believes that is that he doesn’t even want to consider anyone but fundamentalist Christians:
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This is the man who stands against “forms of bigotry” but would encourage this line of thinking:
Well, that’s what bigots do, for starters.
You consider Christians and Christianity to be extremely bad because of a vocal minority – the fundamentalists. You have decided that they represent the core of religion when their messages of exclusiveness and intolerance are not at the core of Christian teachings. Love is. (Don’t make me cite the First and Second Great Commandments. )
No offense, Quiddity, but the Old Testament does call for stoning/execution for several rather silly seeming things from a modern day standpoint. It’s been a while since I read it, but it was pretty clear.
Let’s be more clear. This needn’t be a hijack, because it’s just a plain fact.
(Exodus 31:15):
Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD: whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.
Exodus 22:20 states: He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed.
And so on. Religious Tolerance has a pretty good list:
Death penalty for cursing, death penalty for not chopping skin off your penis, consumption of blood (including all rare meats with blood in them: death for sushi!), death for having sex with a woman on her period, death for birth control, and so on.
There’s just no argument here, no lack of comprehension. No one is required to believe that just because the Bible says so, all Jews or all Christians should care or are bound to it. But that doesn’t mean one can simply deny that it says this at all, or that this at least USED to be what it meant to follow the religion associated with those commands and beliefs and that God.
How rude and obnoxious it is to presume that I’ve not comprehended. I see that this is a charge you are spewing against many people here. Very rude and obnoxious behavior indeed!
I’m not sure if you missed, or simply did not comprehend, my simple question. So, I’ll ask it again, breaking it up for clarity’s sake: A. Which of Dawkins’ books have you read?
B. In which does he claim that science “disproves” religion?
Furthermore, I’d ask you to try and behave in a more civil fashion. This isn’t the Pit, and your hostility may turn others against your point of view.
Because it seems to me that the IPU and the FSM arguments are purely an intellectual exercise which IMHO makes them too limited to be a realistic comparison.
I’d do what I do now. Respond to their actions. There are people all over the place that believe things without proof. The most vehement atheists on this board have expressed there own. If people tell me toy soldiers in their head told them to be kind to others and help the needy I’d say “I don’t believe in your soldiers but I certainly applaud your actions.”
If they believed that their toy soldiers wanted them to invade another country or oppose the civil rights of a certain group I would oppose them.
God belief is connected to people’s emotions, morals and their subjective experiences. I completely support education and any facts that help people let go of tradition and myth. For example, there is plenty of solid factual evidence about where the Bible came from and how much it changed as it passed through human hands. That kind of factual evidence might help people reconsider their belief that they can use a selected verse to justify their prejudice. When people cling to beliefs in spite of ample evidence against said belief you can use that to point out their emotional attachment to that belief. Beliefs that cannot be proven or disproved require a different approach. My choice is to deal with the actions.
I do support a healthy discussion and an exchange of ideas. In doing that my observation has been that atheists also hold beliefs that have a more emotional basis than factual or logical. Somehow we have to learn to deal with the emotional and subjective quality of belief systems rather than just a logical factual analysis.
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Der Trihs** is a great example of an atheist who behaves in a similar manner to the fundamentalist Christians he criticizes. We’ve had a discussion about fundie atheists before. He holds beliefs unsupported by evidence and continues to spew them as fact.
I suppose everyone is hostile to what they consider extremely bad. Does that mean it isn’t bigotry? Are blanket generalizations about religious beliefs much different than blanket generalizations about gays or Muslims or anything else?
I think the question is whether that hostility is justified and reasonable.
Can religion provide any reliable answers regarding the truth and understanding of how the universe works? Is it possible to know those answers, or can they only be felt?
This is correct and goes to the heart of the problem. It is lazy and illogical to attempt to argue for atheism by attempting to disprove a strain of Christianity. It wouldn’t even make sense to attempt to disprove Christianity as a whole. The entire Christian religion could be wrong and there could still be a God, or a god. The intellectual honest course for Atheists is to argue against that to which it is diametrically opposed: Theism, but that rarely happens. Why? Bcause there are no easy targets. That, and that they’re stuck offereing up an alternative to a Creator, a First Cause. And that puts them right into a camp of faith. That someday, somehow, science will learn about and understand a thing that—contrary to one of the most basic laws of science—existed without a cause. That or argue for a timeless universe, which they must then take on faith, with a belief that someday, somehow, a person will appear in a lab coat and explain how it all works.
Dawkins, in his book, argues against theism in general, not just christianity. I mostly argue specifically against christianity because it is so widespread, and imo, harmful.
From my point of view, it doesn’t matter if you want to call the first cause “god”. However, I fail to see how this has any relevance to the existance of any kind of sky god, who is interested in and interferes with human affairs.
I’m very dubious that there are athiests who are primarily concerned with Christianity alone.
Well, not just theism, but also deism, as well as polytheism, but such concerns may be beyond the point at present.
Pure nonsense. First, in treating claims about religion, it is not specifically necessary to offer an alternative. However, the fact is that for many of the claims of religion, there are alternative explanations that function much better.
But to deal with your specific argument, atheists don’t need to have any faith that science will do anything in the future. The demonstrable falsity of relgious claims can be made right here and now without a need to wait for anything. If we never get a scientific explanation for how we got here, clearly we are here and that won’t change if “a person in a lab coat” appears or does not appear.
Furthermore, suggesting that one theory is wrong does not prove another specific theory is right. If a scientific explanation is not forthcoming, it doesn’t mean that there must therefore be a god.
Of coursse the crux of the problem is the word “reliable”. But for the vast amount of how the universe operates there is no divide between Atheists and Theists. Very few Theists, or Christians for that matter, have disagreement with what we call the laws of the universe. The disagreemnet arises when we venture into what science does not KNOW, mainly when it comes to the origins of the universe. Now, Young Earth Creationists are an exception, and one would do well to question their spoecific beliefs, which is done regularly. Most people have backed away from a YEC postition due to evidence. Others are yet to be convinced. But if I were an Atheist I would find it a better use of my time to argue against the more reasonable strains of religious belief, not the most questionable. If you disprove YEC, you then have to move on to non-Young Earth Christians, and then non-Christian religionists, etc. As I’ve stated a few times, Atheism should be arguing against Theism. Unti it can successfully do that, there will always be another religion that can make the case for Theism, and therefore, against Atheism. And after every religion, old and new, is revealed to be mere myth, Atheists are still stuck with Thesim sans religion.
It seems to me that by continuing to go after religion and not have the more fundamental debate, that they show themselves to be simply against religion. I’d like to see an good argument FOR Atheism that leaves religion out of it. One that gets to the heart of the matter: is there or is there not a God? Or god, if you prefer.
It matters greatly. If you allow that there is a “god”, then whether he is God is a matter of faith. Something that I dount will ever be proven one way or another. It becomes a matter of philosophy and faith.
Depends on whether you also want to insist on omnibenevolence (let alone the other, sometimes mutually-exclusive omni-s). Sure, one can handwave it away by claiming that since God is allpowerful, God essentially dictates what is good and what is not, but that is equivocation because they are not using the term “good” the way it is commonly understood in English.
It seems a strange distinction that you want to make between religion and God or god or gods. I’ve been using “claims about religion” and “claims about God” essentially interchangably, but it makes no difference one way or the other.
A theist or religous person or believer in God is making observations about the world, and saying, “Well, God must have done that.”
An athiest might respond, “Why is that?” The response should include claims that can be evaluated. In my opinion, the argument for atheism is the essential lack of an argument for God, or god or gods. It’s really that simple, but it seems that you feel that athiests are obligated to prove that God or god or gods doesn’t or don’t exist.
Why should atheists do anything? Why should they pander to argue an unfalsifiable claim? The dangers in the West are Fundamentalists, and right-leaning moderates who want to bind Christian dogmatic thinking into to the legal systems, educational systems, etc.
The fundamentalists are the ones on the front lines, and in any “war” that’s who you go after first.
To put this debate into perspective, as an atheist, I do believe that the only thing I really should do is keep working on shaking the perfect martini.
What Dawkins and other activist atheists fail to understand is that religious belief goes to the very core of the believer’s identity. It isn’t just empty blather when religious believers say, “Without God, I am nothing.” They mean it.
Think about it for a minute – what part or parts of your life do you consider necessary for your identity? What are you, and what makes you what you are? Your education? Your political beliefs? It is almost certainly intangible, not something that can be proven to exist by emperical evidence. Now imagine that you are told everything you know about that part of you is wrong, doesn’t even exist. I am confident that you would fight hard, angrily, bitterly, to retain or regain it before you would deny your own identity.
On the one hand, I am perplexed that someone as intellectual and world-wise as Bill Winterowd, former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado, could believe that God actually exists and acts on our individual daily lives; on the other hand, I’m shocked that someone as intelligent and educated as Richard Dawkins knows or cares so little about the deep personal nature of religion.
Are there people who use their religion in negative, even crippling ways? Of course there are! There are also people who use their conservative political beliefs to justify raping the environment, oppressing minorities and disenfranchising the poor. That doesn’t mean we should sit around talking about erasing conservativism from the face of the planet.
Dawkins is a radical. We need radicals, if for no other reason than to make the rest of us look reasonable. I do not believe God exists and I have turned completely away from my old religious beliefs. But I don’t want to live in a world where religion is treated like a disease to be eradicated.
It’s true that there are atheists of different persuasions on the board, but why is that a problem to you? Discuss one version at a time. Why is this so difficult?
My impression from the last time you brought this up is that you’re frustrated that you can’t pin anyone with the STRONG version of Atheism because you have such POWERFUL ARGUMENTS to counter them. Why not just make a case against Strong Atheism and be done with it?
I think that is a worthy goal. I have no problems with Theism sans religion. A world without religion is a world with mathematics without numerology, anatomy without palmistry, etc.
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