You’re going to have to explain yourself more clearly, then. You stated:
For a substantial number of human beings, Christianity has not worked “just fine” because that religion has been used to justify abominable behavior. How are non-Christians at fault for the excesses of Christians?
Or are you acknowledging that Christianity isn’t about peace, brotherhood, and all that other feel-good stuff? Are you, in fact, suggesting that it’s all about power and dominance, and the rest of us are fools for expecting to be regarded as anything other than convenient stepping stones to that goal?
This analogy doesn’t work. People who practice Kung Fu generally don’t assert that the rest of us live and/or believe the wrong thing. They generally don’t insist that everything would be just fine if only everyone would practice Kung Fu. They don’t have a history of making life difficult for people who don’t practice Kung Fu.
By your logic, I might as well say that knitting works for humanity. Lot of people don’t like it and many people who like it aren’t very good at it. But it makes me and a lot of other people happy. Shall I declare that non-knitters are missing something essential in their lives?
I think this is a common misconception. The core set of moral values is independent of religion. Do you think that if you changed religions you would decide that murder, or stealing, or deception is OK? What ties together members of a religion is less about shared moral laws than it is about common sets of behavior: wear or not wear a hat; cut or not cut your hair; is it OK to eat pigs, cows, animals, lobsters; worship on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. These are not moral issues. People have a very similar set of moral values across religions and countries, so I expect that they do not stem from religion but from a set of practical and innate principals.
While shared custom and ritual are important, I think another key element that binds people together is simple identity. People like to label each other, put people into groups, sort ‘us’ from ‘them’. They also like to align with movements, communities, and authority structures. “I am a Catholic”, with an unspoken “…not something else”. “Being Jewish is part of who I am.” And such.
Identity, belonging, and group membership are important parts of culture and of personal self-image. Further, belonging to a group can give codes of conduct and social mores that make life much easier than having to deal with people who act and think in many different ways (and that promotes socialization of the young, and enforcement on the old, and from that the woes of many a misfit and minority group). And if that group you’re identifying with is bolstered by an claim to universal superiority (ie, holding to the correct form of the fundamental truths of the world, or being privy to the special attention of the creator-controller of the universe), well, that just makes it that much more attractive to join, and that much harder to leave, than a service club or a street gang.
For sure. How many religions have some variation on ‘do unto others as you’d have them do unto you’?
I am not religious nor I am sure I believe or not in God but I was raised a catholic and It bothers me that in the SDMB (even in the Pit), people can be so dismissive of religions in general and Christianity in particular with argument like this:
Provide scientific evidence that God exists or shut up.
Why didn’t god prevented jesus death?
Etc.
For me, a good introduction to a critique of most of this kind of arguments is found in Terry Eagleton review of “The God Delusion”, after all people like Der Thris are only advertising it.
Also, it has the best line ever: Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. Enjoy.
It’s a really, really stupid belief system with no evidence that it’s true, or even possible. It makes no logical sense and has inflicted great evil on the world. Treating it “dismissively” is if anything too mild.
Reads *
A great deal of dodging or ignoring Dawkin’s actual arguments, mixed with incoherent gibberish. Fairly standard.
Well I just googled images of “god”, and guess what turned up. A big old page chock full of supersized chaps with white beards. And I’ll bet most of them can speak to billions of people simultaneously. I also tried googling for “Tony Blair” expecting to find a page full of optopuses, but imagine my disappointment.
Dawkins is adressing god as he is most commonly portrayed by his own believers. It seems rather disingenuous of Eagleton to compare it to a human octopus, basically dismissing the idea as silly.
Why shouldn’t belief in God be held to the same standard as belief in everything else? Take chairs, for instance. Since there is widespread evidence of the existence of chairs, and the theoretical existence of chairs would not contradict the known laws of reality, people come to the rational conclusion that chairs exist. On the other hand, there is no convincing evidence that God exists, we have never seen evidence that anything has the powers ascribed to God, and we have evidence that a benevolent god is not helping us out. Therefore, it is rational to conclude that God does not exist.
Arguing that the Christian belief system is not internally consistent is a perfectly valid way of disproving it.
The problem isn’t that people are too dismissive of religion. The problem is that, given the complete lack of supporting evidence, people aren’t dismissive enough.
Not according to one of many anthropologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists who are in aggreement:
We propose an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Our analysis reveals 3 principle psychological dimensions of religious belief (God’s perceived level of involvement, God’s perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge), which functional MRI localizes within networks processing Theory of Mind regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics, and imagery. Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions.
“Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dimitrios Kapogiannis et al
Sure, humans have a tendancy to anthropomorphize nature. But going from that to implying we’re born theists is quite a stretch.
At a personal level, the thought of a god never occurred to me, for example, until I started going to catholic school at about the age of 7. And even then, I can recall thinking it was a fairy tale, it took a while for it to sink in that other children and even some adults believed that there really was a god.
You have a problem with this position? Why? That is pretty much THE essential burden which must be met by the theist? What’s unfair about asking for proof? Why the hell should anyone NOT ask for proof?
This is not a question asked by atheists.
This review is a huge crybaby exercise in missing the point (and that particular quote mischaraterizes Dawkins, by the way. Dawkins does not single out a “personal God” in the way this review suggest, nor does he make any strawman objectons to how many people any God can talk to. This guy, Eagleton, is making things up. I have to wonder if he even read the book.
His objections about Dawkins not having studied theology are completely ridiculous. That’s like whining that you can’t say vampires don’t exist unless you’ve seen a bunch of vampire movies. It’s stupid. Theology is all just fabtasy and fan wanking. It has nothing to contribute to a scientific discussion. It’s irrelevant because it starts by assuming the exact premises which are under discussion.
Sorry stupid. Because people want to look at the thundering sky and assume it’s a big-dick father figure who’s angry at them doesn’t mean we are born as theists.
It means we have imaginations. Shouldn’t you be working on a ponderous thread proving that Christ is aesthetically pleasing or something?
I’m an atheist - because I see no need for a supreme being to explain certain things about the world and do not need someone to blame when something bad happens to me.
I’m quite content with having this one shot at life, to try and be as happy as I can be - and not at someone elses expense - but as part of a succesful society.
Quite frankly I find the idea that I am not a moral person because of my lack of a religious belief offensive. I do not need the threat of hell or some god’s wrath to keep me from stealing, murdering and generally being an unpleasant person.
The ten commandments are an adaptation to the set of rules that were already in place - because it makes a society work to the greater benefit of all in it.
Just my two cents, because I got slightly offended while reading this thread
Tikster
My sentiments are, “What you mean ‘we’, Kemosabe?”[sup]1[/sup]
I concur in the epistemological principle that to place credence in anything, there must be evidence pointing to that anything. Further, that evidence must be convincing to the person evaluating it.
Now, here we have the problem. It is a commonplace of those denigrating religion that “there is absolutely no evidence.” There is, in fact, large quantities of evidence, ranging from the Bible to historical and personal-anecdotal accounts, of experiences attributed to God’s doing. (And of course this is not limited to Judaism and Christianity – there are other examples of alleged divine intervention in Islam and other faiths.) It ias of course each person’s prerogative to evaluate the evidence available and make his/her own judgment as to the validity and convincingness of such evidence.
Taking this a stage further, let us postulate a set of non-supernatural things alleged to exist: the unicorn, the Loch Ness monster, the Ivory-billed woodpecker, and the rhinoceros. In the case of the unicorn, there is no particular reason why a cloven-hoofed single-horned animal with a build akin to a horse could not exist, but all accounts are regarded as fanciful. In short, while there is evidence for the unicorn, there is no reliable evidence, and we regard it as fantastic, legendary. With Nessie, there are eyewitness accounts, a few photographs, but plenty of contradictory evidence regarding the improbability of a creature of that size in that lake without concrete, irrefutable evidence turning up. So Nessie is regarded as probably fictional, though some few sober rational people might regard it as more probable than that, and a few will “believe in” its existence. The Ivorybill unquestionably did exist but was long believed to have gone extinct, There is a certain amount of data (observations, hearing its call, etc.) suggesting that it is still alive but rare – and experts are divided AFAIK on whether to regard it as still extant. Now, I have never seen a living rhinoceros. (In fact, I don’t believe I’ve seen a stuffed or skeletal one in person.) But the overwhelming amount of expert evidence and even video footage (which, please note, could be faked) lead me to accept the idea that there is such a thing as a rhinoceros – that it merely has never come into my sphere of experience.
This is the process a reasonable skeptic should take with God: weigh the evidence for His existence, not necessarily taking the wildest claims (analogy: while the yeti is improbable, if it does exist, it does not have backward pointing feet nor do females fling pendulous breasts over their shoulders when pursuing prey; if God exists, He is not in the habit of miraculously imprinting His own portrait on taco shells, nor does the author of Joshua’s claim that the sun stood still have to be taken as anything but Bronze-age legend, just as Troy can be historically beseiged without the existence of Greek pantheon being assumed, just because Homer placed them at the scene), and allow those with different experiences to make their own evaluation.
Also, please note the phenomenon of “cultural Christianity” where adherence to belief in a God who loves what you love and hates what you hate goes along with an unthinking adherence to the Republican Party, a dislike and distrust of all non-Americans, etc.) – and a consequent belief that God wants them to enforce their cultural norms on everyone else by law or force. Der Trihs is entirely justified, in my opinion, in his diatribes against this phenomenon and its past analogs (witch burning, cuius regio eius religio, Galileo’s imprisonment, forced conversion to orthodoxy, and the like); where he goes wrong is in equating this cultural aberration to all of Christianity.
No Cherokees were harmed during the making or using of this cliché.
Hmmm… I know it’s the Pit, but where’s the logic in berating Lib for posting an abstract of a scientific paper that provides a cite to the point you made, about imagination?
