There was plenty of evidence for Fermat’s Last Theorem. You could plug in values for a, b, and c and never find a solution. Furthermore, it was testable.
The problem with “there are things we don’t understand” is that it has no value. If people say “everything is connected” or “people have souls” or any number of other vauge phrases, it has no real value or importance unless it makes a difference in the physical world.
For example, let’s say that someone comes in every Thursday night and replaces everything I have with a copy so exact that it can not be differentiated from the original. What difference does it make if that is true or not? How can we ever test if it is true? On the other hand, if you say that praying to God makes a difference in someone’s health we can test that statistically and see if is true.
In other words, if a statement on god or religion is so vauge that it can’t be tested then it makes no difference if it is true or not.
I didn’t know that. In what context? What I meant, in case someone doesn’t know, is “leads to.” It’s just a graphical depiction of an arrow.
In case anyone else thought I was using a pre-defined symbol, I also did not mean to refer to the “charity” member of the data structure to which the pointer “Christianity” points to. Nor any other formal, pre-defined uses of the “->” symbol. I just meant it as an arrow, because my keyboard doesn’t have an arrow character on it.
Since these guys spent their life fighting to advance Marxism in Europe (and America in Marcuse’s case) and they were certainly intelligent men, there’s no reason to doubt that they knew quite a bit about how it interacted with other trends and ways of thinking. If they say that Christianity was the obstacle blocking the establishment of communist governments worldwide, I see no reason to doubt them.
Surely you would agree that a person’s stands on religion and morals and ethics are not completely independent variables.
If we follow your reasoning here far enough, we’d find that virtually every person on the planet is “attacking” virtually every other all the time. I use the English-language definition, by which an attack means taking hostile action against someone or something. By that definition, thinking is not an attack but insulting is.
I refer to the argument often made by atheists (including Richard Dawkins, as you know) that all religious people are guilty of supporting extreme and violent religion merely by existing, and that this justifies unending attacks against all religions. It seems obvious to me that an atheist making such an argument is implicity claiming that atheism can do better on the violence and extremism fronts. I started this thread to rebut that claim.
Small groups of people have often banded together and shared their resources to protect their freedoms. That’s the opposite of communism as we now understand it where a large, national government explicity strips away the freedoms of the people.
What you’re talking about (i.e. Soviet style communism) isn’t Marxist communism but fascist totalitarianism with a socialist economic system. Jesus taught pure Marxist communism (which has no government).
If they knew so much about how it interacted with other trends and ways of thinking, I would imagine their work would have succeeded, no? And like I said, did they not themselves think Marxism would be successful? If they were wrong enough in understanding how widespread and accepted Marxism would become, and how it interacted with other trends and ways of thinking, then I see very good reason to doubt them. You seem to want to hold Marxism up as a dangerous and ultimately unsuccessful doctrine on one hand, and supporters of it being great understanders of the world and of people in the other. You can’t have both.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean. Could you restate it for me, please?
I would say Dawkins claims that moderate religious people make the nutjobs look less nutjobby, rather than accusing them of supporting the nutjobs, which to me implies actual voluntary aid. This might be a semantic difference, however. Also I think “unending attacks against all religions” could do with a bit of a qualifier, since the most Dawkins seems to go in the attacking front is insults.
I’m afraid I don’t think your argument follows through, however. The comparison you seem to be drawing is between moderate religious people providing a sane basis for the nutjobs to spring off from and commit whatever atrocity, and atheists comitting atrocities. The true comparison shouldn’t be against atheists causing atrocities, but moderate atheists providing a reasonable base for the nutjob atheists.
In other words, you would need to show that moderate atheists do provide that reasonable base - that for example people are more tolerant of religious whackery because of all the sane religious people around, and that equally people are more tolerant of athiest whackery because of all the sane atheists around. What your debate should be based around is not whether or not atrocities can be said to have been caused by the athiesm of the perpetrators (although that it also an interesting debate), but whether or not such atrocities are provided a reasonable basis by sane atheists. To venture my opinion, I would reckon not; partially because generally atheism is often seen as a bad thing anyway, and partially because it is often another facet of the perpetrators, such as their political leanings, that is the focus of their behaviour, and not their atheism.
Wait - isn’t it the theists who are always claiming that you can’t have morals without God? Maybe not you, but most other theists.
I wouldn’t say they’re completely independent. Adherence to an ideology/dogma can cause people to do immoral things.
By the way, I’m not someone who would try to make an argument one way or another about who caused more atrocities. I was just objecting to the OP which said that atheism was responsible for Stalin’s atrocities. It clearly wasn’t.
I think mostly this is just a rebuttable to the argument that religion automatically brings with it moral superiority. Also, it tends to happen for examples in which the crime was specifically tied to the religion, rather than just happening to have been committed by someone of a particular faith. In theory it’s only fair to judge atheism and theism by the same standards, but I think you’ll find in practice that the times when it seems like the same argument is being used, there is often a key difference that makes it actually a different issue.
I think that’s Sam Harris’s thesis, not Dawkins’. That the moderate religious enable the extreme religious to be more extreme. I’m not thoroughly familiar with his thesis, but basically I think it’s that the moderates support the wall that forbids the questioning of beliefs held by faith alone, therefore shielding the extreme religious from having their views challenged.
I think attacks against religions are justified, based on how it’s a bad idea in principle to hold irrational beliefs. I’m not attacking the religious, but the religions. A doctor fights the cancer, not the patient.
That’s only true for positions considered absolute, not provisional. If I say Mike Oldfield is the greatest guitarist of all time, i know (if I’m sane) that this is not an absolute opinion. So, you saying that Jimi Hendrix is the greatest guitarist is not an attack.
I’m trying to think of non-religious absolutes. The existence of the Holocaust, maybe, but the feeling of attack there is probably more from bigotry than historical inaccuracy. Most of the old polytheists had no trouble with people not following their religion, since it allowed many other gods. Judaism evolved into monotheism, but non-Jews are not really obligated to worship, so it is not an issue. Only Christianity, and later Islam, became absolute and universal.
I read Harris’s book not long ago, and I seem to recall that argument. Dawkins says that he wants religion to not be treated differently from any other view of the world - in other words no special pleading. I suppose some people would consider that an attack.
I don’t think Harris is saying that moderate theists deliberately enable the radicals; in fact many dislike them as much as atheists do. But we’ve had this discussion quite often here, and the results usually boil down to the moderates rejecting parts of the Bible because they believe God just wouldn’t do that. I’ve never seen a filter proposed for this, besides that of personal morality. All this seems to demonstrate is that the moderate theists have better morality than the Bible does, which is as far as I can tell quite true.
As I recall, Dawkins lays out that position in The God Delusion. Perhaps someone who owns a copy can confirm.
It IS an attack. Religion requires special treatment in order to be taken seriously at all. Treat religion like any other idea, and it gets relegated to the same category as belief in fairies and goblins.
And it seems obvious to everyone else in the thread that this is a huge strawman that you can’t let go. It’s been repeated to you time after time that the point isn’t that atheists can do better. The point is that although religion claims it can do better because of its moral superiority, it has demonstrated in numerous ways on numerous occasions that it is just a power-hungry empire like any other, god or no god.
Even if you stipulate that “atheism” killed as many people as religion has (which I don’t), religion still loses. Stalin followed no god or moral code. What’s religion’s excuse?
The whole premise of the thread has been shattered.
Hitler can hardly be called atheist by his words and actual persecutions of atheists under his rule.
Pol Pot was deeply religiuos.
Stalin was sort of religious about his communism to begin with at least and seems to truly believe in Marx’s predictions, while Mao broke from the Marxist mantra in a number of ways.
Even if atheists accept Stalin and Mao, the OP is silly.