Except she wasn’t attacked:
I’ve found similar statements of “fact” in The God Delusion that are easily found to be urban legends or simply false. What’s the specific claim Dawkins makes?
Oh wait, here it is:
So that seems to accurately represent the story of the doctor. The claim of the paper “inciting” people is something I can’t confirm.
I do realize that many people critize Dawkins for not being gentle enough. But really–how gentle must one be when rejecting the idea of the existence of fairies, goblins, or the Loch Ness Monster? Isn’t this really the problem here? That religion (God belief) gets an undue pass, and therefore authors like Dawkins are expected to treat this subject with kid gloves?
Objectively speaking, why should Dawkins treat the belief in God with any more respect than a belief in the existence of monsters under my bed? Merely for the comfort of the duped?
Because there is actually some semblance of logic behind theism, as opposed to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the like.
In another thread you said the following:
I then asked you:
You answered:
My response:
You never got back to me. Here you are again claiming Sam Harris is a hatemonger. Show some evidence or shut up already.
The existence of (a) god(s) has never been important to my religious practice, so I don’t care about Dawkins “debunking” anything factual.
Meanwhile, critical text (Talmud) study is probably the biggest part of my religious life. (Well, that and singing in the shul choir.) I do think The God Delusion isn’t a very knowledgeable work about any religion other than evangelical Christianity. I haven’t read Dawkins’ other books, so I can’t say whether he continues the same generalizations, but I thought it was very sloppy.
My super-fundie cousins paid me a visit once, and picked up The God Delusion from my bookshelf and read it. When they got home, they sent me The Dawkins Delusion by McGrath. It was certainly not a good refutation, but one of those books that is so filled with logical absurdities that I couldn’t make it all the way through.
So I sent them Why I Am Not A Christian by Bertrand Russell. Haven’t heard from them since.
The News of the World did run such a campaign in 2000, and it led to a vigilante mob rioting in Portsmouth, torching cars and running a sex offender out of his home (cite). Whether it had any influence on what happened to the paediatrician is hard to say, but given they both happened in the same year, in a pattern of vigilante attacks that hasn’t really occurred since, it’s probably fair to conclude that it did.
It’s exceedingly lame to say that a mob vandalizing a home is not an “attack.” The most salient point anyway is that the mob really didn’t know the difference betwen a pediatrician nd a pedophile.
One of the more fallacious critiques of Dawkins is that he isn’t an expert on theology or world religions. This is a meaningless objection since no knowledge of theology is required in order to critique the metaphysical claims – that is to say, the scientific claims – about them. This complaint is like is akin to saying that you’re not qualified to say there’s no evidence for wizards unless you’ve read tons and ton of fantasy novels.
In that case, it doesn’t make sense for him to be attacking religions as social institutions, if he’s only addressing the metaphysical claims. As I’ve said, I don’t really care about the scientific question of god(s), but Dawkins’ arguments assume that all religions involve unquestioning belief in divine existence, which is just not true.
Maybe the intellectual theism that is practiced on internet message boards and in philosophy classrooms. [And I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt there - I’ve heard logical arguments for deism but never for theism.] There is no semblance of logic behind mainstream Christianity, which seems to be mainly what Dawkins is addressing.
Is it ever fair to say that any belief is deluded? If so, then what distinguishes religious belief from truly “delusional” belief? Dawkins’ point with the title is that there is no demonstrable distinction.
It’s declaring the thesis. Also, assuming delusion for impossible and unsupported beliefs is the rational, default conclusion.
He does a lot more than this, and “thinking theologians” don’t have any actual proof for anything, it’s all just elaborate fanwanking. Theologians are the ones who assume their conclusions. Everything they say relies on the uncritical acceptance of their starting premises. If you don’t accept their premises (and ther’s no reason why you should), they refute nothing and prove nothing.
How is this an ad hominem? An ad hominem against who?
I don’t think you read it very carefully. Dawkins presents it only as a hypothesis, for one thing, and does offer a scientific argument for it. I actually think it makes a lot of sense.
You trounced him in a daydream? Congratulations.
If you don’t have supernatural beliefs, then Dawkins isn’t talking about you.
I agree that he overreaches when he tries to critique religion as a social institution, but that’s not a subject which interests me. It gives theists something to refute and allows them to avoid addressing the far more significant demolition of supernatural beliefs (something his critics rarely attempt to do).
Well, Dawkins is talking about me, because he says he is talking about all religions and religious adherents. If he doesn’t mean to address all religions, then he should clear up his language.
The discussion of religion as a social institution is much more interesting to me than supernatural belief. Many of Dawkins’ criticisms are of the effects of religion as a social institution, as those listed in the introduction of The God Delusion:
If, as you say, he is only addressing supernatural belief, then here he seems to be arguing that there would be no economic, social, cultural, gendered, geographical or national conflicts if no one believed in an active supernatural deity. Dawkins is attacking religion as a cultural institution but relying on arguments against the supernatural to do it. It’s sloppy.
As I said, I think he overreaches in trying to attack religion as an institution. He’s still right about supernatural beliefs being delusional, and there is SOMETHING in what he says about fanatacism.
Quotes from King are in this thread, so I see no need to repeat them here. King specifically credits everything: his opposition to segregation, his non-violent tactics, and his broad base of support among blacks and whites, to Christianity and the Bible. As I mentioned in that thread, it makes no difference what he learned from Gandhi when Gandhi based so much of his philosophy on the teachings of Christ.
Dawkins says: [King’s] “religion was incidental. Although Martin Luther King was a Christian, he derived his philosophy of non-violent civil obedience directly from Gandhi, who was not.”
King says about King: “I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.”
I’m just assuming that King knew King better than Dawkins knew King.
Which religion(s) are you thinking of?
From my own experience, as I said above, Judaism.
King himself said he got it from Gandhi. Here’s the quote again:
Did you not read this quote before you responded to it? It pretty much decisively buries you.
Which part of your statement does Judaism NOT fall into – “unquestioning” or “belief” or “divine existence”?