“Unquestioning”, definitely, but also “belief”. Rabbinic Judaism is based on critical text study. The whole point is to tug literature around to see what we can do with it, and we do pretty much the same thing with the idea of god (literally called “god-idea” in Reform Judaism’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform). There is no central tenet or belief. Nearly every argument in our canon has at least three contradicting arguments. The entire Talmud is a whole bunch of rabbis debating with each other, and none of them are ultimately right (or wrong). The entire endeavor of rabbinic Judaism is questioning. I don’t really understand how you could have an unquestioning belief in Judaism, because how would you choose which of the thousands of conflicting opinions to believe in? What is “Judaism”?
For belief, I know my rabbi doesn’t believe in an active Biblical god; she’s told me so. I would be shocked if more than five people at my (3000-strong) shul believed the events involving the character of Yahweh in the Bible were literally true. It’s just not the way our system works.
My fact checking looks just fine, thank you. A woman found her door daubed with yellow paint. Okay, I wouldn’t want my door daubed with yellow paint. But as the BBC article mentions, there’s nothing connecting the incident to misdirected vigilante justice. There’s just one police officer who “feels” that it might be something more than some dumb child playing a a prank. As for “attacks” or “mobs”, that’s purely the creation of the media.
I did get back to you. I started a new thread just for you. But if your ego depends on pretending that I didn’t, go right ahead. It makes no difference to me.
Mainstream Christianity does not involve unquestioning belief in God–there’s even a whole book in the Bible, Job, devoted to questioning.
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I have read many of Dawkins books, but only the ones involving science. I’ll probably get around to reading the God Delusion, but from I’ve heard secondhand, it seems like he’s attacking only a particular form of fundamentalist Christianity and sounds like he’s unaware of liberal Christian beliefs. Which is unfortunate, both because fundamentalists already get too much attention and are used as a proxy for all Christians when they are actually unrepresentative.
And because general statements about “Christians” when “fundamentalist Christian” is what is correct raises defensive hackles on those theists who are pro-science and pro-evolution. It’s unnecessarily polarizing and irrational–you’re less convincing when you lump together people who disagree with you by 1% with those you disagree with by 99%. A scientist needs to be sensitive to fine distinctions.
Yeah, Dawkins should really watch it or the 0.00001% of religious people who don’t believe in god are going to be pissed! :rolleyes:
You are straw-manning the shit out of that quote. He is not saying what you claim he’s saying. First of all, he clearly believes there’d still be Jews. Your argument falls apart right there. Secondly, he’s saying the conflicts he mentions wouldn’t have happened, not that no conflicts would happen.
Reform Judaism is the biggest Jewish sect in the US. With Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism, which have effectively the same approach to the god-idea (Reconstructionist is a bit more out-there and overtly atheist), liberal Jews are 79% of all American Jewry. Believing in god just isn’t an important part of most Jews’ Judaism. I’m pretty sure unquestioning Jewish belief in god is impossible. And yes, I am pissed when people who clearly haven’t done their research thing that they can define and identify the practice and beliefs of millions of people.
I’m not sure that he does clearly believe there would still be Jews. Anyway, it is extremely unreasonable to argue that, for example, land disputes such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, or the Northern Irish troubles stemming from plantation, would not have occured if no one believed in a literal active god. Do you honestly think that none of the conflicts Dawkins lists would be a problem if no one believed in the supernatural? And do you think Dawkins honestly believes that the medieval British economy had nothing to do with the Crusades, or that opium money has nothing to do with the Taliban?
He’s simply incorrect, in that some of the conflicts he mentions are first and foremost ethnic conflicts. The fact that religion is a component of ethnic identity is irrelevant - it could just as easily be something else, and in many cases is. If every Jew and every Arab in the ME suddenly became atheists (and many Israeli Jews are atheists, I should add), the conflict would not, contrary to the thrust of this quote, disappear.
The whole "imagine … " quote smacks of a truly off-putting level of naiveté.
Sorry, I guess it’s more like 0.0002%. I was off by a couple thousandths. Going out of his way to account for and appease such an ultra-minority would do far more to confuse his audience than doing what he did- which was accepting that every reasonable person knows that there are exceptions to everything.
Yeah, I honestly believe that if people weren’t hoodwinked into thinking there was something better waiting for them in the afterlife, they wouldn’t be so eager to die in “this temporal life that doesn’t really matter.” That’s not rocket science. It’s common sense.
I think your math may be a bit off. I don’t think “most Jews” is an ultra-minority, and as Pleonast says, there are a hefty amount of thoughtful, questioning Christians as well. I don’t know enough about other religions to say. But questioning, debating and agnosticism are a design feature of at least one of the world’s major religions. You can’t be a Jew without questioning god-idea. Not only does Dawkins not address this at all, he states the complete opposite, that unquestioning belief is the foundation of all religions. That’s clearly demonstrably false, in a culturally and statistically significant way. It’s not good reasoning.
Now I’m really confused. Surely if more people believed in an afterlife, they wouldn’t be fighting so hard to hold on to land, trade routes, ethnic/national identity and money, which is what most of those conflits are about. Like Malthus points out, loads of Jews (and I imagine many Muslims) are atheists. I imagine there are quite a few IRA and UDL members who are atheists too.
You’re going to see exactly what you want to see, but religion is a major part of ethnicity, especially in that part of the world.
I went off of about 1 million reform Jews and about 5 billion religious people. If you want to count every single Jew in the world, that’s still less than 15 million people. So move the decimal point once to the right. It’s still an ultra-minority.
You’re trying to simplify an extremely complicated subject, and you’re assuming religious people act rationally and logically.
I don’t think Judaism is the only religion of which agnostic debate is a design feature, just one of them. Anyway, Dawkins has a significant section on Judaism in The God Delusion where he pretends that all Jews take the bible as literal truth and sacred writ, and that the character of Yahweh is how all Jews imagine god-idea to be. He’s not ignoring Judaism, as he might do if (as you are arguing) it were a culturally and statistically insignificant religion. He is arguing against it with false pretenses.
I would love it if Dawkins were to address the problems of organized religion as an ethnic signifier and cultural institution. I have a lot of issues with that aspect of it myself. However, that’s not what he does in The God Delusion (I haven’t read his other books). He uses untruths and sloppy arguments. It’s boring, and it doesn’t mean anything.
I do assume that religious people act rationally and logically, because most people I know are religious of some stripe, and they generally don’t run around starting conflicts for no reason (including purely religious ones). I have a question for you: do you think that every one of the conflicts Dawkins lists in that paragraph would be a non-issue if no one believed in an active supernatural god?
No, it doesn’t bury me. Why don’t you try reading my posts before you accuse me of not reading your posts?
Now, presuming you’re trying to defend Dawkins statement that for King “religion was incidental”, please answer these questions:
Why did King say, “I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.”? How does this coincide with Dawkins claim that for King, Christianity was entirely incidental?
Why did King say, “How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”? How does fit with the claim that King’s political philosophy was unrelated to religion?
Given that Gandhi based his philosophy in large part on the teachings of Jesus Christ and other Christian writers and thinkers, wouldn’t it be true that even if King had merely copied Gandhi’s philosophy, it would still have had a Christian source?
If we believe what Dawkins believes, than it seems that both Gandhi and King lead their respective movements only because they had “infantile”, “deluded”, beliefs in ancient fairy tales. Further, Dawkins believes that both of them followed and promoted belief systems that lead “naturally” to violence. Further, Dawkins believes that both have them should have been ripped away from their parents in order to be saved from being raised in religious households. If this had happened, would it have been a good thing?
Really? Now, admittedly it’s been a while since I’ve read The God Delusion, but it seems like the kind of thing that might stand out. Where did he advocate this?
I recall him criticizing Christians for having done this very thing to Jews in the past, so I think you’ve really caught him in a significant bit of hypocrisy. If you can show it, of course.
The problem with Dawkins, it seems to me, is that while no-one questions his contributions to the field of evolutionary biology, he’s horribly out of his depth in discussing matters of culture, history and anthropology; his use of the concepts from the one to analyse the other (discarding inconvenient facts in order to make the theory fit) is more an exercise in polemics than science (i.e., religion as a wholly malignant “mind virus”).
I don’t like the fact that many, not all, but many of Dawkin’s arguments can be easily refuted by anyone with any sense, atheist or otherwise.
For example, the Flying Spaghetti Monster has become a favorite of his. He equates it with the belief in the Judeo-Christian God, Zeus, etc. The problem with thinking of God as being equally absurd is the deeply rooted logic and reasoning behind God, whether convincing to you or not, as opposed to the stupid for the sake of stupid FSM.
Ahh, you mean this thread where you accuse Harris of being a liar, yet your reasons get destroyed and you never come back to defend yourself. I see nowhere in that thread any evidence that Harris is guilty of being a hatemonger. How about an example or two?