I don’t find it to be particularly pleasant behavior to seek out “reactions” in this board and then chortle about how they conform to your expectations.
I think my post was snarky, but a pretty fair summary of the bizarre dance going on. No one here has asserted that these books aren’t critiques of religion, or that the titles imply otherwise, and yet here you are arguing that point: the ONLY substantive point you’ve raised other than to ascribe to unknown others that some guys writing books might be the end of the world.
Then apparently you are unfamiliar with how people interact in the various forums on this board, and need to read up on what it is for and what the other forums are for. “I don’t understand what bemused means” or “what is ya’lls opinion on these books I didn’t read?” is not a Great Debate, but if you do post something in Great Debates, everyone is going to assume that you are staking out SOME position or at least an issue for, you know, debate, not that you are carefully trying to avoid any position at all while snickering at anyone who is wondering what you are up to and what the heck we are discussing.
For all those that think Dawkins is just a shrill Christian hating jerk, watch this YouTube Video
I for one hope that this recent “trend” continues. 2,000 years of Atheistic Philosophical Dominion. Change is good, change is fun. I hope Dawkins writes 10 more books, every book I have read has been a delight. (There is a great line Dawkins quoted, but I can’t use it here without getting in trouble )*
Search YouTube for Dawkins vs Tyson to get my sentiment.
Wouldn’t it have to be three more than last year to be a trend? I know you want everybody to agree there’s a trend without asking questions, but that’s too bad.
To get back to the topic a little, as I think about it, this is probably a reaction to the ascendancy of the religious right. Dawkins is probably not selling books only to atheists. Last night at the Republican Party, three candidates said they didn’t believe in evolution. I don’t think that would have happened in 2000, or in 1980. There has to be a pushback from that. Dawkins and Hitchens have been around for ages, but perhaps these days they are shouting to be heard.
Just a question about your operationalization of “trend.” How many Hollywood movies come out each year? Three on the same theme would probably stand out because they represent a small but still meaningful proportion. Three people saying Athiestic things? Three books? Not nearly the same magnitude.
On “proselytizing,” your own definition says “recruit.” What is it that atheists are to be recruited into? I’ve read two Dawkins books. It would seem to me that the only thing I am to do after having read them is think critically and have a more thorough appreciation of evolution. I’ve not been asked to join anything, identify myself to anyone or any group, or anything remotely resembling recruitment. I think you are using the word proselytizing in a way that would render it meaningless.
Then you define all athiesm as “active” proseylatizing. How else can I define my athiesm without referring to those beliefs which I do not hold?
The Bible refers to the Christian God as being truth. How about the ten commandments - “you shall have no god before me”. Surely that’s “active”?
Alright. I disagree. Of the book on athiesm that I have read, none have said that all religion is false and bad. The God Delusion? Doesn’t just talk about God. And it suggests there are different levels of delusion. And it suggests that in fact not all religion is harmful.
These are not dishonest arguments - and I believe you are resorting to calling people “dishonest” because you can’t be bothered to actually read the books themselves.
I’ve never known someone so adamant about not reading a book. Seriously. How exactly will reading it fully harm you in some way? Do you not have time to?
it seems to me that mswas’s argument against “door to door” is strong (and that RT comes close to contradicting himself on this point), but her argument is weaker against RT’s claim that proselytizing involves “actively try and push their beliefs”. Weaker, but not bad.
I have to take issue with the characterization of the recent release of a handful of books advancing atheist thought (and it is a tiny handful, compared to the wheelbarrow-loads of Sylvia Browne and Celestine Prophecy type garbage that gets dumped on the shelves of Borders every day) as some sort of “attack” on Christianity or on religion in general. As I said four years ago ( :eek: ) in this thread:
The basic position of most atheists (not all, certainly not the most militant among us, but most) is to say to the proselytizing faithful: “I choose not to convert because I find your evidence unconvincing.” And yet one of the characteristics of the deeply religious is that their faith is enormously personal to them; so when an atheist says the religious argument is unconvincing, this is, rightly or wrongly, perceived as the atheist saying “I find you unconvincing.” Obviously, this is seen as an attack, even if, just as obviously, that’s not what was actually being said. The two sides are, in my opinion, speaking past one another, from fundamentally different points of view. The atheists are not attacking; the faithful feel attacked. It’s irreconcilable.
(To be fair, some of the less honorable among the faithful are willing to manufacture feelings of persecution as an offensive tactic. This is not unique to the religious, either. “You don’t support the troops” comes from the same place, as does “they’re not Indians, they’re Native Americans” and other efforts pursued by certain members of the left-wing language police. Both are idiotic. But they’re actively espoused by a minority, and I accept that the majority come by their feelings honestly, even if they’re stoked a bit by the self-absorbed manipulators hiding among them. I will leave this alone as a digressive nitpick and focus on the overall point.)
Now, that being said, even though I believe there is no widespread movement in this country to attack religion with anything close to the same missionary zeal religion itself displays when it attacks other belief systems, I will make a personal assertion, and reveal something of my own philosophy:
I believe that religion should be attacked.
(Wha-a-a?)
Yes. Now let me explain.
When I say attack, I mean aggressively questioned. Challenged. Investigated with skepticism, and doubt. Confronted. Dissected. Objectively evaluated, with emotions set aside. In the same way one attacks a math problem, or an engineering project, or a chemistry experiment.
I do not mean attacked in the sense of insulted.
I firmly believe that strong ideas stand up to challenge, and become stronger as a result — and that therefore they must be challenged for their own good. You can always tell a weak idea because its defenders won’t tolerate questions, and won’t accept outside evaluation. When people defend an idea by personally assaulting those who try to look into the idea, that for me is the giveaway that the idea is not worth defending. And in the long stretch of human history, it is religions more than anything else — or, rather, the specific trappings of specific faiths — that have always attracted adherents who say “don’t ask questions or we’ll kill you.”
I’ll say it again: If your belief system cannot stand up to rational, objective analysis, then it isn’t worthy of belief.
Now. There are components of religion that defy objective analysis. What happens after death, for example, is a great unknown. As an atheist, I believe that nothing happens after death. When I die, I, in the sense of a thinking entity, will cease to be. Period. My physical body will remain, until it decomposes, but I will no longer exist as an individual being according to any meaningful definition of those words.
But I can’t prove it. Any more than Jack Chick can prove that he’ll go and sit at the right hand of a big guy with a glowing egg for a head. And what’s more: neither he nor I can disprove one another’s beliefs.
For my part, I’m happy to let Jack believe whatever the hell he wants to believe about what happens to him, and to me, after he dies. As long as he doesn’t try to impose his beliefs on me in this world, I will make no effort to impose mine on him. Objective evaluation has nothing whatever to say about this, and about elements of belief in the same category.
But elements of belief that can be objectively evaluated? Absolutely, yes: evaluate the ever-loving shit out of them.
Some of them will not stand up to rigorous analysis, and will fail. Stupid stuff like the six thousand year old Earth will be stripped away, and abandoned.
And what remains will be stronger.
Religion is a powerful, powerful thing, and is clearly, if somewhat ineffably, inherent in the human psyche. Something about it provides some kind of social glue and makes us, on some level, more successful as a species than we would be without it. (I have a hypothesis about this, but it’s more philosophical than anything else, and is a separate discussion.) I am an atheist, and a strong one at that (aka “there are no gods”), but I’m happy to concede that religion confers some benefit, some positive effects, on us, all of us, collectively.
Which is why I believe it must be attacked. Responsibly, objectively, thoughtfully. But attacked. So the bullshit can be burned off and the basic, impervious, core can be exposed.
What’s going on now does not amount to such an attack, and it’s misleading and irresponsible to characterize it as such.
Nevertheless: I would welcome the effort.
And if you have any degree of respect for your faith, you should too.
Where did I contradict myself? Not that I don’t believe you, but if i’ve accidentally done so and not noticed i’d really like to know. Sometimes you can miss even the biggest problems with logic unless someone points it out to you.
I wonder if anyone has a figure comparing the totoal number of pro-religion books and pamphlets published in a year (including everything from Bibles to Jehovah’s witness stuff to the latest book by the Pope) to the total number of pro-atheism books by people like Dawson?
Has anyone compared the total number of websites promoting atheism to the total number promoting religion?
Reminds me of Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian media commentator of the 1950s-70s who outraged people in Canada by declaring himself an atheist.
Thousands demanded he be taken off the air “for the sake of our Children”.
Sinclair himself used to say that it was funny that atheism could be promoted on TV and radio every Sunday morning and from thousands of pulpits across the nation, but let JUST ONE LITTLE GUY get up and say there is no God and WHAM. . . . . . . he has to be driven of the airwaves for the sake of our children.
I don’t want people to agree that it’s a trend, but people have sort of been trying to twist the subject matter. I think it’s a trend, I have stated why. You don’t think it’s a trend and have stated why. Now it’s just a conflict of opinion. We both know what the word trend means, and we disagree about its application to this subject.
Well, I agree. Even though Hitchens looked stoned, I agreed with a lot of what he said. I do not think that Christianity is a solid basis for a ‘worldly’ morality. Attempts to impose Christian values on government are both anti-thetical to America and anti-thetical to Christianity. For me a Christian has every right to spend all of their energy preparing for the next life and living a life with that in mind. That however, is not applicable to a solid government. Much of our modern secular humanist morality is derived from Christianity, but as it does not share the same foundation it is not the same, nore should it be treated as such. I disagree with the way Dawkins and Hitchens go about it, simply because they are atheists. I don’t believe that God is irrelevant to modern experience, I just think that it is untenable to rely on a 2000 year old convention as though people 2000 years ago were so much smarter and more moral than we are. If one takes Christianity literally, then people were LESS good before Jesus was born than after, otherwise that whole redemption bit was meaningless.
On the other hand, I think that a Democratic candidate is going to dominate. I think it’s good that the debate is healthier, that the Evangelicals are unable to control the discourse, and that they have had a number of scandals revealed through their increased power that is causing Christians everywhere to reevaluate their moral foundation. Overall, I think the debate is quite healthy.
Fair enough. What they are being recruited into is a ‘culture’. It’s a salvo in the culture wars, memetic conflicts that determine which memes loom larger in the political consciousness. I would say that other than the choir they are probably looking for dissatisfied fence sitters.
Many religious scholars have written extensively on the virtue of Reason. The Enlightenment was largely laid upon a foundation of Spinozism. Spinoza was considered to be an atheist in his time, an appellation he disagreed with. He was working on a model for a God of Pure Reason. That heavily influenced the deists, who among other things founded the United States of America and fought in the French Revolution.
This makes the character of what Dawkins et. al. are saying different from just a defense or encouragement of reason. They are specifically putting their position as counter to established religion, particularly of the Abrahamic persuasion as it is Abrahamic religion that has dominated western culture for two thousand years, and is at the heart of the current conflict we are in. You don’t need to be an atheist to encourage reason. In that regard, I am totally with them. I agree that improving people’s faculty of reason is a lofty and virtuous goal. I disagree with them on atheism.
In the first of your posts that I quoted, you make this claim: P if and only if D, where P is proselytizing and D is going door to door. (Actually, it’s “P if and only if (D or A)”, where A is “actively try and push”, but the comment “I’ve never been doorstepped by an atheist” suggests that, for purposes of this argument, D is more important.)
mswas responds by saying, in essence, that “P if and only D” is not true, because that is not the definition of P.
Then she says that if "P if and only if (D or A), then P, because A is true.
You counter with: If D then P, right? And then “You didn’t prove A, so still not P”.
**mswas ** says: So you’re saying “P if and only D”? And are you saying “not A”?
You say: Nope, D could be part of P, but not “P if and only D”. And then you say C: “The books are about atheism”. The implication is that, therefore, they are not proselytizing, but you don’t directly address the truth of A.
It seems that your “Nope” in #5 contradicts part of your first claim in #1. But, the added premise A makes it’s less clear that there’s actually been a contradiction, which is why I said that you “come close” to contradicting yourself.
Also, your claim is #3 appears to involve the logical fallacy of Affirming the consequent, although, again, the premise A makes it less clear that this is actually a fallacy.
Hope that helps.
(And, I’m definitely open to the possibilty that I’m wrong. But not alwrong …)
I agree with the above 100%. I stated as much in the ‘value of faith’ thread.
As far as attacks go, I invited people who have read the books to tell me why they think my characterization is wrong. Thus far, your post has been the best in this regard. I find little that I don’t approve of in it.
The reason I defend faith is that I see it as a conflict of cosmology. The problem IMO is that we rarely get to the point where we are using a common vocabulary, so that we can actually argue with a relative assurance that we are arguing about the same thing. Liebniz seems to have shared my opinion on this.
Dawkins book might not be an attack on religion, but from what Hitchens said, it seems like his surely was.
Revenant Threshold I am so adamant against reading the books that I bought Dennett’s when it first came out read a quarter of it, and only put it down because I was distracted by another book I got in the same shipment. I read a lot, and I don’t read books in a linear strip very often. I tend to skip around. Forgive me, I grew up with the internet. I’ll try to fit it in between my Neurology homework and ‘Rise and Decline of the State’ by Martin van Creveld which has dominated my leisurely reading time lately. My problem is not that people were saying I hadn’t read it, it’s that none of you were really explaining why what I said was wrong, you were only talking about the fact that I hadn’t read the books.
Valteron Proportion is irrelevant. No one is disputing that religious sects proselytize.
Revenant Threshold Holding the belief is not active proselytizing. Expressing it when asked for your opinion is not proselytizing. Marketing your opinion is proselytizing. It is the seeking of the adoption of the idea that constitutes proselytizing.
Yes, there is an inherent conflict involved.
The religious person makes a positive statement of belief:
I believe in God
The atheist makes a negative statement of belief:
I do not believe in God
What makes it proselytizing is if you are out promoting the belief. That’s the only criteria that I am using.
I think the use of the word “culture” here is even more problematic than “proselytizing” was. There’s no atheistic culture - no shared set of anything, other than an agreement about the absense of a god. You agree that there is nothing to recruit people for, but then put forth a “cuture” and suggest that there is a “they” who are looking for dissatisfied fence sitters. Looking for them to do what, exactly? You’ve simply substituted a lot of other verbage in place of “recruit,” where you clearly persist in a mistaken understanding. A very basic, obvious misunderstanding.
This is simply further evidence of what might happen if you don’t actually read or understand the subject of your criticism. At the most basic, for instance, Dawkins does not differentiate in his critical evaluation between any religions or religious distinctions, Abrahamic or otherwise.
On the other hand, reason and critical thought is often actively discouraged by religious groups.
Ah, gotcha. Here’s the problem; I didn’t mean to suggest that going door-to-door was the only means of proseylatizing. That was just one example of my overall definition; actively pushing your beliefs on someone. Rather than D meaning doorstepping, then, it would be the active pushing of beliefs. Looking back I see I did put it pretty badly; I hope you’ll accept that i’m just poor at getting ideas across rather than contradictory.
Ah, fair enough then. Good luck with your homework (and exams, if you’ve got them soon; I did a project in neuropsychology this year, so I can sympathise ;)).
I don’t know about that, but I do know that I had a hell of a time finding The Blind Watchmaker in Barnes and Noble last week. I eventually had to ask for help, and found out that it was in the apparently untitled “Evolution” section in the corner next to the non-book “Gifts for Readers” section. I missed it after circling the store twice. On the other hand, I could not avoid the “Religion” section, which was next to the “History” section, and IIRC was about as large as the “History” section.
I don’t totally disagree with your culture war point, but again, it sounds like you’re connecting a lot of things with atheism that may not actually belong there. Atheism is not liberalism; Hitchens, for one, is a conservative, and Penn Jillette is a libertarian type. There is no atheist culture. Are atheists usually educated, and are more of them somewhat wealthy than poor and more liberal than conservative? I’m sure the answers are yes, but that does not make for a culture. There might be a culture to recruit people away from, but there isn’t much to recruit people into.
I’ll try to fit it in between my Neurology homework and ‘Rise and Decline of the State’ by Martin van Creveld which has dominated my leisurely reading time lately. My problem is not that people were saying I hadn’t read it, it’s that none of you were really explaining why what I said was wrong, you were only talking about the fact that I hadn’t read the books.