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Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins


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Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1960799)


by Tucking_Fypo! Mon May 04, 2009 4:23 am

lordpasternack wrote: Tucking_Fypo! wrote:I tend to call them Jesus Freaks, Bible Bashers but this only applies to Christians .

And "DC Talk" has taken the first term and made it completely palatable to Jesus Freaks:

Wow, i've never heard that song before, i'm not even sure exactly where it was i got the term 'Jesus Freaks' from, it does seem to offend people whom i say it to if they're Christian though.

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Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1961141)


by Layla Nasreddin Mon May 04, 2009 7:50 am

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Yet another article regarding Richard's comment, this one from the Guardian's science blog. (Wow, I never realized so many people were keeping up with Richard's remarks! Also, if you haven't yet seen the Open University lecture referenced in the article, please do so, it's very good.) Richard Dawkins is more persuasive when he refrains from god-bashing
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/may/02/richard-dawkins-contempt-religion-charlesdarwin)

His reasoned arguments for the power of natural selection carry more weight than his anti-religious diatribes It goes without saying that Richard Dawkins has a talent for causing offence to people of a religious persuasion. I'm sure he believes this offence is justified by the noble cause of rooting out dangerous superstition, but a recent comment he left on his own blog RichardDawkins.net, beneath a piece by Jerry Coyne, suggests he is about to take his campaign to a whole new level: I suspect that most of our regular readers here would agree that ridicule, of a humorous nature, is likely to be more effective than the sort of snuggling-up and head-patting that Jerry is attacking. I lately started to think that we need to go further: go beyond humorous ridicule, sharpen our barbs to a point where they really hurt ... I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven't really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.

As someone who sat on this very fence for many years, I think contempt probably would have pushed me in the other direction into the arms of the irredemiably religious. Nothing reinforces tribal identity like the contempt of your rivals. Ask a Glasgow Rangers supporter or a Celtic supporter for that matter. It's a shame Dawkins has such a gift for insulting the people he's trying to convert, because he also has an extraordinary gift for lucid argument. This came into full play in his Open University Annual Lecture in March at the Natural History Museum in London, which can now be watched in full on the university's website. (http://www.open2.net/dawkins
/dawkins_1.html)

In the lecture he argues that Charles Darwin was the most revolutionary scientist ever. It wasn't that he revolutionised the practice of science, to the extent that Newton and Einstein have, but he utterly revolutionised the world outside science. His was the most seditious idea of all. Before Darwin the only known alternative to the possibility that there had been an intelligent designer behind the wonders of nature was random chance, which was no alternative at all. It wasn't even that the concept of natural selection was original when Darwin put his thoughts to paper. A Scottish landowner and fruit farmer Patrick Matthew had written a
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Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1961148)


by besleybean Mon May 04, 2009 7:53 am

Well actually some of us think he's very persuaive when he is god bashing! Top

Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1961753)


by Gnomeyhead Mon May 04, 2009 1:03 pm

It's a shame Dawkins has such a gift for insulting the people he's trying to convert.

I was under the impression that Richard just wanted people to think...if conversion is the result from thinking, that's definitely a plus. It wasn't even that the concept of natural selection was original when Darwin put his thoughts to paper.

AND they are trying to devalue Darwin. Top

Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1962401)


by mirandaceleste Mon May 04, 2009 5:12 pm

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Layla Nasreddin wrote:It's interesting how everybody sees other groups as oppressing them, and almost never how they're oppressing other people. Pious Christians or Muslims might feel horribly aggrieved by secularists, or even other Christians or Muslims whom they see as somehow endangering their religion, but they usually don't think for an instant about what they're doing to those of other religions or none. I suppose the Christian "Jesus Freaks" at your school never gave a thought to how an atheist might feel in such a religion-soaked environment, or if they'd cared if they had considered it. (Man, I guess I lucked out -- I never really came across any people like that at any of my [secular public] schools. Maybe I was just lucky enough to avoid them, since I was usually in the library... )

Yeah, probably not. I don't know that most of them even knew that one could be an atheist, sadly enough. The fact that you had a choice in the matter of belief never crossed most of these kids' minds (and I don't mean to imply that I was the only one who had left religion behind, or that my choice and ability to do so made me superior in any way at all.) And with teenagers who have been raised in very religious environments, I have a lot of patience for that, honestly. Although I grew up in the same kind of environments as many of these kids, I ended up with a different conclusion/a different belief system. But, really, there are a lot of things that can be tolerated in a teenager that would just be horribly obnoxious and willfully ignorant in an adult. A fervently religious, rather ignorant sixteen year old may grow out of it, whereas a fully-grown, fervently religious, willfully ignorant adult has chosen to not break free of indoctrination and has instead decided to remain that way. On a perhaps more disturbing note: one of our ten (spread out over four years) required Religion classes was one in World Religions, and I remember being shocked that over half of the students in the class I was in thought that Islam and Hinduism were the same religion and held the same beliefs, etc. That's what being isolated in a bubble of religion and religious education will do for some kids, sadly enough. And, yes, thank goodness for high school libraries, I swear! A nice, quiet refuge and the official hiding place of smart teenage girls. Top

Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1962410)


by Delphin Mon May 04, 2009 5:16 pm

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I don't like the term "faith-head". The first word that comes into my mind whenever I hear "faith-head" is dickhead, which certainly is an insulting term. I thought the idea was to respect the person while at the same time not to show undeserved respect to religious ideas, and I don't think this will be achieved by calling theists "faith-heads". I agree that Richard Dawkins is more persuasive when he refrains from god-bashing. I have always had the feeling that "The ancestor's tale" was more persuasive for fence-sitters than "The God Delusion" but I am having a hard time getting some of my fence-sitting friends to pick up "The ancestor's tale", because they won't read a book by "that man who called me deluded", even though I keep on telling them that "The ancestor's tale" was 100% God-bashing-free. And it would get them thinking. I'm not sure, if calling them "faith-heads" would be all that helpful. Top

Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1963909)


by Layla Nasreddin Tue May 05, 2009 3:38 am

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And yet another opinion column from the Guardian taking as its starting point Richard's remark we've been discussing: Dawkins is wrong about believers (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief
/2009/may/04/richard-dawkins-ridiculing-belief)

Richard Dawkins' tactic of ridiculing religion will inspire only hostility among those who feel their worldview to be under attack by Carlo Strenger I have been an admirer of Richard Dawkins' work since I first read The Selfish Gene some 25 years ago. His now canonic reformulation of the tenets of Darwinian thought, the enormous lucidity of thinking and the ability to present highly complex argument accessibly are exemplary for the spirit of science and enlightenment values. Yet I have been bothered by an inconsistency in his approach, particularly in the last years since his God Delusion. In this book he basically tries to demonstrate that a) arguments for God's existence and the truth of sacred text of the various monotheistic traditions are invalid; b) arguments that religion makes people more moral are fallacious; and c) religious education is largely noxious and prevents human beings who have been subjected to it from becoming truly free minds. I happen to agree with him on all three points, but I wonder what he is trying to achieve. He says in a recent post discussed by Andrew Brown that he hopes to convince religious people that haven't given the issue much thought by ridiculing religious belief, and he thinks that this might be a useful way to win them over to the scientific worldview. Given his deep commitment to science, it somewhat surprises me that in formulating this strategy of ridicule and frontal attack he does not take into account scientific knowledge about the functioning of the human mind. In the last two decades, the discipline of existential experimental psychology has investigated the function that worldviews (whether religious or other) play in the human mind. One of the most important findings is that belief systems, by connecting individuals to a larger whole (a religion, nation, community or an endeavour like science), protect us from the unbearable anxiety generated by awareness of our own mortality. This holds true for all belief systems whether religious or secular. These results are pertinent to the question of how to deal with the conflict between science and religion. A variety of researchers have produced strong research results demonstrating that when the belief systems that provide humans with meaning and worldview protection are attacked, the result is inevitably that humans dig more deeply into the trenches of their belief systems. The meaning and psychological protection that humans derive from their worldviews is so important to them that they will go to enormous lengths to defend these beliefs against any attack. This is exactly what has happened in the last decades: the more western secular culture impacted traditional forms of life in all three Abrahamic religions, the more they moved towards fundamentalist versions that vehemently attacked science and western liberalism as decadent and corrupting. If Dawkins' theory were right, the technological superiority of the scientific worldview should have made them feel ridiculous, and hence they should have given up on their belief systems. But the opposite happened: from Wahhabist insistence on
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Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1964439)


by Janus Tue May 05, 2009 8:53 am

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We should not think that all-out attack on religion will convert anybody.

That may be true, but it's not like gentler attempts at deconversion are much more successful anyway. Let's face it, faith-heads rarely deconvert, and when they do it's even more rarely as a direct result of a non-believer's efforts, regardless of whether these efforts were somewhat aggressive or excruciatingly gentle. Now, this doesn't mean that we should stop trying to deconvert faith-heads, because it does occasionally work, and because it's important to get our arguments out there. However, it does mean that it's silly to make deconversion the central pillar of our strategy. As the author points out, Dawkins- and Hitchens-style attacks on religion have benefits beside occasionally deconverting religious believers: They raise the spirits of non-believers, they break the taboo against calling a spade a spade when it comes to religion, they change the social climate about the moral worth of faith, and they make a splash and attract attention to our cause. On the other hand, the gentler kind of approach with its respectful tone and 'sophisticated' debating, has only one benefit: potentially deconverting the religious. Since this is unlikely to happen even with this gentle approach, this lone benefit is far outweighed by those of an all-out attack on religion. Another point: While Dawkins wants more atheists to adopt a more forthright attitude towards religion, he didn't say that he would like us to behave this way all the time. There are times when we should use the gentle approach. There are even times when we shouldn't even mention atheism and religion, and only talk about the scientific facts relevant to whatever issue is at hand. Dawkins' call does not conflict at all with a more pragmatic approach when necessary. Finally, let me point out something that should be obvious: There are some "religious leaders" who will never accept reality when reality is contradicted by their religious beliefs. To give just one example, the current pope is never going to tell his followers that using condoms is okay, because, you see, he honestly believes that God hates all 'unnatural' forms of contraception, and it is extremely unlikely that the next pope will feel differently, because popes are elected by a bunch of old cardinals who are also convinced that God hates contraception. Given the fact that many people harbor a dangerous delusion and that there is no way to break them out of it, it is only becoming more urgent than ever to get rid of this respectful attitude that many (most?) non-believers have towards religious beliefs, so that we can oppose the most toxic of them efficiently. It is also important that religious believers be reminded that their beliefs are based on faith, which means they are disconnected from reality, and therefore have no place in policy making, or in any serious discussion, for that matter. And the only way to do this is to treat religious beliefs the way we treat all other irrational beliefs: With ridicule. Top

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Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1964455)


by sueonmain Tue May 05, 2009 9:03 am

Wouldn't the opposite of "atheist" be "faithist"? Top

Re: Andrew Brown whinges some more about Dawkins (#p1964520)


by Spacetime Inhabitant Tue May 05, 2009 9:47 am

Massimo Piglucci wrote:Look, even the most outrageous version of young earth creationism cannot be scientifically falsified. Wanna try? Piglucci is making a fundamental error (as he no doubt knows; I suspect he is being facetious). For instance, if I say that I can't use maths to prove that a rose and a daisy are exactly the same - the reason is that firstly it isn't true, and secondly it isn't a maths problem. Falsifiability in science only applies to scientific theories - therefore the concept of scientific falsifiability inherently doesn't apply to YEC, and also YEC can't be falsified because it isn't true, and only something true can be falsified (in science). YEC can be shown to be false, so can't be falsified. Top Previous Display posts from previous: Post a reply 85 posts Page 4 of 4 1, 2, 3, 4
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