An atheist temple?

You won’t get much temple in London for just £1 million, that sounds like a shrine at best.

and furthermore, although I am sure that AdeB’s desire is sincere to move away from the rudeness and confrontational attitude of Richard Dawkins, he is proposing to build a one hundred and fifty foot gold-embossed tower to a) demonstrate that he is right and Richard Dawkins is wrong and b) to emphasise to the workers of the City of London, via a massive gold-and-fossil tower placed forever outside their workplaces, that they are insufficiently spiritual and have no moral values. This suggests to me that he has not entirely escaped the influence.

1ST ATHEIST: So.
2ND ATHEIST: Yeah.
1ST ATHEIST: So, here we are.
2ND ATHEIST: Yeah.
[Pause]
1ST ATHEIST: Big place.
2ND ATHEIST: Four thousand eight hundred fifty seventh tallest in the world.
1ST ATHEIST: Yeah.
2ND ATHEIST: Makes a… statement?
1ST ATHEIST: Yeah… kind of… I guess.
[Pause]
2ND ATHEIST: So… lots of floors with the bacteria theme.
1ST ATHEIST: Makes you think, doesn’t it?
2ND ATHEIST: No, not really.
1ST ATHEIST: Right. Screw it, I’m out of here.
2ND ATHEIST: I’m right behind you.

Here’s a remark I prepared earlier. Also: ONE MEEEELION POUNDS.

I’m reminded of a line in a Julian Barnes novel – can’t remember which one – about the purpose of medieval cathedrals being to terrify people into belief like a knife at the throat, rather than relying on any of that rational argument nonsense. De Bottom seems to have bought into the same idea; non-belief needs to be inculcated by stealth and manipulation rather than reason. I have no problem with the idea of architecture inspiring awe and bringing new perspectives, but for me that means something like Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish museum in Berlin where the building actually has a purpose beyond celebrating itself and its creators.

I’m more of the atheist tendency to want to see current religious buildings demolished (exceptions for artistical and historical value), not by law/violence but just because everybody wakes up some morning and realize what a waste of their time religion is, but well, I like Dawkins.

I dont know who this de Bottom fellow is, but what we need is LESS stupid waste on “spirituality” and more actual help to people here, in this Earth, now, in their necessities. So that 1 to N million pounds in his stupid scheme would be better employed on doing something to eradicate poverty, bring education, or whatever.

Not that it looks like he has any possibility of getting that money for that project, I think

I also note that he plans to represent 300m years of life on earth by building a 46 metre tower, each centimetre of which represents a million years.

One charitably assumes the news story left out a zero, the inclusion of which would bring things more in alignment with both the actual span of life on earth and the height of “the tapering tower’s interior “.

tomslee

…
Um New Year?

You’re obviously not an Australian, or you would be well aware of the alternatives (Show Day, Melbourne Cup Day etc).

There already is an atheist cathedral, masquerading as the Natural History Museum in Oxford.

I thought abortion clinics and crack labs were an atheist’s church? Did I miss a memo?

faustusnotes
No abortion clinics are there for minister’s daughters to enter the back door. Athiest’s use contraception.

One charitably assumes the news story left out a zero

this doesn’t work as far as I can see – since there has been only about 300m years of life on earth, either every year is represented by a decimetre, or the tower is 4.6m tall (which is a lot less cathedral-like).

Thanks for the link, Chris. I’d completely forgotten that blog post, that concert and that odd little church of Comte and Clothilde. Thank God for the Internet…

“300m years of life”

Where do you get that from? Our are you only counting land vertibrates or something similar?

46m = 4,600cm = 4.6bn years according to his caculation.

The age of the earth.

It’s still stupid though.

De Botton’s planned monument is, of course, silly, but if you think of it less as a Temple of Atheism and more as a cover-story to allow construction of the Worldwide Evil Atheist Conspiracy’s secret nuclear powered underground headquarters bunker, it makes a bit more sense.

The earth is about 4.6 billion years old, so the 46 metre height matches the alleged scale of 1 cm = 100 million years if the height is taken to represent the history of the Earth, rather than the history of its biosphere. I guess the newspaper reports are just confused.

I suspect that De Botton is not really serious about this temple, he’s just cleverly stirring up publicity for his forthcoming book, Religion for Atheists: A non-believer’s guide to the uses of religion.

Well, there was that The Palace of the Soviets project in Moscow in the 30s. Very ambitious, apparently.

So, they blew up Cathedral of Christ the Savior to clear up space, but in the end the Savior’s won: the project failed, the space was taken by a big swimming pool for a while, and then the cathedral got rebuilt. Gods are very powerful, and they don’t appreciate this kind of stuff.

I’ve never heard of De Botton, but in the case of Dawkins I’m not sure why you’d want someone to lose who’s dedicated themselves to fighting ignorance.

Ahh that makes a lot more sense, thanks Gareth.

@29 Being called deluded is polite?

If you mean what I think you mean. I tend to think politeness generally involves deference to other people’s feelings. So if someone is grossly obese, and your child says they are fat you teach your child not to say such things because it is not polite.

Here’s a non-polite thing Dawkin says but there are many others:

“Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!”

Dawkins had made it clear that anyone who is not an atheist is stupid, dangerous, possibly insane and not deserving of respect. This does not qualify as politeness. He does have a nice accent to most American ears and does not raise his voice though.

They can stage debates over the nature of the god that doesn’t exist. It would be cool. The could present lectures on the history of conflicts between religions and non-believers, and the history of atheist attitudes toward religion, and of the kind of thing Tom Slee mentions above. (I assume that Dennett, Pinker, and Dawkins, et al., are already doing this kind of thing.) Then we can anticipate, whether with excitement or trepidation, the rift over whether to exclude the spiritualists or not. Not to mention the leninists.

(David Mamet once proposed the Oscar ceremonies as a modern-day public ritual. He seemed pretty taken by them. Then twenty or so years later he came out as the most reactionary kind of right-winger. So who can say?)

I assume that Dennett, Pinker, and Dawkins, et al., are already doing this kind of thing

I think Dawkins is coming off as the sensible and reasonable party in this one, while De Botton is (not necessarily for the first time) coming over a bit creepy in exactly the way in which August Comte did, back when the idea was new.

Or more specifically, I personally think Dawkins goes a bit far and sometimes it seems like he’s intentionally trying to wind up me, specifically. But in fairness to the guy, when he calls the religios “deluded” or whatever, he tends to do so either in books which he writes and which one has the option of not buying, or at public lectures which charge an admission, or in other contexts in which it’s pretty clear that he’s talking to people who have at least tacitly accepted that there’s some Dawkins in their immediate future.

Sticking down a gigantic Temple which people can’t not look at is a whole new level. De Botton seems to think he’s being the reasonable one and trying to be nice to the religiousses by respecting their sense of awe! and wonderment! and love of pretty gilded things! But actually he’s being much more invasive in terms of shoving his message in front of people who don’t want it. People really don’t like this (some London readers will remember the “megamosque” proposal a few years ago and the absolutely visceral opposition to it; obviously there was a lot of ordinary racism involved in that campaign, but it was also driven by the fact that the design was so totally disproportionate to any actual demand for mosque space in the area – it was another piece of statement architecture).

dsquared: so putting up statements that are obtrusive and expressive of controversial views that some people find upsetting is wrong? Like building non-atheist temples, fr instance?

Where once we were all acolytes at the altar of Christianity, today we are all acolytes at the altar of Democracy, where the indigent worship the affluent by allowing them to seek advantage from the ignorance of the indigent, in their temples dedicated to the exchange of cattle. Christianity morphs into Democracy, but the acolytes continue to worship at the altars of affluence.

I guess we’re past the point of charitably assuming that your “since there has been only about 300m years of life on earth” is a typo missing an extra zero.

It’s a direct quote from the article; as and when the Guardian prints a correction and apology, I will, but for the time being I’m assuming De Botton was correctly quoted.

dsquared: so putting up statements that are obtrusive and expressive of controversial views that some people find upsetting is wrong? Like building non-atheist temples, fr instance?

I explicitly mentioned the case of a mosque proposal that I think is a piece of “statement architecture” so yes. In general I don’t think it’s an unreasonable goal of actually existing planning law to protect people against being proselytised at architecturally unless they don’t mind it. If someone wanted to build the Duomo today I’d say they were probably going a bit far.

Something like this was tried during the French Revolution, with Catholic churches being converted to “Temples of Reason.” The leaders of the movement got on the wrong side of Robespierre, though, and it was cut short . . .

As someone has said, atheism is a religion in the same sense that not collecting stamps is a hobby. Whether stamp collecting is a worthwhile activity or not, it is entirely plausible that stamp collectors, as a group, could organize around that activity and receive real social benefits for themselves, and, possibly, create some real social benefits for others, just from the fact of their being an organized group with a common interest. The group might, for example, get the stamp collectors out of the house and get together with other stamp collectors, who might be very different from them in non-stamp-collecting ways, broadening their world view and increasing tolerance. Fellow-feeling among organized stamp collectors might lead to mutual aid socities or other charitable endeavors. Organized stamp collectors might lobby to preserve mail service, which is good for us, even if their only goal was to insure the continued issuance of stamps. They might come to work with other groups, say, Roy Orbison fans, to persuade the Postal Service to issue a Roy Orbison stamp.
But what about the people whose only common characteristic is that they don’t collect stamps? On what principle do they organize? Perhaps some fringe group of non-stamp-collectors actually has an anti-stamp-collecting agenda, whatever that might be, or perhaps organized stamp collectors will lobby not for Roy Orbison stamps, but for restrictions on e-mail to force more people to write letters, thus increasing the issuance of stamps. Then some sort of organized non-stamp-collecting defense alliance might make sense. But how else do you organize non-stamp-collectors? That may mean that non-stamp-collectors, as such, are deprived of certain social benefits, but nothing can be done about that. DeB’s proposed temple is a temple to not collecting stamps.

Doctor Slack:
. Yeah, this actually isn’t as much more defensible as you appear to think it is.

Care to offer an argument? Or do you think it is just obvious?

As for the article: the fundamental flaw with the idea of an atheist temple is that temples are things you build to honour a particular belief system. Atheism is not a belief system: you can be an atheist and be a Randian, or a Marxist, or a Taoist, or a Humanist, or a Unitarian Universalist (the route you’d go if you were actually an atheist interested in hanging out harmoniously with non-atheists), and so on. So it’s not clear who would go to hang out in De Botton’s temple. Apparently Dawkins Fans are their own category, and perhaps they could go hang out and discuss how awesome Richard Dawkins supposedly is, but it looks like even that’s not going to happen now (and is just as easy to do at a convention centre anyway). I like Jeffrey Kramer’s #5, it sums up the likely outcome quite nicely.

56: I think the breadth and diversity of philosophy of religion as a whole (which is indivisible from the rise of modern science, incidentally) is itelf an illustration that the first proposition is ignorant and foolish as a response to “religion” as a whole. Dawkins’ public atheism basically amounts to arguments against fundamentalism, and fundamentalists, that he mistakenly imagines to be arguments against “religion,” about which he appears not to think he needs to do too much serious thinking, reading or research because he knows (or thinks he knows) all about fundamentalists. His arguments about religious people are flawed in similar ways, as if he has structured his entire view of them from trolls on talk.origins or something*. If he had stuck to the more restricted target he would have been fine, or at least better off; his understanding of fundamentalism even strikes me as a little restricted and polemical, actually, but at least there he has good cause and some good points to make regardless.

(* These are common flaws to all the so-called “Four Horsemen” atheist writers, not just Dawkins. The caricaturing leads to bad places: there’s a reason some of them have proved easy marks for Islamophobia, such as Harris and, in his day, Hitchens.)

Steve LaBonne: I’ve been outside the “academic hothouse” for a long time too. And I live in Canada’s Bible Belt to boot. And I come from an extended family of DITW Catholics. I think the “average Joe” is capable of quite a bit more sophistication than Dawkins grants or than you do; not having a university education isn’t the same thing as not having a brain, and the stereotype of the “average Joe” who just mindlessly cranks out whatever he was taught in childhood is problematic. (Not that there aren’t people like that, there are plenty of them; but the “average Joe” is not automatically that.)

I also think you’re mistaken to conflate what you encounter in a Unitarian Universalist setting with “liberal theology.” Liberal theology is arguably a lot more robust in established faiths outside the Universalist setting, which has always struck me as a little “New Age-y.”

Can we just summarise and say that most people don’t have a very sophisticated view of most things? Because they lack the time/ brain power/ energy to be experts in everything, they end up with a lot of unsophisticated views. I’ve lost track of the number of people I know in real life or on the internet who are reasonably intelligent and capable and yet have some strange ideas lurking in their heads or unsophisticated views on a topic or three.

I also don’t understand the problem with Dawkins not knowing much theology, given that theology is about God, and he is specifically negating god. Once you’ve done that there isn’t much point in learning any theology.

It’s not surprising that atheist would want their own temple. People will never be able to get around the fact that they were created to worship. If they don’t worship the true and living God, they will worship something else.

I actually agree with that first paragraph of Brett’s. It seems to me that the right memorials to human achievement so far and the marvels of the world around us are ones that are social and useful – places to gather together, see neat things, learn something, and like that.

A theologist would be the expert on what different religions believe and how they function.

That is a very serious category error. In fact, your description is that of a historian, sociologist or anthropologist of religion- all very different animals from a theologian.

But you’d need to read some theology to know that.

Why no, you wouldn’t. You’d need to know enough science to know that the whole project just isn’t on. (Philosophers may help too-how many of them, outside the intellectual ghetto called philosophy of religion, are prepared to seriously entertain substance dualism? And the kind of religion you can entertain without that is weak tea indeed.) And you’d have to clear your mind of the wishful thinking that prevents you from confronting the true state of affairs.

To even know that there are parts of religious thought that aren’t in necessary conflict with science, you have to have studied the subject more widely.

This is merely wishful thinking on your part; there are massive and massively well-founded parts of science that do indeed exclude 99+ percent of anything that can possibly be called religious belief (no matter how skillfully the theologians can doubletalk). As you’d know if you spent more time reading up on subject areas that actually have subject matter.

64 – Yes, we can summarize and say most people aren’t experts. The problem arises when we take the mass view of a idea or theory (whether it be Marxism, Catholicism, liberation theology, or astrophysics) and assume that critiquing that mass view has much intellectual weight. It does not.

64+66 – The argument is that Dawkins doesn’t need to know theology since he has negated God. As Doctor Slack points out, that’s not that simple! One cannot prove or disprove the existence of ‘God’ or ‘the transcendent’ logically or scientifically. (No, evolutionary biology does not do so, any more than the fact of the earth being round. That only works if you have a very limited idea of what religious thought requires). Even to decide on what ‘God’ means is a difficult exercise; different religions and different adherents believe a variety of things.

And if you don’t really know the content of religious belief how can you say anything interesting about that belief? If Dawkins is going to be a public spokesman for atheism and write about religion, then, yes, he should learn something about what he’s attacking. Otherwise it’s just another flavor of the right wing dismissal of ‘expertise’ as a necessary precursor to intelligent thought. (‘I don’t need to understand what I disagree with’ is a dangerous idea.)

69 – Fair point; I shouldn’t just throw out ‘theologist’ without explanation.
70- My point is that Dawkins is not an expert on this stuff. Sure, other people are. Dennett’s an atheist who’s at least more engaged in the philosophical ideas that underpin a lot of this stuff.

belle le triste @ 41:

Perhaps he’s planning an atheist TARDIS.

There already is one. It’s called “the TARDIS.”

Turns out “negating god” isn’t really that simple

~god. You’re welcome.

Oddly, I caught the God Channel last week, while flipping around, and saw about 15 minutes of a program featuring some creation science bod who was “debunking”, in his mind, the theory of evolution. He spent about ten of those fifteen minutes on anatomical differences which proved that mankind couldn’t have evolved from apes.

Clearly this was a total waste of everyone’s time (or at least mine, I could have been watching MTV Base). But I don’t think that if I’d challenged him on the subject, I would have been very impressed by his retorting that it hardly mattered what the egghead specialised theorists thought – the vast majority of ordinary believers in evolution thought that mankind was descended from apes, so that was all he needed to argue against.

But I don’t think that if I’d challenged him on the subject, I would have been very impressed by his retorting that it hardly mattered what the egghead specialised theorists thought – the vast majority of ordinary believers in evolution thought that mankind was descended from apes, so that was all he needed to argue against.

This analogy doesn’t work. Evolutionary biology is an intellectual discipline; to find out more about it you need to consult those who are expert in it. Religion as practiced by ordinary believers (in distinction to theology) is a sociological phenomenon; to find out more about it you need to observe and interview those believers, or consult sociologists / anthropologists who have done so. (Note that in the former case you can also of course do sociology- unless you’re Steve Fuller and have had your license revoked- but this will not tell you all that much about the intellectual content of what evolutionary biologists do.)

You ask for examples of illumination that theology can provide in arguing God’s existence.

Yes. I did. Were there some?

Dilettante: (Even the Vatican accepts evolution now)
It never rejected it. The theory doesn’t have particular theological significance unless you happen to be a creationist.

I mean, is the argument really that Dawkins might not know that the C of E is all squishy and metaphorical and science-accepty where Ted Haggard is not? Because he did speak to Haggard and Rowan Williams quite directly about those issues.

74: Reading theology would certainly be useful in knowing what religions, at the most sophisticated end of the spectrum, actually have to say on the subject and the arguments they actually use. Dawkins knows sophisticated Christians exist, but is not troubled by them overmuch; cf. his discussion of contradictions, mistranslations and inconsistencies in the Jesus story that starts around p. 117, where he gives a fairly commonplace list of the problems involved, says “sophisticated Christians” aren’t taken in by all this but laments the “very many unsophisticated Christians” who presumably just never notice all of this. Well, some of them indeed never do: but what would have been really cool there was a discussion or even mention of some of what actual theologians have had to say about those contradictions, mistranslations and inconsistencies (because there’s a lot of it, starting at least with Augustine) and some refutation of that. Would have been a lot more convincing.

Stuff like that is symptomatic of a larger unwillingness to grapple seriously with the topic he claims to be grappling seriously with, as others have pointed out.

80: Yes, Dennett is not indeed any less full of shit than Dawkins.

Dilettante’s 81 is well put.

82 – Uh, yes. For example, the illumination that the big bang does nothing to prove/disprove God. If you want theology to prove or disprove God to you, you will wait a long time.

73/ 83 – You say that various ‘massively well-founded’ and ‘other specific scientific ideas’ are incompatible with pretty much all religions??? I do not think that is so. I assume you refer to your idea that evolutionary biology somehow precludes anything non-material: that’s a silly argument that would only work if you assume religion requires a God who is essentially like a very large and old man. You might as well say God can’t exist because something of infinite size would have infinite gravity; you can’t sensibly apply those sorts of arguments to spiritual claims.

Now, you can use them on physical claims – age of the earth stuff – but there’s nothing to be gained either way by using this kind of argument on theological issues. I understand the desire to think otherwise – it lets you dismiss ideas with which you disagree in the name of science! – but the reality is that this kind of argument is deeply pointless. Which, to come back full circle, is why Dawkins is more light than heat, and why his brand of uninformed theorizing is more divisive than illuminating.

89 – Hey, that’s a good point! The Pantheon in Paris is an interesting example of a secular piece of architecture.

I do not think that is so.

And you’re wrong. The idea of a “non-material” something or other is not even a coherent concept at all, much less one compatible with either evolutionary biology or neuroscience. And handwaving simply doesn’t help you.

What is so difficult about that?

Absolutely nothing, if one wants to fancy up an argument so the Serious People Take You Seriously Because You Didn’t Make The Seriously Approved Argument The Last Time. But again I ask you to be specific: what point does Augustine make that Dawkins has missed? I can keep asking.

My response in 95 is quite specific.

96 now. Surely you can’t be serious. That was pure fudge. And the only one tap-dancing here is you.

Counter challenge: what is one thing Dawkins has said that would have illuminated an argument regarding God’s existence?

Counter challenge: what is one thing Dawkins has said that would have illuminated an argument regarding God’s existence?

He has said many times the sorts of things that I have said in several comments above, and they pretty much settle the matter for anyone who understands the science and is willing to accept everything that it entails. “Non-material” minds of any sort are simply not on.

Didn’t Dawkins once say that there is no point in reading any book written before 1900.

The Origin of Species, for one, was published in 1859, so this is unlikely. It’s amusing to watch the defenders of religion do the only thing they know how to do- make shit up.

What illumination is provided by reading theology in arguments about God’s existence? Specific examples would be nice.

Theology is not concerned with God’s existence. Philosophy of religion is. But you rejected that earlier as a useful field of study. So apparently the issue of God’s existence is to be rejected, too.

And your empiricism/logical positivism is subject to severe critique from the very philosophers you demand should be handmaidens to science. Which is itself a philosophy as much as it is “knowledge” (the original Greek term, translated into English).

Substance McGravitas @ 101

I believe the primary benefit is to avoid thinking you’re a genius because you just reinvented the wheel.

I just don’t see how evolutionary theory and neuroscience discredit the concept of God. Is it just that now that we know that the pineal gland isn’t the meeting place of body and soul, we’ve attained the view from nowhere and there’s nothing more to see? I don’t believe in non-material minds myself, but matter is a lot more complicated and our understanding of it is a lot more limited and metaphorical than this argument seems to allow. Dawkins’ claims always seem to me not skeptical enough–I’d trade an epistemologically modest agnosticism for an overweening atheism that thinks it has all the answers any day.

Doctor Slack @107:
…That this is an ancient feature of Christian thought from Augustine’s time down to our own isn’t addresses by Dawkins. Just one of many holes in the endeavour.

The claim that because Dawkins hasn’t individually refuted every theologian ever and so is therefore wrong through lack of thoroughness is called the Courtier’s Reply. It was named by PZ Myers, whom Dawkins quotes in the preface to the second edition of the God Delusion.

People accuse Dawkins of picking an easy target by mostly attacking Fundamentalists, but Fundamentalism is as useful to moderate theists as it is to new atheists. For example, absent the Creationists, folks who go around talking about God using natural selection to create the world would not appear as reasonable but simply as quaint since theistic evolution is, in itself, just as barmy as New Earth Creationism. Liberal Protestants and Catholics absolutely depend upon the continued existence of the Elmer Gantry crowd in order to maintain their intellectual self respect.

I don’t disagree that Dawkins and his crowd often make a hash of the history of religion, but my complaint against ’em is that they aren’t fair to history. On the other hand, it isn’t entirely reasonable to complain that they don’t pay much attention to theology unless you can come up with some evidence that theology has more substance or credibility than, say, palmistry. Or do you have to know how to draw up a natal horoscope before you can dismiss astrology?

Jim Dementia @ 111- I would describe myself as a weak atheist, meaning I don’t believe in god, as opposed to a strong atheist, who believes there is no god (a subtle distinction, but I find it can end being important). I don’t see any positive empirical evidence for god or any other supernatural being, and the lines of evidence indicate to me that while an actual lack of their existence isn’t falsifiable that’s probably the way to bet. I recognize that subjective experience of the supernatural is pretty damn convincing to those who experience it (if you believe in god because Jesus dropped by your house last night, I can’t say I blame you), but modern studies of the brain give a plausible non-supernatural explanation for everyone else.

This is all speaking for myself.

Occasionally I wish CT showed the nationality of each commenter. This is one of those times. US: We have National Parks (the Grand Canyon and the Smithsonian). UK: We have National Heritage (Stonehenge). I’m sure the differences are minor, though, and would show up as important only within a narrow range.

DS @107: their moral and salvific … point

Would you say a bit more? What is that point?

Is information material?

Give me an example of information that floats free of any material substrate. While you’re at it, give me an example of information that exists as such independently of the existence of human beings.

And let me be clear: I am completely with James Refell when he wants to call Dawkins out for this or that idiocy.

Dawkins is quite capable of being a total prat, obviously. This is the case with both his racially tinged islamophobia and with his Elevatorgate demonstration of aggressive cluelessness about patriarchy. So what? It’s as though some of the commentesr on this thread aren’t aware that the argumentum ad hominem is a fallcy.

“Or do you have to know how to draw up a natal horoscope before you can dismiss astrology?”
It might be useful knowledge if you were trying to make a career for yourself as the world’s greatest refuter of astrology. On the theology point, modern philosophical theology, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, has not focused on whether or not God exists, but the extent to which religious language can be said to be meaningful, is capable of falsification etc – and it has been a far more fruitful discussion, in which both believers and sceptics have participated, than the dialogue of the deaf between the Four Horsemen and the Holy Rollers. Perhaps Substance Mc might care to have a look.

Ooh! A book blurb! The foundation of all arguments!

Well done.

I’d hate to think that you were desperately squirming to avoid admitting a mistake.

I am happy to admit that I thought you were talking about an argument Dawkins was making rather than your impression that he was struggling to conform to his ad copy.

there’s no reason to assume there’s a god

I don’t know, maybe the word “assume” is significant here in a way I don’t realize, but surely there must be a good reason to believe in god, since so many do.

I think it would make a lot of sense to investigate what these reasons are, and then, if you really dislike gods, try to find a way to provide the same utility in some other, godless manner.

You asked where he made those claims. The description he approved of his own book doesn’t qualify?

That is hilariously weak. Should I then point out that the ad copy doesn’t actually make the claim that he is a scholar of religion or that he is “the definitive refuter of religion” but rather “makes a compelling argument”? Mind you, there are fundamentalist ad-copy readers and then there are the more sophisticated kind.

46m is 4600 cm, which allows one cm for each million years in the age of the Earth (rounding up from the estimated age of 4.54 billion years). Perhaps that is De Botton’s intent, and he was just misquoted.

Life dates back to 3.5 billion years or so ago, which doesn’t map into his scheme well at all. The Cambrian explosion, when things got photogenic, was around 540 million years ago. Makes for a fairly dull first 40m of tower.

Henri, I’m not going to let you forget that you said GOOD reasons.

Steve LaBonne:
In case it’s not clear, though others have pointed it out, there’s a connection between Dawkins’s particular approach to attacking religion and religious people that has a tendency to slide into bigotry. It could be the enthusiastic embrace of ignorance about religion, the lumping of people into groups and then making huge generalizations about them, probably it’s a little of both. Hitchens did it, Dawkins does it, and as an atheist who wishes more room for atheists in public life, I wish they’d cut it the hell out.

That’s not an ad hominem attack. I’m not saying his arguments are invalid because he’s a bad person. I’m saying that his arguments–not his scientific ones, nor his defense of secularism, nor his advocacy of atheism, all of which seem perfectly sound to me–but very specifically those arguments where he attacks specific religions and groups of religious people–are wrong. Furthermore they are wrong in exactly the same way that equally bigoted remarks coming from some right-wing thug are wrong.

A good reason to believe in God is that people in your church will give you stuff when you’re in need.

Nah, you can get the same benefit by pretending to believe. And I think there’s more of that than many people realize. Even, or especially, among ministers.

“can’t” s/b “can” Can’t abide typos in our snark after all…

In case it’s not clear, though others have pointed it out, there’s a connection between Dawkins’s particular approach to attacking religion and religious people that has a tendency to slide into bigotry.

Not that I have any particular wish to defend Dawkins, who has been pissing me off more and more. But this is indeed not clear at all. It is not something that was really noticeable in Dawkins’s writings or speeches prior to 9/11/01. Furthermore, I am interested in truth and falsity, not in “approaches”. I’ll leave tone trolling to those who are interested in such stuff.

@Steve, ‘good’ in the sense of ‘strong’, ‘pervasive’. You eradicate the gods, and what’s going to happen then? The question that made Dostoyevsky very nervous…

My belief is in a radical agnosticism. We cannot know that there is a god.. What follows from this is that theology is useless, because nothing else can be known for certain about something that we cannot know exists in the first place. We cannot say, for example, “We cannot know there is a god, but he is probably going to be benevolent…” Arguments from the subtlety / complexity of theology don’t really hold much water, because how can anyone really know anything about any of this? The most ignorant person in the world knows as much about god as the most subtle theologian. Exactly nothing.

The most ignorant person in the world knows as much about god as the most subtle theologian. Exactly nothing.

There is a branch of theology based on that very premise; the via negativa. Arises mostly out of the experience of the Christian mystics, although it’s often traced back to Martin Luther (not mutually exclusive origins).

And, of course, theology is almost entirely a Christian endeavor. There aren’t any Jewish theologians, or Buddhist, or Taoist, or Hindu, or….

Aquinas, the great theologian and rationalist, explained God as thoroughly as any Christian thinker ever has (not that I agree with him, but disagreeing with him is rather like disagreeing with a mountain. You still have to deal with it.). He was, at least, the supreme “subtle theologian,” and remains so to this day.

Anyway, Aquinas had a mystical vision at the end of his life. As a result, he said, all his writings appeared to him as straw.

He never wrote another word.

Fair enough.

I think we’re finally in agreement on Dawkins

Only if you agree with Reffell and with me that “his scientific [arguments], … his defense of secularism, … his advocacy of atheism, all … seem perfectly sound to me”. Dawkins is, of course, very far indeed from being alone in making those arguments so his personal significance is simply not a very interesting topic.

An English intellectual acting barmy. Who would have thought it possible?

On the count of judging Dawkins based primarily on his public perception instead of actually reading him I plead guilty, guilty, guilty. My defense, or perhaps excuse, is that what I had encountered made me decide further reading wasn’t going to be illuminating or interesting. Which seems a bit like Dawkins’ approach to religion from the descriptions here. Poetic justice? I’ll leave that decision to the better informed.

Since I’m a bit more curious now (though not enough to do my own reading), what is Dawkins’ definition of religion? On the one hand it’s a bit important to know what you’re arguing against, but on the other hand its notoriously a hard thing to nail down.

129, “Give me an example of information that floats free of any material substrate. While you’re at it, give me an example of information that exists as such independently of the existence of human beings.”

DNA frequently exists independently of human beings. I think this question popped into my head as a result of hearing a wonderful lecture by — Richard Dawkins (!) about the continuity between matter and life. I was so intrigued I bought a copy of the book. (Need to read it again, actually.) I cannot believe that information and its transmission is (are) unique to human beings, or even mammals, or even living things (selfish genes), when it comes to that.

@ Jonathan Mayhew

Yes. I would add that the problem with ordinary agnosticism (among which I count my previous self) is that it says there must be something to all those texts that–it’s only logical to believe–have been believed by so many people in exactly the same way for so many centuries (which we know because the high priests today invariably say that’s the case), and have so much empirical evidence in their favor (which we know because they must have done a fair enough job for a lot of people for a very long time, to not have been rebelled against by anyone up til now, at least not successfully). In a single-culture society, it boils down to casual acceptance of things one doesn’t believe or understand, because why not? In a multi-cultural society, it boils down to either cheap relativism or cheap Joseph Campbell-ism: maybe each person has a good impulse and an evil impulse, maybe each person has original sin unless redeemed by grace, surely, they both mean the same thing and can be used interchangeably?

174: All of that is actually why it would have been nice had Four Horsemen-style atheist-proselytism turned out to be a lot less shallow than it is. It would have been nice to see prominent atheist spokespersons with persuasive, informed and interesting critiques of religion to offer. What we have instead is polemicism long on energy and short on substance that gained traction at least in part because it also provides a convenient cover for the popular prejudice of the day.

“You might think so, but that would be to underestimate the enormous dead weight of dogmatic religion right up through the early 19th century, which isn’t, as our species goes, so very long ago.”

I don’t underestimate this. I just think Dawkins atheism period hasn’t done much good or produced anything original, and this is at the cost of what could have been a significant contribution to biology the guy is obviously capable of. It’s not as if things were heading back to a new age of superstition until the late 80s when Dawkins started fighting the fight.

The question that made Dostoyevsky very nervous…

Not that it took much to do that.

@178, wouldn’t it be easier (and make more sense) for those subtle and plausible religious types to discredit and dispatch their full-blown dogmatic coreligionists (Spinoza seems to be a case in point)? Rather than the Four Horsemen/scorched earth style approach.

I think I want to worship geo.

Ok, what geo stands for.

@178, wouldn’t it be easier (and make more sense) for those subtle and plausible religious types to discredit and dispatch their full-blown dogmatic coreligionists (Spinoza seems to be a case in point)? Rather than the Four Horsemen/scorched earth style approach.

I’ve had that argument many times. How, precisely, am I to do it? “Ideas are bulletproof” is a truism, unfortunately. And it works for bad ideas as much as for good ones.

Not that I think scorched earth is that much better an option.

188: Sorry, who’s said any of that?

I don’t see that they’ve “dispatched” anything as such in the practical sense that wasn’t already “dispatched” by Enlightenment rationalism, on which they have not improved. I certainly wouldn’t class any of them with Spinoza or Diderot as thinkers.

Would they disagree?

The arguments for and against the existence of the usual type of god up for discussion haven’t advanced much in the last 3 or 4 centuries

Neither has this observation. I believe one notable atheist observed in 1844: ‘the criticism of religion has been essentially completed’.

191: You mean, would Spinoza or Diderot be more impressed by them than I am? I somehow doubt it, but I haven’t conducted a seance or anything.

#129: “Give me an example of information that floats free of any material substrate. While you’re at it, give me an example of information that exists as such independently of the existence of human beings.”

Mathematics. A long line of scientists (and almost all philosophers including Dennett, but perhaps excluding Brouwer and Wittgenstein) has supposed that mathematics exists independently of human beings. This is a major position in the philosophy of maths, called Platonism or Objectivism. When you have resolved the ancient dichotomy of form and substance, you can claim that information is material. Indeed, why should monism be preferred to dualism? Monism doesn’t seem to confer any intellectual advantage, while producing more confusion.

195: Well, hopefully not. I was responding to a comparison in the post I was replying to.

As Dawkins, Harris and others have argued, to the extent that it justifies belief through faith, “moderate” religion is just as irrational as “fundamentalist” religion. “I believe through faith that God wants me to help the poor” is no less irrational than “I believe through faith that Allah wants me to hijack these airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Center.”

But without faith, what’s left? The “evidence” of sacred scriptures and divine revelations? Worthless. In the developed world — even in America! — religion is gradually dying off. The sooner we’re rid of it the better.

There’s always sports.

Harold, that’s a peach of a quote. Where’s it from?

> I haven’t read books by Dawkins or the other Horsemen. Reviews and excerpts were enough to convince me that I’d learn nothing from them that I didn’t already know.

On the one hand, this does make you unusual. Could I take his by-far most famous book – “The Selfish Gene” – as an example. Are you convinced that its content would all be obvious to you should you read it? Or perhaps that the falsity of it will be obvious to you? Or perhaps you are young enough to conclude that, while at the time there may have been learnings within, they have already reached you from some other path so that _today_ the incremental value of you reading it would be zero?

But if you are specifically thinking about one of his recent (of very many) books, “The God Delusion”, I would chime in support. I thought it was a bad book, in that it was suitable for a very tiny audience but not fairly marketed thus. The arguments were not credibly written to engage or persuade believers new to the atheism question, yet were crude and incomplete for a believer who had thought about such issues and could raise some basic logical and evidential counter-questions. And to such as myself, as strident an atheist as they come, there is most certainly no learnings – conventional and boring (though mostly correct) arguments presented shockingly poorly. Yawn.

IMO there’s likely a _very_ narrow window in the long slide from religious belief to agnosticism/atheism where a valid but shallow book such as TGD would be useful and appreciated. Bottom line, I suspect that while this book isn’t empty altogether, for one reason or another is simply empty to 99% of the people.

sorry, didn’t see you’d already given it to geo

Harold, I second @202 in thanking your for introducing me to this quote. On the face of it this seems very pertinent to the corruption and inequality of today’s society particularly as regards the U.S.
What I am missing though is the tiniest, faintest, connection to the current thread – could you explain? The nearest I can guess – I’m sure I’m wrong – is that it is insinuating that someone critical about religion (“the skeptic”??) is going to also end to be against justice, fairness, equality, and apple pie. But that would be beyond stupid – so in your mind, what _is_ the quote suggesting that is relevant here?

they’re not only numerically predominant

What?

Harold #201 “and the political economist combines labor” [Shelley]

With Geo, Great quote! There is the pathology: the adding-up of labor, as a scientific datum. Sometimes I think the 19th cent. beats the 20th (& 21st) because it’s the last time that anyone could hold all the thoughts together.

that’s a peach of a quote

It’s nicely written, but the chain of causation between ‘unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty’ and ‘everything is going to the dogs’ seems a little bit obscure.

chris at 209, the logic you’re describing was a common belief system of christian anti-semites before the 20th century – if those Jews would just convert they’d be fine. It served perfectly well as the basis for exclusion and discrimination and pogroms for quite a long time.

Obviously I don’t think Dawkins is in favour of any of those things, but the fact that he’s a decent chap (or can’t be bothered) doesn’t make his writing on the topic any less unpleasant. It’s an old-fashioned piece of nasty.

Doctor Slack, you seem very convinced that Dawkins hasn’t read any theology or serious philosophy of religion. Are you really sure of that? Because it seems like the kind of mistake that even someone making a passing attempt at looking thorough and intellectual would avoid.

fn @ 206 before the 20th century

To be more specific, roughly in the interval [Napoleon, Hitler). Maybe union that with (dk, 1492].

oh damn, *Harold*’s come back, and he brought artillery.

Dawkins is an idiot, a racist, and a snob. Holding “religion” responsible for the numerous crimes committed by people excusing their colonialism, slave trading or mass murder with religion is absolute bollocks, based in an immature philosophical idealism that would make Hegel blush in embarrassment. It is just incredible that a supposedly smart person would not notice that ruling class ideologies have produced, over the course of history, a great many excuses for brutal inhumane behaviour, many not related at all to religion – and will continue to do so in the future without any involvement of religion, unless of course we get our act together in the fight against actual oppression instead of squandering it tilting at windmills.

Using said alleged inherent evil of religion to actually justify repression of adherents of a very particular religion (which happens to be the religion of the major minority group in the country Dawkins resides in) is as blatant a case of racism as there is.

209: Er… by this logic (criticism of Islam allegedly being per se racist)

Wow, talk about a post collapsing right at the first hurdle.

216: you seem very convinced that Dawkins hasn’t read any theology or serious philosophy of religion. Are you really sure of that?

Really sure that he shows little evidence of having done so, yes. It is of course possible that he has done and is simply hiding this fact, but that seems less likely.

223: I’m with faustusnotes on this one. It’s stupid to wait until it’s gotten to the point of arson and beatings before you’re willing to say that prejudice is not on.

I meet a lot of Japanese people who claim they don’t have any religion. But they go to temples and clean their ancestors’ graves and so on. I know a pharmacologist who paid for a special blessing this new year because under some buddhist ideal, it’s a year of bad luck for her.

I’ve asked a lot of questions about the grave-cleaning and the ancestor thing (it’s a complex topic and most people are happy to talk about it). You can even get to this entertaining part of the conversation where someone who regularly honours their ancestors, both in their home and at the grave, and who refuses to give up the practice because it would be disrespectful to their ancestors, will happily tell you that their ancestors spirits aren’t a real thing, but that’s not the point.

This is how ordinary people apprehend religion.

I’ve not read any of the New Atheists, only seen the kind of things that get written about them or that they put into newspaper columns and the like, but I don’t get the impression they have thought much about the way ordinary people approach their beliefs, and they don’t seem to make much allowance for the fact that a huge proportion of the world’s population can simultaneously believe something strongly and completely reject its mystical underpinnings. I also think their crusade against “religion” seems to be actually a crusade against “theism” or just “christians and muslims.”

I’d like to see how Dawkins would engage with Shintoism. I think he would simultaneously make himself look very arrogant and very ignorant.

I’m an atheist and I certainly believe religion is responsible for a lot of bad things. But I don’t get the impression that the New Atheism is offering a critique that will change it.

@Consumatopia:229

I believe the current idiom is: “+1”

On the other hand, if you want to argue that religion is harmful, then you’d need to know a very great deal about the history of religion.

There’s no evidence that religion provides reliable information about the world. Its factual claims are either useless, demonstrably false, or true only by accident, like a lucky guess. I’ve never seen an example of a religious moral prescription of which I approve, such as the Golden Rule, that could not be justified by secular moral reasoning. I’ve seen lots of examples of religious moral prescriptions that I find appalling.

Was it Mark Twain who said that atheists are boring because all they can talk about is god?

I am sure it was Emily Dickinson who bade, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant – success in circuit lies ….”

211: If you need refreshing , the H. Allen Orr review I linked in 93 provides a succinct summary of TGD’s flaws and includes some specific examples.

Here is Jason Rosenhouse’s rebuttal to Orr’s criticisms of TGD.

Really? “Broadsides against religion are rarely best-sellers; ergo, unlike when they are it must be because they’re well-written?” And…this is because the public, while having extremely questionable taste in many other ways, suddenly becomes very discerning when it comes to such things, and only accepts the creme de la creme?

Okay, then.

Dawkins writes tripe like this:
” We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)

Anyone disgree that it is tripe?

Because it was something different? Because it was confrontational, and Americans, at least, like confrontation? Because it filled a niche?

Lots of books criticizing religion and theism have been published. Lots of books far more “confrontational” than TGD have been published. Lots of books “fill a niche.” Very few of them have achieved the success of TGD.

Because it’s easy to read and understand?

And yet you insist that that has nothing to do with Dawkins’ skills as a writer. How bizarre.

“Easy to read and understand” in the sense that it is not complicated. The Da Vinci Code would fall under that aegis too. So what?

While I’m not necessarily denying that they exist, I’d sure like an idea of what some of these would-be popular anti-religion broadsides that were ignored before Dawkins came along because they lacked The Right Stuff were, exactly. And even if there’s a whole stable of them, this appears to be about the same as “there were lots of vampire novels published beforehand, so why’d Twilight become so popular, huh? It must be because it’s GREAT!” No, one might counter. There were pretty obviously other factors, not all of which are easily quantifiable. Well, exactly.

in the sense that it is not complicated.

In TGD, Dawkins discusses many complex and abstruse philosophical and scientific ideas. And yet you’re seriously claiming that the quality of the writing has nothing to do with how easy it is to read and understand those discussions. What were you saying about not being able to keep a straight face?

While I’m not necessarily denying that they exist, I’d sure like an idea of what some of these would-be popular anti-religion broadsides that were ignored before Dawkins came along because they lacked The Right Stuff were, exactly.

Numerous books written for a general audience arguing for atheism have been published over the past few decades. Try Atheism: The Case Against God, Natural Atheism, The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, Atheism: A Reader, Atheism, Morality and Meaning, Why Atheism? and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism, to name just a few.

They And even if there’s a whole stable of them, this appears to be about the same as “there were lots of vampire novels published beforehand, so why’d Twilight become so popular, huh?

Gee, maybe because it was a melodrama aimed at the teen and young adult female market about hunky young male vampires and was made into a series of big budget movies that stimulated even more book sales. I’m not sure what you think this has to do with the success of TGD.

Ok so it’s pedigree chum.

Given the millions of books Dawkins has sold, the millions of people who love his writing and the millions of people who regard him as an intellectual hero (this isn’t Dan Brown we’re talking about here), I think it’s pretty silly to claim that he’s not a good writer.

So Avatar was a great movie?

Look, the overwhelming majority of people have awful taste. Given how little most people read in their spare time, they are not going to notice bad writing. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that grammatical writing can be bad.

The faith vs. works distinction is irrelevant to atheists. They are not planning to go to heaven anyway, by either means. If they do good works (as many do) it is for secular reasons.

For atheists, the fundamental question about any theological proposition is “How do you know that?” The answer “By faith”, which is frequently given, does not satisfy them. Should it?

Getting back late to Harold re information, sorry, no dice about DNA. DNA is just a chemical. Information is only information because it carries a message as interpreted by us. Saying that DNA contains information is really a metaphor. (And yes, I know about the high=flown physicists who say things like “the universe is composed of quantum information”, but they’re just abusing language.)

And even when we speak of DNA as carrying information, you still fall at my first hurdle, since that information does not exist other than as embodied in the physical DNA molecule.

Bafflegab about information cannot rescue supernaturalism.

I am not interested in trying “to rescue supernaturalism” — just on the alert against reductionism. All language is metaphorical. And religion is a language, a system of communication using metaphors.

I take it back.

Water Kaufmann said something to the effect that a professed atheism was simply a kind of aggressive non-conformity in a particular culture, that since “I believe in God” was without meaning for him and therefore could not be untrue, he (WK) should have no problem saying it, unless he simply wanted to rebel. He, as a Nietzschean, was ok fine with rebelling.

Israels confirmed this understanding for me in his work on the Age of Spinoza, that “atheism”, professed or imputed, was originally understood as an aggressive non-conformity.

And this we are back to Kierkegaard, and Sickness Unto Death:”Thou Art a Bad Artist”

Rebellion. Atheists are as boring and irritating as teenagers.

I guess I could go to the topic, absurd and boring though it be.

Atheist miss the point of religion, which is not the substance or dogma but the practice. It’s about piety, about showing respect for community norms at the village hearth.

And as the substance of communal bonds have always and constantly changed, the need and demand for piety has and probably always will remain. And so we get a proposed “temple for atheists” more piety to control the populace.

You wanna rebel? Attack piety in itself for itself and be a Nietzschean. Or attack some current shibboleth or idol, like liberalism, science, capitalism, democracy, etc.

But atheism is just the piety of bourgeois rebels.

260:Well, Rawls, public reason, etc. We scrutinize policies and practices not beliefs or justifications.

Where the heck does this strange belief of liberals that beliefs, justified or not, determine practice and behavior come from anyway? I see little direct empirical evidence that this is true.

Why, could it be a vestige of religion and faith? That professed piety ensures correct behavior? I think so.

The canard that all negative criticism of bad ideas is bigotry

See, this would be exactly the kind of bullshit I’m about. Don’t do that.

Having said that, Steve’s third sentence in 264 is mostly unobjectionable, except in that of course their animus against groups of people was reflected in writing enormous amounts of nonsense about the supposed bad ideas of the people they targeted. Just as was characteristic of anti-Semitism, although the underlying animus was more basic there as well. When criticism relies on caricature, fabrication, distortion and cherry-picking (all characteristic of Hitch’s writing about Islam, for instance) it’s probable you’re dealing with bigotry. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other criticisms that could be sound. It means the bigot isn’t curious enough about his target to actually know, or care, what they are; his criticisms are excuses more than they are products of inquiry.

@200 There’s always sports.

Also: all those divine i-things. I suggest a 46 meter copy of iphone with a statue of Steve Jobs made of pure gold on top.

heckblazer @ 144
Re. American attitudes toward religion: There are a lot of things going on there. But traditionally, lots of settlers in North America, through at least 1848, understood themselves to be fleeing restrictions on their religious practice (which those they were fleeing, clearly, understood to be heresy deserving prosecution). They wanted to elevate George Fox or John Wesley’s ideas over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. Or eius religio wasn’t a religio that appealed to them. So there have always been a lot of sects, many of them schismatic w/r/t European churches, and even those that weren’t were separated from Europe by distance and war for a very long time, and evolved separately.

In Massachusetts, also, Parliament made a point of favoring conforming Anglicans over the Puritans and their descendants in the years running up to 1775. (Harvard was originally a Puritan seminary. Anglicans returned to the home country for their education, I think.) After the Revolution, those schisms faded and new ones took over (the environment out of which Joseph Smith emerged). Lots of these kinds of things over the East Coast.

bob said ‘Agnostics are asking the wrong question, there will be no well-calibrated God-o-meter to give them certainty’

Surely agnostics are not asking any question at all, they are precisely saying that the word ‘god’ is meaningless, there is no possibility of certainty, and that we should fall back in silence, or at least a feeling of humility. The religious fill that restrained silence with noise, or perhaps I should be kinder and say ‘assertion’. With constant, insistent assertion. And with each assertion people are browbeaten, and frightened.

I feel impatient with the religious in this thread who say ‘Oh no, we agree with you, there is no certainty, there is only the ineffable’. Go out there and say that in the churches and the church-schools, where people are frightened and intimidated by religious bullying. Do you think atheists like Dawkins get their anger from nowhere? They get it from being browbeaten and intimidated as children.

And if you do make that stance, I think you will find that your co-religionists will be more angry with you, than they ever are with atheists.

Btw, the view that it was possible to establish the truth of religion by intellectual argument has been heresy for most of the history of Christianity.

That’s not true dsquared! On the contrary, it is a very longstanding Catholic doctrine.

No, you were right the first time, Doctor Slack- bullshit is what you’re about. Well, carry on then. I don’t have the patience for any more of it.

There is a 3-part episode of South Park that may be the logical conclusion of De Botton’s proposal (one of the plot points involve a group of atheist sea otters).

@252,
So Avatar was a great movie? Look, the overwhelming majority of people have awful taste.

Avatar is a big-budget action/adventure movie made by a director who is generally recognized to be pretty talented at making that kind of picture. I’m not sure what you think this has to do with the success of The God Delusion. Are you suggesting it was so successful because of all the exciting car-chase scenes?

@253,
Following on from what dsquared says, another thing the New Atheists tend to do (and this is only a tendency) is to rail against faith

Yes, because religious faith is so dangerous. It is worthless for distinguishing truth from falsehood. It causes people to believe nonsense. Yet religious people routinely appeal to faith to justify their religious beliefs. Not just “fundamentalists” but “moderates” too.

@264,
What made Hitchens, and makes Harris and lately Dawkins bigots is their obvious animus against identifiable groups of people, and not merely the bad ideas they hold.

What “obvious animus?” Cite and quote this alleged animus.

That’s not true dsquared! On the contrary, it is a very longstanding Catholic doctrine.

Yes. Or, at least, the Catholic Church claims that certain “truths of religion” can be established through reason alone. For example, the Catholic Catechism states that reason alone provides “a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator.”

Note the scope of this claim. The Catholic Church isn’t claiming merely that reason establishes the existence of some kind of creator God. Even that limited claim is rather implausible. But the Church goes much further than that, claiming that reason establishes the existence of a “personal” God who interacts with the world and has written Catholics teachings on “natural law” into our very natures. The claim is breathtaking in its arrogance.

I am an atheist and I don’t need a temple.
I just come here: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/i-discovered-paradise/

Dawkins, not too long ago: “I think it is well arguable that Islam is the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today.

Seems reasonable to me. What clearly greater man-made forces for evil in the world today do you claim there are? The Islamic world is generally characterized by appalling restrictions on human rights, especially the rights of women, religious minorities and sexual minorities. And Islam is one of the primary, if not the single largest, inspiration for global terrorism in the world today.

What clearly greater man-made forces for evil in the world today do you claim there are?

Microsoft, of course. Also, some might argue: nuclear weapons, small arms, imperialism.

Yes, as usual my intuition didn’t let me down:
microsoft+evil = 161,000,000 google hits
islam+evil = 148,000,000 google hits
Q.E.D.

What clearly greater man-made forces for evil in the world today do you claim there are?

Money.

No, you were right the first time, Doctor Slack- bullshit is what you’re about.

Because you don’t like being called on yours, eh? Sorry it frustrates you to be unable to simply lie about others’ arguments without challenge.

274: So what makes Islamic preachers who preach suicide bombing different etc. Posted as most of this stuff typically is from a parallel universe in which nobody — including Muslims, I’ll bet! — ever thinks to criticize suicide bombing.

Another common posture of bigotry: “you don’t like us because we’re making the hard-nosed judgments all you squishy people are afraid to make!” But of course a bigot isn’t someone who knows that Muslim suicide bombing is bad. It’s someone who knows only this about Muslims, and is interested in knowing and talking about little else.

The Islamic world is generally characterized by appalling restrictions on human rights,

actually “the Islamic world” is diverse in this respect. The country with the largest number of Muslims is, iirc, Indonesia, which is currently a functioning democracy — imperfect but functioning. I don’t think its recent human rights record is “appalling” (though no doubt it could be improved, as could many countries’) .
The Dawkins statement quoted is not v. sensible, way too broad-brush. The problem is not Islam per se by any means, but rather certain extremist interpretations of it, and really probably only a subset of those.

Seems reasonable to me.

Disgusting.

No, I wasn’t especially serious about this.

Good, because it’s a silly claim.

282: busts of Socrates, Voltaire, Paine, Owen and Jesus

I’m kind of a fan (with qualifications) of Robert Owen, but a tiny bit surprised to find him in this company. Of course I don’t know the history of the Leicester temple.

“The government generally has been unable to adequately address serious human rights abuses committed in the past. Inadequate resources, weak leadership, and limited accountability contributed to continued abuses by security force personnel, although with sharply reduced frequency and gravity than under past governments.”

In other words, things are improving, though problems remain. And the portion of the report you quote doesn’t give frequency of the cited abuses. (State Dept is statutorily required to do these reports, let’s remember, which is no doubt partly why it sounds boiler-platish.)

Sorry it frustrates you to be unable to simply lie about others’ arguments without challenge.

Since you choose to put it that way, and just for the record , you yourself lied quite blatantly about what I actually said.

Beyond that, the idea that one has to immerse oneself in sympathetic study of some particular set of stories about invisible sky stories, in order to recognize that one ought not hold a belief in invisible sky fairies (given that there are excellent reasons for concluding that they don’t exist), is a particularly fatuous form of special pleading. There are very good reasons to study religions, but that most certainly isn’t one of them.

Yikes, 300+ comments. I’m only up to about #80, but so far Doctor Slack is saying what I would say, and I just wanted to +1 his #63/65/76 for the record (like you all care). Okay, back to the thread …

Avatar is a big-budget action/adventure movie made by a director who is generally recognized to be pretty talented at making that kind of picture. I’m not sure what you think this has to do with the success of The God Delusion. Are you suggesting it was so successful because of all the exciting car-chase scenes?

No. I was suggesting that popularity is not a sign of merit, which was pretty obvious. How did you miss it?

If you can’t explain why you think the world would be a better place without money, I’m not sure why you think money is a force for evil at all

That wasn’t the question you asked. I answered the one you asked. Do people kill for money? Yes. Is it a wholly man-made item? Yes. I even get to throw in a bonus: it’s faith-based!

This might be in tension with what I said earlier, but I’m not sure that how much in depth knowledge is required of a specific belief system before you can criticize it fairly.

Take the case of American conservatives. If you listen to speeches by American politicians calling themselves conservatives, you’ll hear them describe a philosophy they call conservatism. And the majority of Americans referring to “conservatism” or “conservatives”, like them or loathe them, seem to have that same definition in mind. But some people, like Andrew Sullivan, claim that this definition is wrong–that they the true conservatives, and their philosophy is significantly different.

Sorting out the history of the conservative ideology, no doubt, an interesting debate. But I don’t think it’s at all necessary to sort that debate out before criticizing the ideology that, today, calls itself “conservative”. The same would hold for “Communist”–it’s fair to criticize the systems that called themselves Communist when they actually held governmental power in real countries without sorting out which aspects of those systems Marx would have approved of.

And that is why a lot us wish he would do some more reading – not [sorry for all the dashes] to learn about stronger arguments that he missed, but to get a sense of what it is to think and talk like religious people do. Honestly, sometimes it looks like he’s never even met any such people in his entire life.

I may be an atheist, but I used to be Christian, I come from a Christian family, I have Christian friends, and I’ve attended Christian worship services of a number of denominations, and I’ve spent lots of time discussing Christian beliefs, which tend to be the “default” in the circles I spend time in socially. I don’t think their beliefs are harmful–at least, no more harmful than typical political ideologies have been.

But generally, when Christians I know say things about their beliefs, the majority mean them as literally and simply as most atheists would understand them. If they misunderstand the nature of Christianity, then so do most Christians, who have, apparently, been done a very massive disservice by their spiritual leaders.

@317,
That wasn’t the question you asked. I answered the one you asked.

You claimed that money is a clearly greater man-made force for evil in the world today than Islam. So I asked you why you think money is a force for evil at all, let alone one even worse than Islam. Money is essential to the operation of any economy capable of sustaining the population above the level of abject poverty. You think the world would be a better place if everyone lived in poverty, do you?

@309,
In other words, things are improving, though problems remain.

Your attempt to dismiss Indonesia’s appalling record of human rights violations as mere “problems” is laughable. Islamic nations comprise many of the worst human rights abusers in the world — Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria, to name just the larger ones.

@315,
I was suggesting that popularity is not a sign of merit

And I’m responding that popularity often is a sign of merit, as in this case. To what do you attribute the enormous success of The God Delusion, if not merit?

Even your supposed example of a popular work that lacks merit makes no sense. Avatar was not only enormously successful commercially, but was also very well reviewed by film critics.

odm,
There’s no evidence that there is God or Gods or whatever, but there’s also no evidence that God is impossible, or in my opinion, unlikely.

I think “God” (and “Gods”) as described by any of the traditional theistic religions — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism — is extremely implausible. The only kind of God that I consider to be even remotely plausible in light of our knowledge from science and reason is the God of philosophical deism. A kind of distant, uninvolved creator, about which we know nothing.

You claimed that money is a clearly greater man-made force for evil in the world today than Islam. So I asked you why you think money is a force for evil at all, let alone one even worse than Islam.

And I answered that too. Money is responsible for vast amounts of evil on a daily basis; you won’t find a religion responsible for climate change.

Leave Avatar out of the argument. The situation is thus: Dawkins writes and sells science fiction. The fact that his readership is large is irrelevant. Ayn Rand, who pushed an agenda similar to Dawkins, also has a large readership. Many people enjoy being told that its righteous and good to be a selfish bastard; and that natural selection has ordered their estate.

. . . both the everyday and information-theory meanings [of ‘information’] connote the presence of a message which has semantic content only as encoded and interpreted by conscious beings.

This seems like a retreat to a very uninteresting place. When bacteria secrete autoinducers and thereby sense (sorry, that’s the best word for it) population density, doesn’t the configuration of atoms in the autoinducer molecule contain information that a bacterium can recognise. How else would you describe it? And that oak tree that grew from an acorn – didn’t it know (sorry again – damn words) how to to grow that way in part because of information it carried in the sequence of its nucleic acids? And I say in part there because the nucleic acid that embodies that particular information is useless in and of itself. It only ‘works’ in context inside cellular structures containing proteins and a lot of other stuff passed down along with it.

And this leads to another point. Material stuff, like neurons, photons, ink on paper, only gets to be information when it enters into some relation with some other material thing, doesn’t it? Are relationships material things? It seems to me that materialism as a way of thinking has its uses, but it’s not the whole truth.

More on-topic, I just found a discussion of a non-theistic approach to religion here via wikipedia’s page on ’emergentism’. It contains a nice primer on emergence in biology, and provides a suggestion that the goal of a religion, broadly, is “to educate the emotions of its adherents such that the goals of the cultural tradition are realized.”

I personally don’t believe we need temples for that kind of thing. As someone way upthread noted, museums do a pretty good job.

Your average officially atheist country is a beacon of freedom these days

As others have already suggested, even if one accepts the factual premise of DelRey’s statements about “Islamic nations'” human rights records, one then gets to the causal question, i.e., are their human rights records bad because they are Muslim countries, or might there be other reasons? I don’t think it is very analytically useful to lump all these countries together, given their diverse circumstances, resource endowments, political histories. I don’t intend to say anything more on this topic.

Many thanks for the PDF link, Agog. I’m about 75% the way through ‘Incomplete Nature’. Deacon’s book is unlikely to move as many units as Dawkins does. What a shame, eh?

Perhaps you can explain what’s wrong with the following idea. God is the being that decides the final state of a wavefunction whenever we make a measurement. We can’t detect God making this decision because It does so through dimensions that we cannot and will never be able to observe. Where did such an incredibly powerful being come from? Nowhere, It’s outside the universe, which means you can’t assign a probability to God’s existence they way you can the God-damn Particle’s existence.

What’s wrong with it is that it’s a meaningless form of words- if even in principle we can never observe the effects of something, then it makes no sense to say the something “exists”. But hey, if it makes you feel good to hold such a tenuous belief, knock yourself out. Since it doesn’t even manage to make contact with the scientific worldview, let alone collide with it, it’s harmless.

As others have already suggested, even if one accepts the factual premise of DelRey’s statements about “Islamic nations’” human rights records, one then gets to the causal question, i.e., are their human rights records bad because they are Muslim countries, or might there be other reasons?

Indeed, even on the level of misogynist (and other noxious) social customs, a lot of the most deplorable stuff is actually a continuation of pre-islamic practices.

And then there’s the whole issue of how Christian churches behaved when they had real political power. I fail to see how Islam is worse (or better) than other organized religions.

I am not about to enter into the tedious argument about what humpy-dumpy means by the word: selfish.

That’s good, since you’re manifestly unprepared to do so in an informed way.

Was John Lennon a bigot, if he wrote the song Imagine without reading a single book by Thomas Aquinas?

Jim Buck

The situation is thus: Dawkins writes and sells science fiction. The fact that his readership is large is irrelevant. Ayn Rand, who pushed an agenda similar to Dawkins, also has a large readership. Many people enjoy being told that its righteous and good to be a selfish bastard; and that natural selection has ordered their estate.

Rubbish. Dawkins’ popular science writings are meant to describe and illuminate our understanding of how natural selection works and to explain the history and diversity of life on earth. They are not prescriptions on how we should organize our society. I’m reminded of creationists who dismiss Darwin’s work because of those who pervert it to justify eugenics/Social Darwinism. Also, Hitler!

If I could bring you back to an actual atheist temple for a mo? Last year we (that is, Leicester Secular Society, the oldest secular society in the world) hosted a lecture by Ken MacLeod about (among other things) _The Selfish Gene_. The main point of the lecture was an attempt to understand how and why there’s a current in left-wing thought which doesn’t appear to have read Dawkins’ book beyond the title. One of the questions raised in response to the lecture was that this view isn’t actually widespread. The above thread seems to imply that Ken was right: it is.

Ken posted an edited version of his talk on his blog here. There’s some actual _facts_ in it, so it might not suit all prejudices:
http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2011/02/lysenkos-tomb.html

Thanks, Chris, that’s a very useful link. (Not that many of those who most need to read and understand MacLeod’s talk will actually do so, sigh.)

“Buck, do you believe that you’re not a semiliterate idiot?” “No.”
Well, I’m glad we can agree on that. Bye.

Roger Penrose has written that he believes that the Mandelbrot set existed before it was discovered. If so, it existed independently of any material instantiations. Kurt Gödel argued that his incompleteness theorems show that either 1. the mind surpasses the physical brain (because neurons and their wiring presumably can be represented as a mechanical procedure, i.e. a computer, but a computer cannot prove the truth that expresses its own consistency); or else 2. there is a currently-undiscovered part of the physical brain that can generate all of mathematics but we will never be able to specify its internal consistency; or else 3. mathematics is not entirely our own creation, implying that mathematical objects and facts exist independently of minds. (Gödel does not exclude that all three may be true). (I am doing a great deal of paraphrasing of Hao Wang’s record of their conversations).

I tend to be an agnostic and a dualist because I think these sorts of things will continue to pop-up, no matter how much further science progresses. The evidence is clearly on my side. The history of thought shows that, no matter what level of refinement, the explanations of reality in any era always pose paradoxes and antinomies. The history of science is now presumed (I think) to show that science does not get to the “truth”, but it gets closer to the truth about some kinds of questions, in a series of unfoldments through revolutions and paradigm-shifts that may never end (although Richard Feynman argued against this position, writing that the laws of nature would finally be discovered and science would wind-down, if not finish its labors). So it appears that we always have a systematic problem with rationality or reason, as a tool of discovery. It always falls short, in some way.

Running away from awkward questions, eh, Mr LaBonne? As Corporal Jones (Dad’s Army) used to say: They don’t like it up ’em!

Harold; It is my belief that you are misremembering; try rereading pages 169-180 (The God Delusion). How curious this attitude that every thing Dawkins writes must be the truth; and that anyone who disagrees with the great man has either not read the books or has misunderstood them. All a bit North Korean, really ; all a bit religious in fact.

Lee @357: It always falls short, in some way.

But it’s only a few hundred years since the Scientific Revolution! Science is still in its swaddling clothes. It’s a long time till the sun burns out.

My comment (362) was in reply to 359, who compared me to a North Korean.

Why do you think money is a force for evil at all

…

@337,
As others have already suggested, even if one accepts the factual premise of DelRey’s statements about “Islamic nations’” human rights records, …

Yes, one can one always simply ignore facts one doesn’t like, as you are doing here.

… one then gets to the causal question, i.e., are their human rights records bad because they are Muslim countries, or might there be other reasons?

I’m sure there are other reasons too. But if you’re seriously suggesting that Islam has little or nothing to do with the appalling human rights records of those countries, what alternate explanation do you offer? The laws, politics and cultures of these countries are steeped in Islamic teachings, Islamic traditions, Islamic institutions. In most of them, Islam is the official state religion, and laws are explicitly based on Islamic teachings.

@332,
Coincidentally (and I’m sure it is just a coincidence!) every single one of these countries has also ‘benefited’ from prolonged ‘Western’ (a euphemism) intervention in their internal affairs (admittedly sometimes through proxies). As I say, a coincidence I’m sure.

It’s not a coincidence, but I have no idea why you think it’s relevant. The West didn’t bring Islamic law and culture to these countries.

@335,
Your average officially atheist country is a beacon of freedom these days

Your idea that North Korea is an “average officially atheist” country is hilarious. North Korea’s political culture resembles a religious cult, with its dictator venerated like a cult leader.

Countries with high levels of wealth, freedom and human development tend to be countries with low levels of religious belief and influence. The clearest examples are the scandinavian countries.

I tend to be an agnostic and a dualist

If you don’t believe in God, you’re an atheist.

It has been seriously argued that the world would have been a better place without agriculture, complex societies, and money.

It’s been seriously argued that the world is only 6,000 years old. Just because someone argues something doesn’t mean the argument has merit. Do you believe the world would be a better place without agriculture, complex societies, and money?

It is a documented fact that agriculture benefitted the few but brought a decline in standards of living and health for the masses of people that it could support.

Nonsense. We have an enormously higher standard of living and health than pre-agricultural societies. Agriculture is the foundation of human civilization.

The case that the world would have been better off without industrial and commercial agriculture and investment banking is even stronger.

Oh, please do try and make that case.

The main point of the lecture was an attempt to understand how and why there’s a current in left-wing thought which doesn’t appear to have read Dawkins’ book beyond the title.

There’s a certain strain on the left that thinks religion is basically just a harmless fantasy and ought to be left alone, except for specific manifestations like the Christian Right in the U.S. These lefties are not religious themselves, but they have friends and family members who are religious, and they tend to view broad attacks on religion as attacks on people they love. Hence all the wailing and gnashing of teeth when someone like Richard Dawkins has the temerity to write bestselling books and TV shows arguing that pretty much all religion is harmful nonsense.

That is a pretty recent development, possibly dating from no longer ago than early modern times. For many, many generations prior to that Harold’s statement is a very well-documented fact. For some of the evidence see for example a famous article by Jared Diamond entitled “The Greatest Mistake in Human History” (the title refers to the Agricultural Revolution).

If people thought they were better off as hunter-gatherers than as farmers, they wouldn’t have embraced agriculture in the first place, or stuck with it ever since. Jared Diamond has done great work, but he does tend to buy into the myth of the noble savage.

Oh, I wasn’t implying you would know an actual argument if it walked up and slapped you in the face, DelRey. Of course you wouldn’t.

@377,
Simply repeating, over and over again, some version of “Dawkins is incompetent!” is not an argument. In all of your wailing, you haven’t made a single actual argument against TGD. This is your standard m.o. Your comments in the abortion thread were the same kind of nonsense.

Sorry, DelRey, I left my finger-puppets in my other pants. You’ll have to actually read and comprehend the thread and represent its content honestly. Of course, we both know you can’t manage that.

Yes but it resembles even more an anti-religious cult.

I don’t know what at an “anti-religious cult” is supposed to mean. The point is that North Korea’s political culture venerates its dictator like the leader of a religious cult. It’s nothing like the culture of liberal democracies where atheism is popular and religion is weak, like Sweden and Norway.

If people thought they were better off as hunter-gatherers than as farmers, they wouldn’t have embraced agriculture in the first place

This argument works for Islam too. Just saying.

This argument works for Islam too. Just saying.

Religion, including Islam, probably was beneficial to historical human cultures, before modern science and technology. That obviously doesn’t mean it’s beneficial now. Religion has been declining in the West for centuries, as science and reason have become increasingly important.

Many hunter gatherers prefer grain to roots, even though grain products shorten their lives — and cause obesity, tooth decay, and what have you.

Other people truly preferred hunter gathering, a lifestyle that was harsh and full of privations but “extremely rich in human satisfactions, both physical and spiritual”, but were exterminated or forced into agriculture.
http://books.google.com/books?id=XL0zgVM4g6EC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=life&f=false

There are plenty of people who prefer hunting and fishing right here in the United States.

I don’t think Dawkins would disagree about the dangers of state ideology, or for that matter Hitchens. (He was a Trotskyist in his well-spent youth). They would both place them squarely within a framework of accepting ideas without questioning them alongside religion, which was the real target, and religion just the most obvious manifestation of this tendency. And in the spirit of reconciliation on this thread I’m going to apologize to Doctor Slack for seeing insult where none was ment.

This post is getting far afield (and I still want that cushy sinecure as priest of this atheist temple) but: Agriculture was more successful because… it allowed for the development of a surplus product, permanent settlements and the rise and maintenance of a ruling class, among other things.

Um, DelRey, you originally said “better off”, not “successful.” Lots of people thought they were better off as hunter gatherers (or as pastoralists) and there is lots of evidence to show that they were better off—taller, longer lived, and so on. Agriculture was more successful because “might made right”—at least for now.

Huh? In this context, “better off” and “more successful” mean the same thing. If hunter-gather societies were less able to defend themselves against enemies than agricultural societies, then hunter-gatherers were worse off in that respect, not better off.

The only metric that really matters is the overall success of each way of life, not particular strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps it’s true, as you claim, that the members of hunter-gatherer societies were generally better fed and healthier than the members of early agricultural societies. But even if they were, that obviously wasn’t enough to overcome the advantages of agriculture. Perhaps agricultural societies produced a more reliable supply of food, even if the quantity of food per person was lower, so they were less vulnerable than hunter-gatherers to sudden die-offs. Perhaps the farmers could support larger populations, so farming societies were better able to fight off enemies. Perhaps the farmers were less vulnerable to death from predators or accidents. Perhaps the farmers were better able to provide other essentials, like water and shelter and clothing. And so on. Whatever the reasons, agriculture was simply a better way of life. Otherwise, people wouldn’t have adopted it.

It might help if someone was to stipulate what would count as ‘belief in god’; specifically, what qualities would have to inhere in one’s concept of ‘god’ to meet the standard. Because there does seem to be an assumption that we all agree on what ‘god’ is, but that some believe in him/her/it and some don’t. Which I think is true if and only if we’re prepared to leave the core pretty damn fuzzy.
To be sure, I say this from the atheist side, in that I find it hard to describe something that would both count as a god in the traditional sense and wouldn’t involve a logical contradiction.

I mean, I hope for this crowd at least I don’t need to unpack that… he is basically advocating humiliating people indiscriminately, encouraging a vicious mob mentality that he damn well knows is miles away from having any bearing on security, as a way to make a statement against religion, reveling in his privilege as a fair-skinned man who dresses in European-style clothing. Richard Dawkins is an angry righteous atheist like Ron Paul is a pure-hearted libertarian.

Kaveh, I don’t see how what you quoted or referenced supports your assertion that Dawkins believes in racial profiling.

@400 The paragraph I quoted? So he doesn’t advocate for a rule that demands racial profiling, but I’m not sure how to read that line about the “big black beard” other than that he sees ethnic characteristics associated with suspect religious beliefs as a reasonable pretext for subjecting people to extra searches. This is a propos of his previous posts where he advocates allowing employers to discriminate against potential employees based on their religious beliefs, even if those beliefs are demonstrated to not affect how they do their jobs (e.g. a scientist who makes calculations in his published articles & research that assume a 14 billion yr old universe, who nevertheless believes that the universe is actually much younger).

His previous posts on the blog where that post is from. Clearly he’s implying that it’s reasonable to “profile” people based on the characteristics he mentions there–“letting screeners use their discretion” means there are some characteristics like the ones he mentions that are legitimate pretexts for extra searches at airport security (and if you don’t agree on that point, you are probably determined to defend Dawkins to the hilt, and this conversation is probably a waste of time). Now, you might argue that those are not, strictly speaking, racial (which is not the same thing as ethnic, but nevermind…) characteristics, but that misses the point that he is clearly playing on racial/cultural resentments against brown-skinned/swarthy people in much the same way that Republicans who complain about black welfare queens are playing on racial resentments against blacks. Such a Republican might tell you that they only resent people (of any race!) who cheat on welfare, or that they only resent blacks who commit violent crimes, and such Republicans are (by and large) full of sh*t.

Or even just “carrying a Koran” as a pretext for racial profiling. I should be able to carry whatever book I want and not be subject to extra intrusive searches. Somebody who plans to blow up a plane will avoid showing signs of religiosity. Dawkins either doesn’t know this, and is an idiot (and he is not an idiot), or he is trying to raise people’s ire with the thought of obvious furriner-religious types that walk right through airport security while nice secular ladies get their ointment taken away because of stupid rules.

Very odd he does not consider that a suicide bomber might be trained to avoid wearing a burka in Heathrow airport. This uselessness could be of a piece with the tactical incompetence of making an attack upon religion from the viewpoint of science.

@405,
His previous posts on the blog where that post is from.

Show us these alleged posts.

Clearly he’s implying that it’s reasonable to “profile” people based on the characteristics he mentions there …

He’s not implying any such thing. You’re projecting on to him what you want other people to believe about him.

You are a typical example of Dawkins’ critics. You can’t offer any substantive rebuttal to his criticism of religion, so you try to undermine it by attacking his character instead. To do this, you trawl through his extensive writings, looking for something that you think you can use to paint him in a bad light, and then put the most uncharitable possible spin on it.

kaveh,
By the way, since you seem to think that all racial profiling is self-evidently and egregiously wrong, and that anyone who supports them is therefore a “monumental jackass,” do you also think the same thing about racial preferences? If not, why not?

@411 I guess by “racial preference” you mean affirmative action? No, I don’t think it’s wrong, it corrects historical injustices, but I don’t have the interest or time to get into a long-winded off-topic discussion on the matter here. Religious profiling (which unavoidably ends up being ethnic/national/racial profiling) does not correct historical injustices, and it is egregiously wrong, in the same way that “racial preferences” in the sense of “not letting black people sit at the same lunch counter as white people” is egregiously wrong.

@411 I guess by “racial preference” you mean affirmative action? No, I don’t think it’s wrong, it corrects historical injustices,

No, it gives someone a preference for a job or a place in college on the basis of his race, regardless of whether, and to what degree, he is the victim of “historical injustices.” If this is justified on the grounds of a statistical correlation between race and historical injustice, why isn’t racial profiling justified on the grounds of a statistical correlation between race and criminal behavior? How is it clear that racial profiling, but not racial preferences, is so wrong that anyone who supports it in any circumstances is a “monumental jackass?”

You’re right, Dawkins doesn’t come out and say that generically, it’s definitely okay to discriminate against people for religious views that don’t affect job performance.

Right. So your accusation is false here too.

In fact, Dawkins isn’t guilty of your charge even with respect to this particular individual, since he clearly states that he believes that the fact that the cosmologist holds “two diametrically opposing views simultaneously in his head” about the age of the universe is a sign of intellectual dishonesty and mental dysfunction, which are certainly relevant factors for job performance.

You’re right DelRey, you should disregard everything I said about largely agreeing with him on the matters of substance in his alleged Boing Boing posts. I’m secretly a theist trying to discredit Dawkins with spurious allegations of race-baiting, which issue I don’t actually care about in real life. And I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you pesky kids!

(And I think I’ve hijacked the thread entirely too much for tonight, although I stand by my link to Dawkins’ blatant Muslim-baiting post above as a useful contribution to the larger corpus of Dawkinsology.)

@418,
And I stand by your comment on that link as a useful contribution to the larger corpus of “Let me see how I can spin this piece Dawkins wrote, attributing to him statements and beliefs he never expressed, to try and portray him in the worst possible light.”

Indeed, even on the level of misogynist (and other noxious) social customs, a lot of the most deplorable stuff is actually a continuation of pre-islamic practices.

I’m not sure why you think that’s a defense of Islam. Islam incorporated and codified and institutionalized and perpetuated those deplorable customs, giving them the authority of holy writ and producing the appalling human rights records of Islamic countries.

And yes, Christianity in the past was just as bad. And would likely be just as bad today if it hadn’t been marginalized and controlled by the rise of secular moral reasoning and liberal democracy in the West.

Judaism has some “codes” about women that are not exactly enlightened — Hinduism had suttee. The Chinese had footbinding. The Byzantines had eunuchs. Islam also had some positive things compared to some of these practices. Many people have voluntarily embraced Islam (huge majorities in some countries), so it must have offered them more stability, protection, equality under the law, and so forth.

Well, they may be more stable than what they had before. Besides, wasn’t that your rationale for why people embraced agriculture?

424: There are almost no good or bad outcomes through most of history that cannot in some way be tied to religion or attributed to someone of one faith or another if you work at it hard enough, for the simple reason that the bulk of humanity through most of its existence has been religious in some way. So “your co-religionists did this or that” or “a religion like yours did this or that” can be used against virtually anyone professing any religious belief system whatever, even those that don’t subscribe to a “god delusion.”

Whether all these attributions are equally convincing is another matter. Take war and conflict: there are very frequently other forces, arguably more basic, at work in promoting warfare than religion, and for which religion serves mainly as a pretext or to which it is incidental. The hordes of Genghis Khan — the single bloodiest catastrophe to befall Eurasian civilization before the Twentieth Century — were for instance not particularly driven by religion, to which the Mongols had a laissez-faire attitude. But going by Dawkins-style criteria for what constitutes a “religious war” — meaning essentially none beyond the participants holding some religion or other — one could easily chalk them up misleadingly to “Mongolian animism.”

So that’s one important caution about trying to assess the “net effect” of religion. Nevertheless, there are also goods and ills that are much more directly attributable to religion. Religions are important to the history of war, genocide, book-burning, intolerance, disease, graft, corruption and hucksterism, tyranny and so on; and also to the history of charity, law and justice, the regulation of conflict, resistance to tyranny, the pioneering of pacifism, the fluorescence of medicine, poetry, art, architecture, pacifi… and so on. This brings up another important caution: someone proposing to reliably assess religion’s “net effect” on history is laying claim to be able to weigh all these factors across appalling breadths of geography, history and culture. This would require a breadth and detail of historical knowledge — and a degree of certainty about that knowledge — that I frankly doubt is acheivable; but even supposing it could be acheived, I don’t see much evidence of Dawkins’ having done so.

Of course, much of what I’ve listed in “good” and “ill” categories above is more ambivalent and context-dependent than that listing implies. Many of the most unequivocal gifts of religion to humanity are also ambivalent ones. Take modern science, for instance: science as we know it is a direct outcome — incidental and unanticipated, but a direct outcome nontheless — of medieval theology and philosophy among Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. On these grounds alone some people would (and do) find talking about religion’s net effects being evil somewhat absurd; others, less bullish about the unmitigated benefits of science, which after all has placed the tools of self-destruction in human hands just as much as it has the most awe-inspiring heights of knowledge and achievement, would be more ambivalent. It’s open to question, but I don’t think Dawkins remotely faces up to the intimate links between the birth of the science he cherishes and the theology he derides, and to the fact that the science with which he purposes to replace “the god delusion” would likely not exist as it does today without that “delusion.”

On top of all that, we may well further ask: had some sort of “secularism” triumphed at some point in early history, would the world have been relatively abundant in peace and progress from that point on, compared to what actually did happen?

This one is hard to assess. We do have a period of history in which secular ideology became the norm for much of the globe to look at: that would be the Twentieth Century. If we went on that alone, some would say that we’d have to admit the prospect isn’t especially promising: the charnel house of genocidal mania and totalitarian lunacy that comprised much of the Twentieth Century — especially its first half — is routinely used as a riposte by the religious to talk about the “net effect” of religion on history. It’s used that way because it is, in fact, pretty hard to ignore. There are mitigations, of course: the appalling death tolls of C20 wars reached such heights because there were simply more people on the globe, for instance. And just as it’s complicated to say whether a war can be attributed to religion, it’s just as complicated to determine whether it can really be attributed to the “ideology” that replaced religion. (And of course a religious person can archly observe here that if No-True-Scotsman is common among the religious, it’s just as common among atheists, who confronted with Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao routinely respond that these guys were not “really” atheists. Since that’s a mistake that does in fact commonly happen among atheists, it’s a valid objection.)

But supposing we just bracket out the Twentieth Century as an outlier, too different in terms of technology and population size to be a fair comparative example. Is there some other way we could assess secularism vs. religion? Well, there is an example of a civilization that embraced secularism early in its history and held to it as an organizing paradigm of the state, law, and social convention for thousands of years: China. The Legalism that drove Qin Shihuangdi’s unification of China was, after all, a secular philosophy. So was the Confucianism that rose to ascendancy soon after his death and dominated Imperial China in one form or another for the bulk of its history. (Of course it’s commonplace to identify Confucianism as a religion because of the framework of ritual and deity-style veneration that surrounded it. But that seems to me to beg the question. Secularism doesn’t inherently preclude ritual or things-that-look-like worship.)

Can we weigh out the “net effect” of secularism in China? China was, it can be persuasively argued, at the leading edge of natural philosophy and technological progress in Eurasia from shortly after its unification until at least the 15th century. Confucianism can probably take some credit for that. On the other hand, China was also profoundly violent and despotic for the bulk of that same history — in some periods more than others — and was far from being immune to prejudice, intellectual rigidity, irrationality, and crackpottery, not just from outside the Confucian establishment but from within it. The closest thing that official Imperial China had to the “god delusion” as Dawkins defines it was the abstract entity “Heaven,” yet it was unable to shrug off ideas and institutions that persistently wrought disaster on the state (in particular the institution of the palace eunuch).

I could go on, but the point is really just this: I think trying to identify religion’s “net effect” on history is a mug’s game; but even if we were to play it, there isn’t really enough evidence of inherent difference in terms of historical effects between supernaturalist religion and secular ideology for anyone to blithely accept Dawkins’ posture of certainty about the question. What’s likely the better answer is that this is simply the wrong question.

(Sorry, a bunch of text there written in a rush, so it’s a bit tortuous in places. Hopefully still comprehensible, though.)

I forgot to mention that Syria is a Baathist dictorship whose ideology is based on secular pan-Arabism and not Islam.

@429,
I could go on, but the point is really just this: I think trying to identify religion’s “net effect” on history is a mug’s game; but even if we were to play it, there isn’t really enough evidence of inherent difference in terms of historical effects between supernaturalist religion and secular ideology for anyone to blithely accept Dawkins’ posture of certainty about the question. What’s likely the better answer is that this is simply the wrong question.

You clearly haven’t even read Dawkins’ discussion of the history of religion.

Whether or not religion had a beneficial “net effect” at any time, in any place in the past, there’s no evidence that it is beneficial in its overall effects today, and overwhelming evidence that it is extremely harmful, as the example of Islam so clearly shows. In the West, economic, social and scientific progress has gone hand-in-hand with the decline of religion, and the countries with the highest levels of prosperity, freedom and equality also tend to be the least religious. The sooner religion withers away to insignificance, the better. Fortunately, we’re well on the way, especially in Europe.

In the Islamic world, unfortunately, and many developing nations in Africa and Asia, religion is probably going to remain a major influence for many decades to come. Poor and ignorant people make easy targets for religious exploitation.

Thanks for your lucid post @ 429, Doctor Slack. The USA is conspicious by its absence from DelRey’s list of countries where religion is probably going to remain a major influence due to poor and ignorant people making easy targets for religious influence.

By the way; Dawkins used to smile on Islam, describing it as more grown-up, and in line with evolved male desire, than Christianity with its absurdly high standard of marital fidelity. That was way back before 2001, of course, and when Dawkins was living the life of a philanderer (no condemnation here, folks, just description)

The ruling family of Syria is Alawite and hence are considered pagan by many Sunni scholars;. One of the country’s worst human rights violations has been their ongoing campaign of torture and murder against members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Syria has one of worst human rights records in the world. The vast majority of Syrians are Muslim, Syria’s culture is steeped in Islamic customs and traditions, and Islamic Sharia is the basis of much of Syrian law. I’m not sure what your point is about the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria is not anti-Muslim. It is overwhelmingly Muslim.

I’d also ask on what basis Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, and Pakistan are among “the worst human rights abusers in the world”.

Here are some of the major human rights abuses reported by the State Department in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia: extrajudicial killings, disappearences, torture, police and government corruption, censorship, rape, honor crimes, discrimination against women, discrimination against religious minorities, child abuse, forced child labor, child prostitution. Malaysia and Morocco are somewhat better, but still appalling.

Window dressing? Hypocrisy you mean? And doesn’t much of this stuff, occur to some extent in the USA:

‘ . . extrajudicial killings, disappearences, torture, police and government corruption, censorship, rape, honor crimes, discrimination against women, discrimination against religious minorities, child abuse, forced child labor, child prostitution.’

I’m not sure what your point is about the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria is not anti-Muslim. It is overwhelmingly Muslim.

The ruling Baathist party is secularist and is oppressing the general populace— that surely is the point?

delrey at 430: you are speaking of “the Islamic era.” What is that? A period of nearly a thousand years in time, covering a huge section of the globe from Indonesia to the UK. For the vast majority of that period the currently-developed nations were barbaric beyond anything that modern Indonesia has to offer. And most of what you describe doesn’t happen in Indonesia, Malaysia, amongst the Chinese muslim minority, in Bosnia or in many parts of Africa.

Also, in case you had forgotten, Indonesia had a secular dictatorship (and before that a communist government) for most of the past 60 years. Its current democracy is only a little over 10 years old, and yet somehow you’re blaming all its sins on its supposedly Islamic character, rather than its history of dictatorship. I don’t think you know much about Indonesia at all, if you think that the human rights abuses that happen there are more to do with Islam than with, oooh … its geopolitical strategy, which was developed and implemented under Suharto and involves a lot of dirty stuff being done by Aussie- and US-trained special forces in West Papua, Aceh, and various other provinces.

(Ooh, look, Aceh, another example of a supposedly islamic government brutally oppressing the islamic portion of its population …)

American political culture is very much cult-like too: venerating its silly constitution, worshiping its deity: the almighty dollar, also known by the names of ‘market’, ‘democracy’, and ‘liberty’.

I imagine all political cultures are like that, to one degree or another: you’ve gotta have the dominant ideology, to justify the social order. If you don’t, everything will fall apart in 10 seconds.

they’ve already conceded the basic points about morality and judgement to the new atheists.

let’s not get ahead of ourselves here! Anything worthwhile the new atheists have to say about morality is not exactly their unique idea. And as delrey has shown, shallow applications of the new atheism to complex political and cultural problems don’t get us anywhere. It certainly is the philosophy of the hammer: it makes a big mess when applied to anything delicate or valuable.

@faustusnotes 446
Seems to fall under the heading ‘Commanding right and forbidding wrong’ (which does come from the Quran). If women are allowed to drive, this will lead to moral decay, which is wrong, so it can’t be allowed. Open to interpretation, of course, but the Saudis have their interpretation and your friend has his.

And this is the fault of religion because …?

Because the bloke in Saudi Arabia gets all of his authority from claiming that his dictum is religiously based, and he (and those whom he influences) will be quite unimpressed by your attempts to tell him otherwise.

Similarly, Evangelical Christians were pretty uninterested in abortion until quite recent times, but the current lot will be unimpressed if you tell them that this history demonstrates that their religion really doesn’t require them to campaign against abortion rights.

Thus, your comment has no obvious relevance to the real world.

DelRey:
Here are some of the major human rights abuses reported by the State Department in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia: extrajudicial killings, disappearances, torture, police and government corruption, censorship, rape, honor crimes, discrimination against women, discrimination against religious minorities, child abuse, forced child labor, child prostitution.

I said I wasn’t going to comment again, but this is worth repeating: You cannot persuasively cite these State Dept country reports as conclusive proof of your argument because (among other things) the excerpts you are citing say nothing about the frequency of the abuses in question or their relation to a country’s total population. For ex., Bangladesh is a country of more than 140 million people. How much child prostitution (defined how) is there in Bangladesh? One case, two cases, a hundred, a thousand, five thousand, fifteen thousand, a hundred thousand? Also, why is child prostitution considered a human rights abuse by the govt, as opposed to an unlawful activity engaged in by certain people? Similar questions could be asked about other aspects of these reports.

But he’s not my friend in Oman who thinks the idea is crazy. He’s not the guys from the Muslim Brotherhood who are fighting for greater freedom in Egypt or Syria. It’s not uniquely religion’s fault. There are a set of circumstances and social pressures that make it possible for that bloke to lie and claim his bigotry is religious – the same way that certain social pressures enabled Hitler to claim his bigotry was racialist, or Stalin to claim it was all the Kulaks’ fault.

This seems like a trivial thing to me – bigotry is a possibility inherent in religion, but it doesn’t happen in isolation from colonialism, patriarchy, racism,etc. Dawkins is a case in point – obviously his atheist ideals change with the flavour of the times.

I’m surprised that this needs explaining.

It’s not uniquely religion’s fault.

That’s right, religion is a necessary but not sufficient factor. That exonerates religion how, exactly?

448: But when it comes to evaluating the role of social practices, it’s irrelevant what the history is. What’s relevant is the role they play today.

Well, for one thing, assessing “the role they play today” is as complicated now as it is historically, because even as all these religions grab headlines for all the bad things they do, they’re also busy doing good things or simply inoffensive, everyday things mostly in the background. Scattershot references to all the bad things are not how to judge their role; if you’re going to do this, it would have to be in balance with the other things.

For another, “social practices” and “religion” aren’t strictly interchangeable. If someone wants to claim that the world would be better off without Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam, and do so because there are social practices that someone-or-other dislikes which seem to be coincident with these religions that would vanish or at minimum be far less prevalent if they disappeared: then it’s kind of important to be able to convincingly answer the questions: “are the religions actually the causative factors” and “as opposed to what?”

And for another, “today” does not come packaged nicely and separately from “history.” This is pretty important with, say, the example of science. A big part of Dawkin’s argument in TGD is supposed to be making the point that the “god delusion” is so profoundly irrational and destructive that it would almost be tantamount to child abuse to inflict it on your kids. But if in fact that’s all really true, the “god delusion” should have strangled science in the cradle when it gave birth to it. Why didn’t it? Why in fact is it the case that we owe the existence of science to the “god delusion”? This problem is non-trivial to put it mildly, and strikes right at the core of what Dawkins is trying to claim. It can’t be dismissed by just saying “Yeah, but what have they done for us lately?”

Watson Ladd: “People like Harold justifying Islam on the basis of what came before are justifying it on the grounds of secular morality: they’ve already conceded the basic points about morality and judgement to the new atheists. (And if you believe certain interpretations of the Sodom and Gomorrah story, God himself was convinced by these arguments).”

I was not justifying Islam, I was making fun of DelRay’s justification of agriculture. I plead guilty to “conceding basic points of morality to the secularists”. I am a secularist.

Actually, religion was a factor in WW2. The Shinto religion worshiped the emperor as a god, descended from gods, who protected Japan from invasion by China. There are still Japanese who cling to the bellicose old ways, but for most people, Shinto has been transformed into a beneficent nature religion.

Tell that to Bertrand Russell, who was making similar points before I was born.

465: That looks like a pretty good example of misleading attribution to religion. The driving force behind Japanese imperialism was nationalism and a desire to stand tall with the great powers of the modern world, which at that time meant getting in on the imperial and colonial great game (albeit as a late entry). Would any of those motivating factors have gone away if Shinto wasn’t on the scene?

467: Okay. Where’s he buried? I’ll get a shovel.

468: we don’t need religion for its good things or its bad things

Or, by the same token: we would probably have many of the same good things and bad things without religion as with it.

I mean, let’s not fall victim to utopianism: even if we could find the set of “universally applicable principles” that would be sufficient to governing societies through all their particularities (some would say science and scientific reasoning are that set of principles, others would say it’s a lot more complicated than that), everyone isn’t going to be able to practice them any more than everyone has been able to practice high-minded ideals like universal love as derived from Christianity or Islam, Jainism or Advaita Vedanta. The small and the bigoted, the violent and the irrational, the mountebank and the torturer and the terrorist and the tyrant and all the other colourful curses of human history are likely to still be just as much with us in a secular context as a religious one. They have after all been so in any secular context we’ve yet been able to devise, and the New Atheism shows no signs of being any different. (I know it’s kinda picking on him and I’m actually starting to feel bad about that, but OTOH he’s willingly made himself a living example in this thread: just take a good look at DelRey, there. Even in embracing a supposedly rationalist belief system, many people cannot manage to be rational.)

Particular configurations of religion will ebb and flow and rise and fall, but I don’t see the likelihood of any significant number of religious people waking up in the near future, deciding Dawkins was right and promptly throwing all their “irrational” beliefs overboard. Apart from the patchy and unconvincing nature of the critique itself, the very notion that there is some sort of purely rational un-religion to which they could convert is profoundly flawed.

Watson @448 (As for the battle about what Dawkins said: I agree it wasn’t pretty, but it’s a step to far to accuse someone of supporting particular policies on the basis of insensitivity to discrimination against a particular group.)

Insofar as he’s not supporting a particular policy of extra searches for -brown people-Muslims, it’s because he’s (in those 3 posts) weaselly as all hell so it’s hard to pin him down as supporting any policy explicitly. He’s arguing in exactly the way that his religious opponents do. “Sure, I don’t generically endorse discriminating against hiring people based on religious belief alone, but then somebody who does good research that contradicts their religious views is ‘mentally deranged’ thus shouldn’t be allowed to hold that job”. So that’s an exception for him. But it’s very hard to see how that “exception” couldn’t be generalized to any religious person whatsoever, in any job whatsoever. Implicitly he is crystal clear-ly saying that discrimination on the basis of religion should be okay, and he is deploying (& thus reinforcing) xenophobic attitudes towards Muslims to make his point.

In fact, I would go further and say that that one example about Muslims and airport security is really the heart of that whole post. Dawkins first and foremost cares about religion, not security theater, not “rules”. I don’t think (though I welcome correction on this matter) that he has, outside of that one article, ever written about society being too “rule-based” and doesn’t leave enough room for personal discretion. He knows that Boing Boing has a long-running beef against security theater and the surveillance state. The rest of the post, where he addresses security theater and other examples of overly strict rules are boring and unconvincing. He is cynically deploying these things to buttress his central point about religion, and he sees Islamophobia as a convenient, if not essential tool for hammering that point.

474: The history of science has come a ways since Andrew White wrote in 1896, and the supposed inherent conflict between, for instance, the Catholic Church and science is largely inaccurate, based on mythifications of stories like that of Galileo (especially of Galileo). There are very few historians today who would accept White’s thesis, and the notion of the Enlightenment as something breaking free of a long dark age of clerical ignorance — while a useful fiction for polemicists of the time — has little basis in history.

Why? Well, in part because the history of science is inseparable from the history of philosophy, and the history of medieval philosophy is inherently religious. Any list of great early scientists in Christendom is a list of Scholastic theologians and philosophers: William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Nicholas Cusanus, and so on. And their work was built on a conversation with thinkers of different confessions, similarly religiously-motivated: Al-Farabi, Banu Musa, Al-Battani, Al-Betrugi, Al-Kindi, Al-Khwarizmi and so on just for a short list from the Islamic tradition. People like Copernicus and Galileo and Tycho Brahe didn’t spring whole from the brow of Science. They were the heirs to this tradition.

And the thing is, the medieval figures weren’t just “doing science” in their off hours from their day jobs as shills for a repressive religious order: for most of them, at least to hear them tell it, the “philosophy” they were expounding was the work of God. Their “god delusion,” the belief in a creator deity whose creation was good and worth exploring and explaining, was foundational to their work, itself built on and elaborating works by pagan philosophers whose philosophy itself was not readily divisible from the religion of their day.

(This outcome wasn’t an inevitability. It’s an open and very uncertain question whether, if Catharism — a late branch of the various Gnostic traditions which regarded the material world itself as evil — had triumphed in Europe, there would have existed a science anything like what we have today.)

Take the agonizing in Scholastic philosophy over finding a logically consistent explanation for the doctrine of the Trinity: Dawkins mentions this in passing, mostly as a reason to laugh at theology and deride its irrelevance. Yet Abelard’s wrestling with this question was an important step in the rise to dominance of Aristotelian formal logic and the pro-reason bent of the Church that would make the rise of modern science possible.

All of this came with a history of conflict, of course: philosophical polemic at the time was a dangerous business, on behalf of natural philosophy or otherwise. But it’s simply false to say that “religion” tried to strangle “science” in its cradle. That they weren’t easily separable is a key reason why this proved not to be the outcome. Moreover, the existence of conflict and tension does not change the fact that it was the “god delusion” that drove science in the medieval era, and that thereby paved the way for modern science.

Of course, it’s also not without significance that most of the medieval / early modern giants mentioned by Doctor Slack were in at least somewhat bad odor with their respective clerical establishments at the time they did their work. On the more philosophical side, the same may have been true of Thomas Aquinas, depending on how one interprets the evidence as to whether he was an intended target of Bishop Tempier’s condemnation.

The truest statement would be that in earlier periods, when religious belief was essentially universal, we cannot separate out its effects from other aspects of culture, and attempts to do so will turn out merely to be polemics on one side or the other. The relevance of all this to the role of religion in today’s world is questionable at best.

This doesn’t change the fact that modern science came to exist at all as an heir to early, “god delusion”-driven science.

As I noted, this fact is an inevitable consequence of the fact that atheism only become widely thinkable in very recent times, and therefore doesn’t have the significance you seem to want to ascribe to it.

479: If someone wants to contend that the “god delusion” is inherently irrational and evil and destructive and tantamount to child abuse, it considerably complicates that contention. The relevance of all this to religion’s role in today’s world is that if it was possible for the “god delusion” to give rise to science, it’s likely just as possible for it to coexist with it, and maybe dialogue with progressive elements in religion is more worthwhile an endeavour — if one is supposed to care about religion-connected social ills — than banging on about “god delusions.”

Another thing the actual history of science should teach us is a healthy respect for the role of intuition, inspiration and other “irrational” phenomena in the history of progress. Supposing we were actually to create a world in which everyone adhered to Dawkins’ idea of what is rational, acceptable, and scientific; it’s actually highly questionable, I would say unlikely, that that would be a more innovative and tolerant world than this one. Dawkins’ own intellectual trajectory and that of many of his followers is evidence of that.

480: The long dark age of clerical ignorance is no fiction: Roman Catholicism in Counter-Reformation [various places] and Orthodoxy in Russia were fanatically anti-intellectual.

No, Steve’s 477 is not very relevant, and yes, it really is a fiction. The history of the Counter-Reformation, not to mention Russian Orthodoxy, was far more complicated than this — indeed to assert that the Counter-Reformation, a fundamentally dynamic intellectual endeavour, was “fanatically anti-intellectual” is incoherent to the point of comedy — and mere assertion cannot change that. (What I’m saying is not a mere assertion. The point about the Scholastics and the rise of science is based, for instance, on the actual history of the period. The business about “minor and occasional exceptions” is what strikes me as mere assertion, and you’ll forgive me if I’m more partial the perspectives of scholars on the specific period than I am to polemics about modern America as a source on this.)

The “god delusion” driving science seems “paradoxical” to you because you’re accustomed to begging the question. If you start out assuming the conclusion that the “god delusion” is irrational and prejudicial to the ability to reason, then of course this seems like a “paradoxical” assertion that would somehow require “dual intellectal allegiances”. But that’s sloppy thinking and poor history. What the events actually tell us is that the truth is more complicated than this, and that when scientists of Albertus Magnus’ era tell us that their natural philosophy was part and parcel of their “god delusion,” it’s probably a good idea to take the contention seriously.

As for why polemic of the era was so dangerous in medieval times: it’s partly owing not just to the presence of the “god delusion,” but to an environment of relatively unstable states and unclear spheres of influence for many competing authorities, including a violent struggle of the orders between the “simple” (e.g. the poor), the emerging bourgeoisie and the traditional aristocracy. As I’ve said, a lot of what looked like religious struggle in the era was really a proxy for political and economic struggles.

482: You can no more prove that intellectual progress happened because of it

I don’t have to. The demonstration that it was compatible with intellectual progress, and part and parcel of that progress as it actually happened, is enough.

The idea that you can simply make atheists into “religious” people by claiming that they behave in a way that you associate with religion is straight out of Topsy-Turvy Land.

Again, it’s not an original idea, and the resemblances between this-worldly and other-worldly eschatologies- and their consequences- have been remarked for a long time.

Dogmatic belief systems that are not open to the influence of new evidence are bad. Doesn’t matter whether they have “supernatural” content or not. Frankly, the idea that this position would be controversial among people who fancy themselves intellectuals is pretty astonishing.

Your attempt to dismiss Indonesia’s appalling record of human rights violations as mere “problems” is laughable. Islamic nations comprise many of the worst human rights abusers in the world—Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria, to name just the larger ones.

Well, there are serious questions of causality. The population of Indonesia is largely Islamic, but the government is not. The history of human rights abuses in that country are more in keeping with military dictator shipworldwide than anything specific to Islam. Somewhere like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan provides more of a claim for Islam as a source of human rights abuses than Indonesia, but even in the case of Saudi Arabia, is the problem Islam? or a monarchical oil shiekdom using Islam as a front? One could just as easily argue that Islamic people are the largest victims of human rights abuses by oil-industry backed military dictatorships.

And any attempt to pin massive human rights abuses on religion needs to address Stalin. Athiestic belief systems can be commandeered in the interest of brutality too. Because, at this historical moment, some of the worst military dictatorships happen to be Islamic does not give one justification for painting all islam with a broad brush any more than Stalin give one justification for condemning all socialists (or athiests for that matter).

488: You’re trying to elide the very big difference between “compatible with” and “part and parcel of”.

No, not really. I’ve provided an extensive list of examples for the latter and am quite comfortable with my position. The “genetic fallacy” is projection on your part, but I don’t blame you for your discomfort. Confronting an inventory of the actual facts should, after all, make it uncomfortable to hold a simplistic perspective based mostly on fictions.

And even you have to admit that nowadays, science can get along just fine without religion.

I’ll do you one better: I think the next wave of religions is likely to claim to be sciences, and that in fact this process has already begun. But whether science can get along without religion is completely irrelevant to my point.

The “genetic fallacy” is projection on your part

Now this is simply obtuse. I expressed agnosticism about (and lack of belief in the contemporary relevance of) the degree to which the (inevitable) religious saturation of the milieus in which early modern science arose implies that religious ideas were a necessary part of that arising. It’s you who need to make a dogmatic answer of “yes” to that question in order to support your position, but it’s an answer which you have demonstrated you cannot support. And yes, to make the unsupported assumption that early modern science arose with the assistance of religion, rather than that the latter either impeded it or was irrelevant, is to commit a genetic fallacy.

We cannot separate out the effects of religion in an era when religion was ubiquitous. And as between you and me, only one of us needs to try to do that, and it isn’t me.

Morris Berman is a leading scholar of medieval intellectual history and only incidentally a critic of contemporary American society. Jonathan Israel is the leading contemporary historian of the Enlightenment.

But let’s not just hurl authorities at each other. Let’s try to find common ground. You’ll agree, I’m sure, that persecution of unorthodox writers and (some, by no means all) scientists was very widespread in early modern Europe. I agree that many sincerely religious people (including Locke and Newton) saw no conflict between science and theology. And I certainly agree with you that “the actual history of science should teach us … a healthy respect for the role of intuition, inspiration and other “irrational” phenomena in the history of progress.” Whether organized religion — Dawkins’ et al’s main target — has much use for “intuition, inspiration, and other ‘irrational’ phenomena,” except as a way of deflecting rationalist criticism, is another matter. Do you think it does?

The term “genetic fallacy” does not mean what you think it means, Steve. I think you’d better do some brushing up.

The only thing I am making a “dogmatic” answer of “yes” to is that it’s worthwhile to pay attention to how historical periods actually saw themselves, instead of how we would like to see them for our own polemical convenience. And while religion and the “god delusion” are widespread in history, the chain of events leading from the medieval period to modern science is not. There is therefore cause to take seriously the theological commitments and polemics of that particular theatre and period as direct contributing factors to the rise of science, and there is not cause to think this would have been equally probable had those factors been removed. This isn’t to say that science couldn’t have come about any other way; only that the fact that it happened to come about this way in our particular timeline can’t be handwaved into insignificance for “god delusion” reasoning as you are rather squirmingly attempting to do.

495: Whether organized religion—Dawkins’ et al’s main target—has much use for “intuition, inspiration, and other ‘irrational’ phenomena,” except as a way of deflecting rationalist criticism, is another matter.

I can get with much of what you have to say except that I don’t think Dawkins’ et al’s “main target” is just “organized religion.” At least that’s not what Dawkins claims his target to be in TGD; his target is supposed to be the “delusion” itself. As for “organized religion” as such, while guilty of its share of sins I also think it tends too frequently to be pressed into service as a whipping boy for polemical purposes. I think the above definition of “organized religion’s” relationship to intuition or inspiration is artificially narrow, and I wouldn’t buy it. That religious organizations sometimes engage in obfuscation is obviously true, nobody here has said they don’t.

Doctor Slack, your 497 in fact establishes the opposite of what it tries to claim. Yes, “religion and the “god delusion” are widespread in history” and “the chain of events leading from the medieval period to modern science is not”. By those very facts, there are no grounds at all for supposing that religion was essential to that chain of events, since it failed to produce any such chain of events at other times and places. This is worse than arguing from a sample size of one; it’s cherrypicking the one instance that appears to support your presuppositions from a larger sample set that fails to do so.

You clearly have strong feelings on the subject, but unfortunately you have no actual arguments. And yet again, of the two of us, only one of us feels the need to take a strong position on this question, and it isn’t me.

‘Jim Buck @447 By the way; Dawkins used to smile on Islam, describing it as more grown-up, and in line with evolved male desire, than Christianity with its absurdly high standard of marital fidelity. That was way back before 2001, of course, and when Dawkins was living the life of a philanderer (no condemnation here, folks, just description)’

That’s amazing if true. Do you by any chance have a link or source for that claim?

@487: Again, it’s not an original idea, and the resemblances between this-worldly and other-worldly eschatologies- and their consequences- have been remarked for a long time.

I know it’s not original. I’ve known this since I was an undergraduate and first ran across The God That Failed, by a number of ex-communists. Many many years ago, when any stick to beat down communism was readily grasped by Cold Warriors. Such “resemblances” are sometimes fruitful, sometimes not – as in this case.

Dogmatic belief systems that are not open to the influence of new evidence are bad. Doesn’t matter whether they have “supernatural” content or not. Frankly, the idea that this position would be controversial among people who fancy themselves intellectuals is pretty astonishing.

If you define as “religion” whatever you consider “bad,” then the statement that “religion is harmful” becomes totally devoid of meaning.

Frankly, I’m astonished by people, whether they fancy themselves intellectuals or not, sneering at anyone who regards as “controversial” their own favorite interpretation of a familiar simile. It isn’t true just because it’s old, or because you believe it. Or is that your “religion”?

@geo

But that theology mainly served as an incumbrance to early empiricism in Britain simply isn’t true. Boyle, for example, isn’t just conveniently justifying his own empirical practices with reference to theology–theology is clearly motivating and shaping his empirical practices. For example, the uses he makes of analogy in his observations derive from the kinds of analogical reasoning he believed was licensed by the presence of the divine in nature.

And for Locke, a tacit appeal to the idea that divine order underlies experience actually enables him to make the famous argument that the mind begins as a tabula rasa that is inscribed by experience. Without the idea that experience itself reflects divine order, this argument–which also provided epistemological support for the idea that all men are created equal–would have been seen as much more subversive because it would have suggested that our minds are the product of contingency and accident and that social and moral values are therefore relative. So in that case, theology actually allowed him to make a much more daring social argument than many would have accepted otherwise.

One of my favourite bits of writing ever is the passage from Tolstoy’s ‘Confession’ that begins:

“And I understood it all. I am seeking a faith, the power of life; and they are seeking the best way to fulfil in the eyes of men certian human obligations.”

(You might like to google for more – forgive me, I’m typing this on my phone.)

He was giving up on the Orthodox Church, which he saw to be peopled by priests and monks struggling to preserve their traditions and their positions within an institution, and not attending to the good work that one might naively expect of them. I like it because I find it resonates, and seems to be applicable to most of the institutions I can think of.

The thing is, it seems to me that Dawkins and co are more like those poor Orthodox priests than Tolstoy. To a great extent they are trapped in this argument of theirs, defending their inheritance and trying to perpetuate it. I sat through a talk given by Dawkins to an audience of under- and postgrads. It was pure missionary stuff: ‘we’ must do this and that to advance ‘our’ cause. I didn’t like it then, nor do I now. It’s not a good approach to scholarship, and not favourable towards the discovery of unexpected truths.

Hildari @ 503 . Like I said: It was way back before 2001. When I get the time, I shall trawl the Guardian archives and dig out the relevant article. Give me a bit of time on this.

Jim @507: Boyle may have employed analogical reasoning, as many philosophers did then, but is there something particularly empiricist about that? The mere fact that a philosopher who is responsible for some innovation also used intellectual methods current at the time doesn’t mean that the latter is in some sense responsible for the former.

Re Locke: I think you may be making my argument. It is possible that the idea of divine order 1) existed in Locke’s mind, and when he conceived of the tabula rasa, he fitted it in with the idea of divine order, along with all his other pre-existing beliefs; 2) provided Locke with a conventionally acceptable language in which to express what might otherwise have seemed too daring an idea; or 3) actually conduced in some way to his conceiving the notion of tabula rasa. Only in the third case is it true that theology is “motivating and shaping” intellectual progress. In any case, subsequent developments in epistemology did not make use of, and even deplored, Locke’s theological scaffolding.

Reality keeps changing but belief systems don’t keep up.

re Dr Slack, geo, and Steve’s argument, we might ask why Christian theology during the Middle Ages and Early Modern period was so conducive to speculative science. The 10th century is a rather arbitrary place to start in the history of Christianity.

As I understand it, Medieval Christian theology was, between the 10th and 15th centuries (or thereabouts) heavily influenced by an Islamic scholastic and scientific tradition that had, in the 8th-10th centuries, revived the “ancient sciences” that had been badly neglected in the late Roman/Byzantine empires, because the Church in late antiquity was substantially hostile to natural philosophy.[1] Arabic writings from the 9th-10th centuries include a lot of anecdotes about sending people (who often were themselves Christians or Greeks) to search current or former Byzantine cities for “lost” Greek texts on “ancient sciences” (math, astronomy, &c.) which, when they found them, were often in very bad shape, moldy, &c. Medieval Christian theology’s friendliness towards science arose in the context of competition with a rival religious tradition whose political institutions were quite friendly towards Aristotelian rationalism, and which could boast better doctors, astronomers, &c.

So there’s probably some case to be made that, to the extent that the Church was science-friendly at certain points, it was at least partly the result of the relative power and prestige of a competing religious tradition, and the history of Church-Peripatetic relations before the 8th century seems to bear that out.[1 again] And to the extent that (certain institutions/speculative traditions in) early Islam was so friendly to science, it might also have to do with the need to establish its access to the truth in a competitive intellectual climate. So it *may* have been the competition between rival theistic belief systems, and not the theistic belief systems themselves, that was responsible for a lot of this (new-found) willingness of theology to accommodate natural scientific speculation.

Understandings of the divine that are generally implicit in Islam or Christianity may have propelled natural scientific inquiry in certain circumstances, but that isn’t necessarily at odds with a more cautious version of Dawkins’ main thesis, applied, conservatively and not ahistorically, to the present day. I’m not so much trying to defend Dawkins here as point to a problem in Dr Slack’s argument that because people like Boyle or Locke were able to marshal Christian theological ideas for “progressive” ends, that that tells us something that is more widely true about Christian theology.

I think a sounder defense of religion as a historical force for good would be that, even if they directly hampered scientific progress, they contributed directly to civic virtue, having a lot of use in formulating social critiques and social/political systems.

My bigger problem with Dawkins’ argument is that it is badly ahistorical–what are we supposed to have replaced Islam or Christianity with, and why can’t I claim for similar reasons that atheism is bad, and insist that xenophobic Dawkinsites embrace a tolerant science-friendly theology, thereby proving that atheism is evil?
——————————–
fn 1 George Saliba made the argument recently that there was a vigorous tradition of natural science in the early Islamic world (7th – 9th c.s) before the big movement to translate Greek scientific works; and that natural science was severely atrophied in the Byzantine world, largely due to Church persecution. He draws on the work of Dmitry Gutas about the state of certain sciences in the Byzantine world. Saliba seems like he might be overstating the case about the decline of sciences in the late antique Byzantine empire (he suggests that Kosmas Indicopleustes’ belief in a flat earth was representative of Byzantine Christian belief; as I understand it, it wasn’t), but I doubt that he is wrong overall, unless he is badly misrepresenting Gutas’ arguments, or Gutas is wrong overall.

Harold on Shinto and Emperor worship, at 465 (ancient history by the standards of this thread): no, Shinto was not the driving force of Japan’s entry into the Pacific War. It was colonialism, the need to establish a sphere of influence in Asia, and response to western racism. Shinto did not have a long history of fascist thought before WW2, and in fact Chamberlain (one of very few westerners living in and writing on Japan at the turn of the century) predicted Japan’s actions in a neat little essay in about 1905. He describes the manipulation of Shinto beliefs and Japanese popular history to develop a fanatical form of nationalism. Japanese scholars of the war will also describe the saturation coverage of nationalism in media and schools between the mid-20s and mid-30s, and although it invokes the Emperor at every turn, it doesn’t have much to say about religion. I have on my blog a review of Japanese wartime propaganda from John Dower’s War Without Mercy and it doesn’t fit the religious image much at all, though it uses a lot of themes from Japanese culture that merge well with Japanese religious thinking. Japanese would probably say this is “atarimae” (natural), because they don’t even think of Shinto as a religion – it’s just a part of their culture.

Also, if religion was a driving force for racist war – rather than an occasionally useful tool – how come Japan’s buddhists never enter into the picture?

I put up a comment above about the way modern Japanese interpret things like ancestor-worship and the divinity of the Emperor. They’re currently in the process of debating whether to extend this “divinity” to female heirs. Clearly there’s a fairly healthy strain of pragmatism in their religious perspective, and it’s probably that same pragmatism that led the ruling classes to use Shinto to their advantage in the war era.

Also, WW2 had two participants and the other guy probably doesn’t class as a religious one.

Kaveh, with all due respect, I don’t see that you’ve addressed the “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” objection that Steve and I have been making. The fact that there was a certain amount of scientific activity going on between the 10th and 15th centuries (comparatively modest, compared with the amount after the breakdown of theological dominance in the early modern period) isn’t evidence by itself that it didn’t occur only because the full anti-theological implications of science and critical philosophy hadn’t yet emerged. When those implications did emerge, in the fifteenth and subsequent centuries, the reaction of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and even of the more conservative Lutheran and Calvinist churches, was harshly repressive. Certainly the official religious view was mistrustful at best. By and large, bishops didn’t think that theology and science were harmonious companions, whatever the more advanced theologians may have thought.

Seriously, to lump Leninism in with religion, and to explain what happened in Russia in the 30s and 40s by Stalin’s dogmatism, that’s really off the wall. If that’s what you have to do, Russell or no Russell, you definitely need to look for a better angle, and it’s not that difficult to find one.

Harold, I think you’re speaking of the Yasukuni Jinja, and that’s another example of missing the point if you focus on its religious element. The way that the temple is defined makes it inevitable that Japanese war criminals who die in war will “go” there, because its purpose is to venerate those who die defending Japan, no matter when or what their personal sins. Shinto doesn’t much allow for the concept of sin, so the idea that a mortal would set up some kind of barrier to veneration based on the lifetime acts of a dead soldier would probably mystify them. So the shrine is just there, and dead people “go” there, and that’s that. Japanese politicians (and ordinary Japanese people, of the not-right-wing variety) go there often. The problem was one politician (Koizumi Junichiro) deciding to go there in an official capacity. His act was an expressly political one, not religious. I think all subsequent PMs have either refused to say what they will do, or visit privately.

If you’re interested in better understanding the Japanese approach to concepts of evil and sin and forgiveness, I recommend the anime Full Metal Alchemist, in which even the baby-eating bad guys get a reason (a very good one!) for their badness, and a shot at forgiveness. If viewed with an open mind it might help westerners to understand the way the Yasukuni Jinja is seen here.

Also, don’t get me started on the racism of western responses to those shrine visits. Not only is veneration of war dead the only time we come close to ancestor worship (which is kind of sick in comparison to the way Japanese do it), but our cenotaphs honour a great many war criminals, from WW2 and the Vietnam war. FFS, John Kerry was a war criminal and he nearly became president of the USA. Japan has no official memorial day for war dead of any war ever, even its own civil war, and yet if the PM decides to try and do a once-a-year ceremony to honour the dead of every war that Japan ever saw, the US is in shock about it because there are 14 war criminals being venerated amongst the millions. What’s that about, if not straight-out racism?

Well, I think you are reading more into my words than was meant, but I will be very interested in reading the book you mention, since I would like to know more about Japan than I do. (I am also a great fan of John Dower, Herbert P. Bix, and the late Chalmers Johnson).

I was there, very briefly, on a visit to the Atom bomb museums at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of one of Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s six visits to the shrine that has the tombs of convicted war criminals, and I remember that it was in the papers. He also deployed some troops to Iraq, which must have been quite unpopular. And I also understand that there were riots in China and Korea over the matter. While I was there, I also read reports in the paper about parliamentary debates, and it surprised me to see the kind of opinions that were being aired there and written about in the paper (such as that rape increases young mens’ fertility and was therefore a good thing — not making this up). However I am well aware, as I said twice before, that these are hardly representative of modern Japan or its people, whom I admire greatly.

Doctor Slack, the motives of the thinkers in question don’t matter in the slightest. Nor does it matter what they thought they were doing, or what their opinions were about the compatibility of theology and science. The question — ie, for those of us considering Kaveh’s assertion that the mainstream medieval theology “motivated and shaped” (he means “motivated” in the sense of “generated,” the way one proposition motivates another — nothing about psychological motivation) scientific progress — is whether their theoretical innovations in epistemology, logic, cosmology, scientific method, etc. followed from theology in something like the same way that relativity followed from classical mechanics — that is, was a development of it — or alternatively, whether, simply because everyone at the time thought in theological categories, their scientific theories initially included some of those theological categories, which were fairly rapidly outgrown and in fact explicitly rejected. The fact that early modern European science was formulated in Latin doesn’t mean that Latin “motivated and shaped” modern science.

@ geo

Well, for Boyle, the divine order licenses attention to what would otherwise be seen as insignificant and unworthy of study. It’s the revelation of God in the world that gives him a reason to look at how the world works in detail in the first place. This isn’t just making use of available intellectual tools, it’s providing the motivation for the entire project and Boyle explicitly says so more than once.

Regarding Locke, I don’t think you can neatly divide his religion from his epistemology. He wanted to support the principle of equality, but I don’t think he wanted to argue for the relativity of all social values, not least because that would undercut any moral claim for the emerging quasi-democratic state. Those moral claims are for him grounded in religion. More than just a set of background assumptions or a conventional language, it’s an active set of values to which he makes appeal and without which the aims of his own arguments make less sense. That’s not to make the claim that empiricism in all its forms is inseparable from religion, which I agree is certainly not true. I mean, it would be a terrifying world if in order to be an empiricist you also had to be a late seventeenth-century Anglican. But as I read him, Locke’s empiricism is bound up with religion, and to forget that in reading him is to get what I think is a thin version of Locke.

(Having been prompted to go back a bit, I see that my response to Kaveh’s 517 missed the key part of his point, because of course he is arguing that the receptive of the medieval Church to reason was a product of very specific historical circumstances, absent which a more restricted version of Dawkins’ theory might be correct. Sorry, I was working hastily.

So to amplify my reply a bit: inasmuch as Dawkins’ claim is that the GD is inherently irrational and moreover anti-rational, historically-specific interludes of pro-reason GD should not be possible, grant as we might that the impetus for such “interludes” may be more external than internal. If we modify this to the claim that the “GD” is frequently hostile to reason it becomes more defensible… but also by the same token harder to demonstrate that the periods of inhospitality to reason were strictly internal to the “GD” as such. Basically things do not look good for Dawkins’ proposition from the rise of Scholasticism to the present day, with the particular exception of a reactionary strain of religion that began to appear in the 19th century when science really did seem to be straining the traditional religion beyond some popularly-acceptable limits. That boundary marks something closer to the likely limit of flexibility for the Abrahamic religions as traditionally conceived… but only because those traditions are carrying a specific baggage of myth and tradition which is beginning to show its age, not necessarily because they adhere to a “god delusion.” And even then, there are substantial swathes of all three major Abrahamic religions that have successfully accommodated themselves to modern science. So I don’t think it’s correct that Dawkins’ point is more applicable to the present day.

Is it just me or are the threads here getting longer and longer?

geo @ 521

I think it’s also worth taking into consideration the more limited opportunities for surveillance at the time, which was related to the limited opportunities for copying of texts and engaging in debate with numbers of people, as well as the lack of a bureaucracy able to keep track of people who might go off in any direction at all. IIRC you don’t see schools in the sense of lots of people doing interesting things at the same time, until much later. You see one person “going deep” and writing books that aren’t responded to equally deeply until the next generation, if at all.

Authoritarian rule tends to be characteristic of non-Islamic Asian and Eurasian countries, as well — such as China, Japan, and Russia, to name a few. There was even a book about it Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, by
Karl Wittfoge, which connects it with economic conditions, particularly the need for irrigation.

@452,
so, neither the haddith nor the Quran says that women can’t drive, and it’s all down to some bloke in Saudi Arabia deciding that women can’t drive. And this is the fault of religion because …?

Because Islamic teachings, Islamic customs, Islamic traditions are steeped in misogyny and discrimination against women. As Islamic treatment of women goes, the ban on women drivers is pretty small potatoes. But it’s still a despicable violation of rights. Every Muslim country treats women badly, and in the worst ones they are treated like chattel.

@445,
I said I wasn’t going to comment again, but this is worth repeating: You cannot persuasively cite these State Dept country reports as conclusive proof of your argument because (among other things) the excerpts you are citing say nothing about the frequency of the abuses in question or their relation to a country’s total population.

Oh please. First, I’m not claiming a State Department report is “conclusive proof” of anything. The reports by Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, etc. find the same kind of abuses. As for your suggestion that the abuses are uncommon, you’re completely wrong about that, too. From the 2010 Human Rights Watch report on Pakistan:

“Suicide bombings, armed attacks, and killings by the Taliban, al Qaeda, and their affiliates targeted NEARLY EVERY SECTOR of Pakistani society … Security forces ROUTINELY violated basic rights … Suspects were FREQUENTLY detained without charge or convicted without a fair trial … evidence that TORTURE IS ROUTINE.”

And many types of human rights violation in these countries are not simply a matter of common practise, but are codified in law, and justified by explicit appeals to Islamic religious authority.

Your efforts to excuse and trivialize Islam’s overwhelmingly destructive influence on human rights, human freedom, human welfare is political correctness gone mad.

@489,
And any attempt to pin massive human rights abuses on religion needs to address Stalin.

Ah yes, the “HitlerStalinPolPot” gambit so beloved of apologists for religion as a supposed indictment of atheism. It’s a stupid argument. There’s no evidence of a causal relationship between absence of belief in God and violent or inhumane behavior. Sam Harris addresses this well:

Need I remind you that the “atheist regimes” of the 20th century killed tens of millions of people?

This is a popular argument among theoconservatives and critics of the new atheism, but for many reasons it is historically inaccurate.

First, the premise that Nazism and Communism were “atheist” ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. In fact, 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judaeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. They were based on the ideas of Hitler and Marx, not David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the horrors they inflicted are no more a vindication of Judeao-Christianity than they are of astrology or alchemy or Scientology.

Second, Nazism and Fascism were not atheistic in the first place. Hitler thought he was carrying out a divine plan. Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no opposition from the Vatican. Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia.
…
When it comes to the history of violence, the significant distinction is not one between theistic and atheistic regimes. It’s the one between regimes that were based on demonizing, utopian ideologies (including Marxism, Nazism, and militant religions) and secular liberal democracies that are based on the ideal of human rights.

DelRey is making me think that the new atheism is a demonizing, utopian ideology.

But seriously, DelRey, the comment about “the HitlerStalinPolPot gambit” that you copypasted into this discussion doesn’t respond to any point that anyone here actually made. 489 was not saying that atheism is especially conducive to massive violence, only that it doesn’t necessarily prevent massive violence. I think you are tilting at imaginary apologists of religion. Or else everyone who’s not with youa new atheist is against youan apologist of religion, in which case see 545.

548: The bulk of beliefs that you list as supposedly needing to be renounced have already demonstrated an ability to accommodate themselves to natural science. Even “scriptural infallibility” so long as one isn’t talking about scriptural literalism, which isn’t the same thing. The history of Reform Judaism is a case in point, but far from the only one.

The process hasn’t been smooth and the products of those accommodations may or may not prove compelling enough to survive an onslaught of new, scientistic religions with less baggage, but that’s a different question.

Interesting, Dr S. Can you say a bit about the new forms of belief you’re referring to — regarding, for example, the soul, immortality, or miracles?

(The soul, immortality, and miracles as they pertain to all this: various beliefs about “energy” for the first two, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” for the third.)

eco-awareness, yay!

556: Heh. I’m game.

Doctor Slack*, regarding Yasukuni Jinja, obviously there are many different aspects of debate within Japan on this, and I’m not qualified to report on any of them, let alone to generalize, but I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people think the shrine visits are bad because they offend foreigners and disrupt harmony, not because they are bad in and of themselves. Others find any govt involvement with the church dubious (there’s a strong separation of church and state here) and yes, others think the shrine is distasteful – whatever its particular religious underpinnings, the shrine is associated with a radical and reactionary view of war, and the shrine, the attendant museum, and the weirdo rightists who attach themselves to it, are not viewed well here. Actually recently someone tried to burn down the gate. Also, I think a lot of Japanese (again, I haven’t asked and can’t generalize) see the event at Hiroshima on the 6th August (which is a beautiful event, btw) as far more important a memorial than anything a shrine has to offer, and also a lot of Japanese think the whole stupid mistake (from about 1920-something to 1945) should just be put behind them. They don’t have a long history of international wars, so the whole veneration of war dead thing doesn’t apply here in the same way. Go anywhere in Britain (even King’s X station) and you’ll see a statue to the glorious dead. You won’t find that in Japan, even for those of the Russo-Japanese war or the Meiji restoration.

I’m pretty sure there would be Japanese – even “devout” Shinto followers – who would agree with a pragmatic line and argue that those 14 war criminals could just be kicked out of the shrine, or not memorialized, or something. But I don’t know how that would work – neither their bones nor their souls are actually there, as far as I know. The Yasukuni Shrine website probably explains it better:

“I assure those of you who fought and died for your country that your names will live forever at this shrine in Musashino”

I don’t see Chinese or Korean uproar at the PM’s shrine visits as racism, btw. Just the American approach. Regarding US war criminals – there is strong evidence of extensive crimes in the Pacific (I put a series of posts about this on my blog, in connection with John Dower’s book), so – unless you require attendance at the Hague as proof of criminality – I don’t think it’s “arguable” that US, Australian and British cenotaphs partially commemorate war criminals (also obviously Boer war, Phillipines and Vietnam war dead were involved in their share of nasty, too).

As for John Kerry: wasn’t one of his purple hearts a result of a shrapnel fragment from a rice bin that hit him in the arse? This, apparently, was after he put a grenade in there to destroy the rice stock. That was US war policy at the time. Enacting a policy of starvation is most certainly a war crime, and his citation openly states that placing the grenade was pursuant to that policy. So (unless my memory of that citation is in error) that makes him a war criminal.

Once again, I commend the Yushukan and the grounds of Yasukuni Jinja to anyone visiting Japan with an inquiring mind, because it’s such a display of the futility of fascism (and its own ignorance of that futility).

—
*apology accepted

Delray @ 439 –
“Syria has one of worst human rights records in the world. The vast majority of Syrians are Muslim, Syria’s culture is steeped in Islamic customs and traditions, and Islamic Sharia is the basis of much of Syrian law. I’m not sure what your point is about the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria is not anti-Muslim. It is overwhelmingly Muslim.”

Syria is not under Sharia, so you’re flat out wrong there. My point about the Muslim Brotherhood is that that a group that advocates for *more* influence of Islam in the government has long been one of the main targets of repression, which I’d say is good evidence that Islam is not the root cause of repression in the country.

“Here are some of the major human rights abuses reported by the State Department in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia: extrajudicial killings, disappearences, torture, police and government corruption, censorship, rape, honor crimes, discrimination against women, discrimination against religious minorities, child abuse, forced child labor, child prostitution. Malaysia and Morocco are somewhat better, but still appalling.”

What you don’t seem to get how bad a country needs to be in order to make the list of “the worst human rights abusers in the world”. What you quote here is on par with Mexico. Again going by Freedom House, the absolute worst are North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Somalia. Please note the absence of Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. While five of those countries have Muslim majority populations, only Saudi Arabia has a government based on Islam. Blaming the problems of the other four on Islam just shows ignorance of those countries’ circumstances (Syria has been discussed, Somalia’s problem is a lack of any meaningful government, and if you think the legacy of Turkmenbashi is the result of Islam you’re smoking dope almost as strong as his was).

“men acting like women and women acting like men”, and “wanton fornication everywhere, no regard for decency”

Definitely sounds like the end of the world to me.

Definitely sounds like the end of the world to me.

And yet another reason to hope it comes soon. ;)

Harold @563- you might be thinking of Joachim of Fiore, who was a strong influence on Dante.

@566 & 564 Of course Christian apocalyptic goes way back before Joachim of Fiore, such as Revelations, and before that to the Book of Daniel, the first(?) Jewish apocalypse. And this I believe has its roots in Zoroastrianism.

This is getting way off Dawkins, which is probably a good thing… I need to take a better look at Joachim of Fiore soon, what I’ve read about him thus far is that he taught the idea of a “third age”, the first two being the world before Christ (Age of the Father), and the world after Christ (Age of the Son); the third age (Age of the Spirit) would be characterized by humanity’s direct contact with God and universal love. This progressive view of history is not dissimilar to that of Ibn Tufayl in Hayy Ibn Yaqzan that I mentioned earlier, in that they both describe a movement of humanity progressing towards a direct connection to the divine. There is in fact a very fuzzy border between apocalyptic and what might call theories of history, and one (of many, many) possibilities is that the latter is hiding behind something like the former, or vice versa, or…

Of course Christian apocalyptic goes way back before Joachim of Fiore, such as Revelations, and before that to the Book of Daniel, the first(?) Jewish apocalypse. And this I believe has its roots in Zoroastrianism.

Well, obviously. Harold’s comment was about a particular strain of late-medieval apocalyticism.

Quite a lot of Jewish thought that later found its way into Christianity comes from Zoroastrianism (the contemporary form of which I have some acquaintance with because I used to be married to a Parsi.) Hell, angels, and the whole concept of a Savior would be three prominent examples.

Well, I don’t have it with me, but I think I read about it in A.H. Levi’s introduction to the Penguin Edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly. These were the “popular superstitions” satirized by Erasmus, and dated back to St. Gregory the Great.

And I should probably not post comments until I finish my post for my own little blog on Cathar novels.

Planned Parenthood under assault as usual.

Doctor Slack,
The bulk of beliefs that you list as supposedly needing to be renounced have already demonstrated an ability to accommodate themselves to natural science.

Hilarious. Please describe how you think “dual substance, divine providence, petitionary prayer, free will, immortality, miracles, final causes, scriptural infallibility” have “demonstrated an ability to accommodate themselves to natural science.”

Just a note — I misremembered a bit, it was not exactly the “Christian apocalyptic tradition” that was incorporated into Dante, but the “doctrines of purgatory and demonology,” including the last judgment (hence my confusion). Here is a passage from the late A. H. T. Levi’s revised introduction to the Penguin edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly :

“The frankly superstitious religion practices attacked by [Erasmus’s] Folly were those of the kind that looked to the Pseudo-Gregorian Dialogues [no wonder I couldn’t remember the name] for support. The four books are chiefly devoted to miracle stories, to other extraordinary supernatural phenomena, and to heroic feats of religious edification. They were intended to reinforce in the faithful a salutary fear of hell. They originated in the very late seventh century and purported to be an account of [Pope St.] Gregory’s relaxed narration of the stories to the deacon Peter. They were not a mistaken ascription but a deliberate forgery . . . . They were translated into virtually all known vernaculars and became the best known single source for the piety, iconography, art, literature, and popular culture of the middle ages. They clearly implied that hell was eternal …, that the soul, although spiritual, suffered physically from burning…, and that absolution could be granted after death through the mediation of alms-giving by the living … . Commonsense objections are parried, and the relationships carefully explained between purgatory, hell, heaven, the individual judgment of the soul at death and the general judgment at the end of the world. . . . . .

…..

[In the Dialogues] The efficacy of the prayers, Masses, and alms-giving offered by the living are not so much taken for granted as triumphantly proclaimed. Dante drew extensively on the Dialogues, and its influence on popular piety was greater than that of any other single work of piety in the history of western Christendom. It obviously distorted popular piety into superstition by its assumption that religious perfection was something extrinsic to moral fulfillment. ” –Levi, ed., Erasmus, Praise of Folly(1971, 1993), pp. xxv-xxvii

The Pseudo Gregorian Dialogues s were only definitively edited (by the scholar Francis Clark), in 1987 [!!], according to Levi. Until then they were apparently considered by many to have the authority of Pope St. Gregory, whom Levi calls “the last great Father of the Church.” For an obit of Levi, a Jesuit priest, see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-anthony-levi-6155102.html

@561,
What you don’t seem to get how bad a country needs to be in order to make the list of “the worst human rights abusers in the world”. What you quote here is on par with Mexico. Again going by Freedom House, the absolute worst are North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Somalia. Please note the absence of Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. While five of those countries have Muslim majority populations, only Saudi Arabia has a government based on Islam.

I cited Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh specifically because they are so large. That’s why I wrote “to name just the larger ones.” Their laws and practises may not be the absolute worst in the Islamic world, but they’re still appalling, and between them those three countries have over half a billion people. That’s what makes them among the worst human rights abusers in the world. Not just the laws themselves, but the sheer scale of the abuse.

You’re not doing anything to improve the image of Islam by citing Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Somalia, either. The populations of those countries are almost entirely Muslim, and their laws, customs and traditions are steeped in Islam.

575: my post for my own little blog on Cathar novels.

This sounds really, really interesting.

‘the idea that ‘there’s no evidence that atheism causes violence, or other kinds of harmful behavior ’ is so obviously and flagrantly false’ (Hidari)
Atheism is the absence of belief in gods. Please explain how that causes violence or other kinds of harmful behaviour. Should be easy, if it’s obvious.

The state was committed to the destruction of religion

So that it could substitute its own.

No such destruction has ever been committed in the name of a sceptical, open-minded empiricism. “Hume, destroyer of worlds”??

Really, after #588 you are in no position to call for anyone else to be treated unkindly. Go Cheney yourself.

Hidari, since 1945 Soviet Russia and North Korea imprisoned vast numbers of people for thinking the wrong thoughts. China created an artificial famine and concealed the worst manmade disaster in history. What did the US do since 1945? Prop up a few dictators. We didn’t enslave half a continent.

Demonizing them is a whole different game.

Yes, demonizing any group is always wrong. That doesn’t mean that Hume, say, was merely indulging his tastes when he attacked credulity. Again, to conflate objections to beliefs with attacks on the persons of the believers is totally illegitimate and invites the collapse of all intellectual standards.

What you seem to be saying, Mr LaBonne, is that the word religion covers cases other than those which involve a big boss sky fairy.

I don’t “seem” to be saying it, I’ve said it quite explicitly above, probably more than once.

Might it even be applied to the adaptationist version of evolution—-where natural selection observes every sparrow that falls?

Sure, scientists can and have fallen into such conceptual traps. Whereupon science moves on without them. The mainstream of contemporary evolutionary biology bears no resemblance at all to this caricature. Not that you’d know that.

If you took what Dawkins writes as Gospel, you would have been missing the point.

The point is the social effect of his pernicious simplifications.

Another one who never read past the title of “The Selfish Gene”. Yawn.

Hidari’s version of “atheism” sounds like the kind of made-up ersatz anti-intellectualism they might imagine in a place that doesn’t have real anti-intellectualism.

IOW Kaveh601 “atheism” doesn’t necessarily imply “science” to my ear.

Indeed. For about the 100th time, for the benefit of the Hidaris and Kavehs out there: Atheism is merely the absence of belief in sky fairies; it has no positive content at all that unites those who lack such a belief. Atheists can perfectly well be antiscientific lunatics, and some are. There are many kinds of crazy beliefs.

I don’t even like the label “atheist” because it says nothing at all about what I do value. I prefer to describe myself as a “scientific humanist”.

Évidemment, vôtre connaissance de la langue française est sur le même niveau que vôtre connaissance de la biologie évolutive.

“au meme niveau” sounds a bit better to my non-Francophone ear. You don’t talk about being on top of the same level, after all. But maybe it’s “du meme niveau”.

Yes, I know this contributes nothing to the discussion. But somehow I find that the first sentence of the original post encapsulates the better part of what I feel like saying. Now where did I put my (unread) copy of The Extended Phenotype?

Veuillez effacer la deuxieme copie de ma response, SVP.

I would not want to see the world peopled with little Richard Dawkinses, exclusively (or Alain de Boutons for that matter, though I really enjoyed “Proust Can Change Your Life,” back in the day). There is a grandeur in diversity, “most beautiful and most wonderful,” as someone once said — and this includes diversity of custom and opinion.

Let us take aim at poverty, ignorance, and fanaticism, and we may see that the problems caused by “religion” dwindle on their own.

Hurray!

Steve @603: Atheism is merely the absence of belief in sky fairies; it has no positive content at all that unites those who lack such a belief.

You made no attempt to address the last five paragraphs of my post.

Seriously though, yes I realize this, and I would describe myself as something like a scientific humanist too (and I think did so somewhere in one of my previous posts, or else implied as much). And I realize atheism has no (well, very little) positive content, but neither does merely believing in a God. Plenty of religious folks, such as Sufis, argued that knowing God is impossible or extremely difficult, and in accord with that, one should be tolerant of all religious difference. Which is in a way a rather obvious position to arrive at if one begins by believing in a unique, omnipotent, omniscient God–the whole via negativa/negative theology thing (favored by a certain Baruch Spinoza) that was mentioned upthread, which some people may have refused to look up or do a little reading on because it’s Latin a theological concept.

Actually Existing theism doesn’t lead inevitably to violence any more than it leads inevitably to apophatic theology (via negativa), or rather, it can lead to both, just like Actually Existing atheism led to Stalin. You may say that atheism itself didn’t lead to Stalin, and I would agree, but without atheism, no Marxism, and without Marxism, no Stalin.

Saying that atheism didn’t directly lead to Stalin in the sense that theism led directly to the Crusades is pointless, because most (or really, all) of the consequences of any belief are indirect ones, that depend on context.

In case anybody else is still confused, all I would say is that dogmatic belief systems are at minimum undesirable as a matter of intellectual hygiene and, when embodied in powerful organizations, often have negative social consequences, sometimes catastrophic ones. That includes systems that are officially atheistic and even that claim to speak in the name of science.

I would not have thought that would be a controversial position on an academic blog.

I try not to feed trolls

It is not at all scholarly to stigmatise an opponent as a troll—simply because they give voice to discourses unfamiliar to you.

Well we could discuss that if you like. I’m not closing down dialogue in the way you did with your troll dismissal.

There is no evidence that science or atheism cause people to do evil things.

A rash statement, my friend, a very rash statement.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nazi-Doctors-Medical-Psychology-Genocide/dp/0465049052

@kaveh,
I don’t think I’ve read anything by Dawkins other than a few of those posts on Boing Boing, and I don’t really want to. …
… you’re not going to prove that [science is not just as evil as religion] to anybody who doesn’t believe it by arguing in these simple terms that Dawkins [is] trying to use.

So, by your own admission, you haven’t actually read Dawkins, except for “a few posts on Boing Boing.” But you’re nevertheless sure that his arguments aren’t persuasive.

Like I said, you’re a typical example of Dawkins’ critics. You don’t know what his arguments are, but you’re sure they’re “simple” and don’t work.

But you don’t really care what the arguments are, do you? All that really matters to you is that Dawkins is an outspoken and highly visible critic of theism and religion. You just don’t like that, hence all your anti-Dawkins guff.

There does seem to be something fishy about the claim that we need religious conformance because anything out of the ordinary will upset the simple folk, said right out in the open, and followed by some quite deep thinking, expounded in detail and at length. It’s almost as if there’s the corresponding belief that the simple folk invariably can’t read.

Either everything philosophy and theology (and related sciences) have done over the centuries , is nonsense, unless radical agnosticism, saying “theism” runs into the same problem as would an “atheist” who retained gobs of theology and just switched the meanings up a little. I might assume the standard-theistic ethic is something like this (hope formatting works):

The proper way’s quite simple: Do no harm,
Do nothing you’d not want be done to you,
To every soul, unfailingly, be warm,
Do everything you’d be expected to.
If you respect us, we’ll respect you, too,
In quite the same way. And, so, now, let’s start,
But this time: with a little bit of heart.

The 9/11 crowd were religious and their actions had religious motives.

That’s just not true. Motives were purely political, and their ringleader (Mohammed Atta) wasn’t even all that religious.

Religion celebrates not merely warmth, but extreme and exceptional goodness, though.

Arnaud Amalric says hello. Along with many others.

All sane human beings celebrate exceptional goodness.

just a lurker @624 Mere theism is a poor sort of faith; you might as well be an Atheist.

Ding ding ding!

bianca @627 There does seem to be something fishy about the claim that we need religious conformance because anything out of the ordinary will upset the simple folk, said right out in the open, and followed by some quite deep thinking, expounded in detail and at length. It’s almost as if there’s the corresponding belief that the simple folk invariably can’t read.

Are people seriously saying this nowadays? This is a shi4ty thing to say! Or did you have in mind Republicans mentioned above?

I mean, it goes without saying that to accuse anyone who doesn’t embrace Dawkinsism of wanting to shield religion from criticism is creating a false choice. We can say that religion, especially monotheistic, prophetic religion, is the greatest force for evil in history, and furthermore imply that people in societies where religion is important are uniquely capable of and likely to commit evil (==> they are uniquely evil). Or we can say that monotheistic religion opened up greater possibilities for apophetic theology, and thus played a major role in laying the foundations for the Enlightenment. Both positions are equally atheistic in the sense given by Jim Harrison @626:

Educated people engage in various shifts to avoid saying it straight out; but atheism, at least if it is defined as disbelief in something like the god or gods of traditional religions, is now the default position.

just a lurker: I’d say that e.g. actually existing Islam in Pakistan does lead directly to violence against religious minorities who are seen as apostates.

He said “doesn’t inevitably lead,” not “doesn’t lead.” “Doesn’t inevitably lead” is accurate: while it’s often the case, as with other faiths, that the best characteristics o Islam are ignored by professed believers as inconvenient, Islamic jurists today very commonly condemn people who take it upon themselves to murder “apostates” or assault religious minorities — there is in fact no law in Islam requiring that they do either, and a mass of law, commentary and scripture forbidding it — just as they frequently condemn so-called “honour killings” and terrorist assaults on civilians. But of course that sort of thing, which complicates the effort to paint Islam as universally malicious and barbaric, is somehow rarely deemed worth mentioning by hostile parties claiming to describe “actually existing Islam.”

If you can show where Actually Existing atheism leads directly to anything more than people leaving ‘their’ religious group, I’d like to hear.

Okay: the CCP’s ongoing campaign against the Falun Gong has been justified in terms of official atheism and the ongoing struggle against “feudal superstition.”

@bianca

Ah, yes, I can see how my comment might have sounded that way. When I said “Actually Existing theism” I meant existing in history, especially Medieval history, not existing in the present. I mean, I think this kind of dynamic (keep serious thought out of sight) did exist in the social context from which the Enlightenment emerged, I don’t feel comfortable trying to judge people who thought that way, and I also don’t see a need to re-invent the Enlightenment in new and different social contexts by pretending it hasn’t already been invented.

misreading, delRey, misreading.

delRey, I would say that the main reason ordinary lay people fall behind crazy religious missions and bigotry is because they apply the same level of critical thought to their preferred religious text as you are applying to the Koran. Reading a religious text like the bible or the Koran at such a superficial level, from the moral context of the 21st century, is a recipe for disaster, is shallow, and is not something that religious scholars have ever done.

In the same way, reading the behaviour of societies in terms only of their religious content, without considering their development path, resource constraints, political conditions and external factors, is a really shallow approach to understanding the world. It might make you feel good but it won’t help you understand what’s happening around you.

Of course to dedicated Islamophobes, any suggestion that they actually learn something about the Koran before using canned out-of-context quotes from it is just The Enemy getting all tricksy. (Rather like the reaction of many “New Atheists” to being informed that it might be a good idea to learn about theology before dismissing it, oddly enough.)

there’s no serious evidence that it’s beneficial today.

DelRey, show me where I said religion is beneficial today. Yes that’s a rhetorical question. You appear not to have read most of what I wrote. Your comments here don’t pass the Turing test.

delRey, the passage you quoted is a lyrical description of the process of waging war. The part just before the passage you quoted is about ceasefires during Ramadan; the part you quoted is the subsequent bit where the Koran describes the return to war. It is not telling muslims to kill pagans. There are also tracts in the Koran about leaving pagans alone, because it’s not important for muslims to convert non-muslims (god will sort ’em out).

Like I said, you’re applying a shallow misreading. This site might help you to understand a little more about how the Koran is interpreted in connection with war.

You’re showing a very wide streak of racism in your comments about islam, delrey. You’re clearly ignorant of the history of Indonesia and very uninterested in a nuanced understanding of Islam. I’m willing to bet most of the people commenting here aren’t exactly experts on the topic (I’m certainly not) but you’re reading like someone who picked up a few talking points from Mark Steyne and hasn’t thought about them since.

To balance things, here’s a shallow, out-of context, misreading from the Darwin canon:

The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

@645,
DelRey, show me where I said religion is beneficial today.

I didn’t say you did say that. I was responding to your false dichotomy of “we can say” that religion is a great force for evil in the world OR “we can say” that it played a major role in laying the foundations of the Enlightenment. No, we can say both of those things (although the second one is highly dubious). There’s no conflict between them.

@648,
In all seriousness, I’m starting to wonder now if DelRey isn’t really, actually a bot, which somebody wrote to make fun of Dawkins-followers.)

By your own admission, you haven’t actually read Dawkins, except for “a few posts on Boing Boing.” But you’re nevertheless sure that his arguments aren’t persuasive. I stopped thinking you might have anything serious to contribute after your first few comments.

@650,
In the absence of an actual God, what is supposed to prevent particular religions from becoming anything whatsoever, good, bad, or indifferent? Certainly history demonstrates that even when their plain meaning is not all that mysterious, scriptures doesn’t crimp the style of the exegetes very much,

Or, rather, history demonstrates that Christian scriptures don’t crimp the style of contemporary liberal western Christians, and their apologists, very much. They simply dismiss or “reinterpret” the scriptures they don’t like, ignoring not only the plain meaning of the text but also two thousand years of Christian tradition. Not to mention the much more traditionalist Christians in the developing world, where most Christians now live.

Little wonder that liberal western Christianity is dying off so rapidly. When your “religion” is little more than progressive western secular morality dressed up with a bit of Christian terminology, there isn’t much reason keep it going.

Do please show us the “context”

When I have time to translate a post into single-syllable words, I’ll rattle your cage.

Do please show us the “context” that you think somehow changes the meaning of “slay the Pagans wherever you find them” into something that does not involve slaying pagans.

DelRey: the context clarifies that this refers to very specific pagans who had violated treaties, specifically grants rights even to the treaty-violating pagans who want to surrender, and excludes the pagans Mohammed’s party had existing treaties with. So yes, the context changes the meaning greatly.

As someone who still greatly admires Bertrand Russell, I feel a pang of regret that atheism can’t find better champions. I’ll have to take a look at Botton’s book, he seems to have been forgotten.

DelRey: the context clarifies that this refers to very specific pagans who had violated treaties,

No it doesn’t. It refers to how pagans are to be treated after the term of the treaty has expired, unless they “repent” and convert to Islam. It doesn’t say anything about restricting the killing to pagans who had violated treaties.

DelRey: he does not and you are a liar.

Yes he does. The text I gave you is a direct quote.

Dude, you just can’t read.

Dude, you’re lying through your teeth. The preceding verse instructs “So fulfil your engagements with them TO THE END OF THEIR TERM.” But after the term is over (“But when the forbidden months are past”), the order is to “fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them.” There’s absolutely nothing about restricting the killing to treaty violators. You have simply invented that out of thin air.

Yes there is.

Quote it, then. I have the section in front of me. Quote the text that you claim restricts the killing to treaty violators only.

One more shot:

Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.
And if anyone of the idolaters seeketh thy protection (O Muhammad), then protect him so that he may hear the Word of Allah, and afterward convey him to his place of safety. That is because they are a folk who know not.
How can there be a treaty with Allah and with His messenger for the idolaters save those with whom ye made a treaty at the Inviolable Place of Worship ? So long as they are true to you, be true to them. Lo! Allah loveth those who keep their duty.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Sage advice from a wise man.

One more shot:

Which just confirms what I already told you. The first line states “when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them.” There’s nothing about restricting the killing to treaty violators. You’re just inventing a restriction that isn’t in the text.

(I know he’s already referenced it, but carefully ignored the parts about how “a number of contemporary Muslims, including influential Islamic reformers have rejected this, arguing for religious freedom instead.” Because of course we’re not supposed to notice or credit the existence of Islamic reformers or contrary opinions.)

Mind you I am be unable to write.

Also we’re being red-herringed big time here. War with unbelievers as described in Surahs 9:1 – 9:5 is very very different to punishing apostasy by death. delREy is changing tack there significantly. Apostasy (according to delRey’s wiki) is:

The orthodox conditions of apostasy are that the person in question (a) has understood and professed the shahada, (b) has acquired knowledge of those rulings of the shariah necessarily known by all Muslims, (c) is of sound mind at the time, (d) has reached or surpassed puberty, and (e) has consciously and deliberately rejected or consciously and deliberately intends to reject as untrue either the shahada (and what it is commonly known to entail) or those rulings of the shariah necessarily known by all Muslims. Maliki scholars additionally require that the person in question (f) have publicly engaged in the obligatory practices of the religion

under this definition (and modern scholars add extra bits, apparently) apostasy is the deliberate rejection of the commonly-understood body of Islamic law and rulings by someone who understands them. It’s not just hte random blatherings of a pagan. So it’s unrelated to the previous text delRey was misrepresenting.

So the pagans either convert to Islam

DelRey PUHLEEZE KEEP READING AND DON’T STOP AT THE LITTLE DOTS! You’ve already agreed to one teensy admission – pagans needn’t be killed! – and that’s a mighty big step. Go on. Read further. Turns out you can make deals with them and not kill them and they can stay idolaters! Seriously!

So long as they are true to you, be true to them.

Who exactly is being referred to in that sentence? Three guesses.

DelRey PUHLEEZE KEEP READING AND DON’T STOP AT THE LITTLE DOTS!

Substance PUHLEEZE STOP INVENTING NEW TEACHINGS OUT OF THIN AIR AND PRETENDING THEY APPEAR IN THE KORAN!

Personally, I find this a despicable teaching:

Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

.

Oh it’s fun once in a while.

Turing Test

I am genuinely interested in whether DelRey could work out what that “neither a borrower nor a lender be” bit might be about. But anyway:

Dear DelRey: who is being referred to in the quoted text below? You haven’t made even one guess.

So long as they are true to you, be true to them.

The CCP doesn’t persecute all religions, though, does it? It doesn’t prevent Tibetans worshiping, it doesn’t prevent Buddhism, and as far as I know certain types of christianity are allowed. It persecutes Falun Gong because Falun Gong break its rules (as I understand it there are some rules about veneration of the head of the religion that need to be observed – the religious leader can’t supplant Mao). So the Chinese Communist Party is a red herring too.

Doctor Slack, I think it’s possible to construct an argument that atheism offers the potential to be more moral than religiousism. Something along the lines of atheist morality being based on principles derived from universal aspects of the human condition, rather than arbitrary rules that are culture-specific and often formed in very heirarchical and old-fashioned environments.

I don’t think I would make such an argument; I prefer to see my atheism as a belief about the nature of the universe, not the nature of morality. But I do think that the “good” things religions lay claim to tend to be quite universal across religions, which suggests that where religions offer positive moral lessons, they’re drawing on something more fundamental that atheists might be able to touch directly.

Dawkins and the Hitch, in ranting about muslims, obviously haven’t found a way to touch that something.

“derived from universal aspects of the human condition” – religiosity is an aspect of human condition, and so far much more universal than atheism (though it might change). And what the heck could “more moral” mean? The only difference is in assigning the source to your morality. You believe (erroneously, imo) that your morality is some sort of naturally occurring phenomenon; they believe it comes from some supernatural force. In reality it merely a social construct.

‘I provided one.’ (Doctor Slack 690)
If it wasn’t for Atheism, no government would persecute religious dissenters who disrespect the government?
‘As for blaming communism on atheists: communism is ideologically and very specifically atheistic. It doesn’t actually seem unfair to “blame it” on atheists, so long as one does not contend that all atheists are communists.’ (Doctor Slack)
Do I get to blame all things done in the name of specifically religious ideologies on the religious? Some people on this thread might object.

To balance things, here’s a shallow, out-of context, misreading from the Darwin canon:

The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.