richard dawkins (1 Viewer)

[Cryptid]

F*ck this. I'm going to 8. Only believe in anything within five feet of me.

 

[Unicron]

Watched that Hitchens on Hannity clip (edited to fuck to make Hannity look like a gimp no?) and his reasoning for his anti-theist stance seemed a little absurd to me.

 

[frona]

If ye want to read an uplifiting book by a sound atheist ye should read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. It doesn't diss religion as such, but it does stress the importance of logical thought, especially in a time when superstition and hysteria seem to be on the rise.

 

[quackster]

pretty sure i saw richard dawkins at mass last sunday. make of that what you will.

 

[Vinnie]

(edited to fuck to make Hannity look like a gimp no?)

Hannity needs no editing help to always look like a gimp. He's as thick as fuck and a complete arsehole to boot

 

[Unicron]

Hannity needs no editing help to always look like a gimp. He's as thick as fuck and a complete arsehole to boot

This is true of course but the cuts back to him in that interview seem to be very sudden.

 

[Diumraid]

anyway, i do think dawkins comes across as not understanding why people do not understand his argument. i've heard someone claim that he comes across as mildly aspergent, in that he's not very empathetic.

but i enjoyed the god delusion. read as a polemic, it's fine.

Bam!! Sorry all; I haven't read past this post because I had to reply. I got into a particularly good discussion on the theism / atheism subject recently and found myself imagining that genuine post-religious thinking would be a kind of profound autism. Dawkins isn't there yet but..
I know people who believe that autism is a part of human evolution. Bam!!

 

[Space]

The problem isn't really the religion or the faith structure, but people themselves. The bible isn't an exact account, sure it has two different creation stories and no less than four versions of the gospel. It allows priests make up their own mind on it. It suited them to preach blind acceptance for political reasons rather than moral.

With the widespread increase in literacy over the last couple of centuries, almost any lunatic can now decide what truths are in it. People take comfort in knowing they're right and will easily delude themselves by quoting the bible out of context and ignoring the parts that contradict their beliefs.

Religion is a symptom of this need, not the cause.

This is true imo.

 

[Diumraid]

To qualify that a little:
Logical positivism taken to its extreme does not allow for any kind of myth - presumably even the myth that men and women in white coats somewhere are concerned about your health and well-being. It also doesn't allow even for image, metaphor, analogy, the notions of truth, beauty, love or any kind of affective language.

The God delusion is so riddled with problems that I can hardly begin. One big problem is that the type of mind I described above really doesn't do philosophy and can't seem to make any distinction between logical propositions and 'reality'. Check out his attempt to debunk Zeno's paradox.

 

[1000smurfs]

To qualify that a little:
Logical positivism taken to its extreme does not allow for any kind of myth - presumably even the myth that men and women in white coats somewhere are concerned about your health and well-being. It also doesn't allow even for image, metaphor, analogy, the notions of truth, beauty, love or any kind of affective language.

genuine post-religious thinking would be a kind of profound autism.

atheism is an absence of belief in God, not absence of belief in everything that can't be logically or empirically proved.
It doesn't need to go that far to be genuine.

Logical Positivism has also long been out of favour as an epistemological underpinning for science.

Even so I would think of solipsism as the philosophical idea most akin to autism.


I don't want to put words in your mouth but i could read you as saying " Without religion a person has some form of autisim"

 

[Diumraid]

atheism is an absence of belief in God, not absence of belief in everything that can't be logically or empirically proved.
It doesn't need to go that far to be genuine.

Logical Positivism has also long been out of favour as an epistemological underpinning for science.

Even so I would think of solipsism as the philosophical idea most akin to autism.


I don't want to put words in your mouth but i could read you as saying " Without religion a person has some form of autisim"

Absolutely not.
The sociological view of religion is that one can effectively ignore the supernatural / invisible elements and concentrate on the concrete; this is logical-positivism in action. I suggest that the underlying structure of religious thinking is intrinsically bound up with but not identical to wisdom, beauty, morality, love and the idea of meaning that these things embody. Wisdom as the small-scale pattern of greater wisdom, beauty of beauty, love of love. If you conceive of these things at all then there's no limit to how far they can go, they belong to the infinite, or more particularly, the sublime and timeless.

I believe that it is a continuum and that to arbitrarily select a part of that continuum and declare it bogus is a fallacy if the rest of it is going to remain unquestioned. I'm not saying that it's not questioned but you seem to imply that there might be a clear line that can be drawn.

There is a modern mode of thinking that will not deal with unquantifiables like emotions, concepts, aesthetics etc. I'm arguing that this kind of thinking is moving toward autism, not in the clinical sense but in the way that it necessarily seems to lead toward a total lack of affect.

Solipsism is self-oriented so i don't think it's what I'm talking about. Even the myth of selfhood is dissolved in this paradigm. Like The Third policeman, people are beginning to resemble their computers.

 

[flashback]

what... the.. fuck?

I ehh, stridently dis.. no, agree. No wait, I completely....ssshhhhaaahhh. Yeah.







Diarmuid accidentally the entire thread.

 

[Space]

what... the.. fuck?

I ehh, stridently dis.. no, agree. No wait, I completely....ssshhhhaaahhh. Yeah.







Diarmuid accidentally the entire thread.

Accidentally what?

On another note I've wondering lately "would the world be that much different/better of a place if no-one believed in God?"

 

[Diumraid]

what... the.. fuck?

I ehh, stridently dis.. no, agree. No wait, I completely....ssshhhhaaahhh. Yeah.

Ha! I imagine it all looks like nonsense to just about everyone for many reasons....

I was answering a technical question... would be happy to reiterate in non-technical terms if anyone wants to know.

 

[Lili Marlene]

There is a modern mode of thinking that will not deal with unquantifiables like emotions, concepts, aesthetics etc. I'm arguing that this kind of thinking is moving toward autism, not in the clinical sense but in the way that it necessarily seems to lead toward a total lack of affect.

I get this bit. I like this bit.

 

[egg_]

The sociological view of religion is that one can effectively ignore the supernatural / invisible elements and concentrate on the concrete

I have only a very dim understanding of what you're on about, dude, but if I'm picking you up right it seems to me that you're using a pretty uncommon concept of religion and "god" to try and discredit atheism.

I'm an atheist. When I say that, what I mean is there is nothing but the natural universe. Here's some corollaries of that:
- there is no creator
- there is no absolute morality
- there's no justice, there's just us

That doesn't mean I can't experience beauty, truth and wisdom, and doesn't even mean that I can't have mystical experiences I can't explain. And the fact that I can have those experiences doesn't mean that I actually, really deep down, believe in god. Unless you re-define "god" (as you seem to be doing)

 

[egg_]

Hmmm

I guess the real distinction between myself and a theist (and the only real theists I've spoken about this to are my parents, so really when I say "a theist" I mean "my Ma and Da") is that I believe that everything we experience is a purely natural phenomenon, a product of the physical universe, where they believe that very many things (including our consciousness, and the universe itself) are driven by an outside, supernatural agency

Why does it even matter? Because understanding ourselves in terms of what we really are is how we engineer more fulfilling lives for ourselves.

 

[snakybus]

Happy engineering, egg.

 

[flashback]

also is it true that, in certain circumstances, you can be immediately released back into the general public having completed a degree in Philosophy?

 

[Moods For Mallards]

also is it true that, in certain circumstances, you can be immediately released back into the general public having completed a degree in Philosophy?

Ha!