Dawkins in the Pulpit... meet the new atheists/evos same as the old boss?

Well, unlike many religions, the Amish (at least some sects) allow and even encourage teenagers and young adults to experience and even live in the outside world for a time so that they make a real choice to return to the Amish community or stay in the modern world.I have known a couple of people who's parents left the Amish community during this time and decided to remain away from it.

Parasites do certainly not serve a function in the whole of nature. Nor does any other species. Nature couldn't care less whether or not a particular species exists, goes extinct, or whatever. The only function the individual organisms of any species serve is to make more genes like the ones inside them.But your question as to why religion would be any different from a parasite is still a valid question. The only premise I've changed is that a parasite, and thus religion (if it can be likened to a parasite), does not serve a function in the whole of nature. Instead, they serve a very selfish one. They serve the purpose of perpetuating the equivalent of genes, which Dawkins - yes, that man again - coined "memes".I think that, just as the theory of evolution provides a very elegant and compelling explanation for biological diversity, a theory of memes could elegantly explain the persistance of certain ideas in the minds of mankind.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

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Or perhaps I know it all too well and mention the unmentionable.

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How very condecending of you to declare that you know others' minds better than they do.What gall.

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You don't attack strawmen because they aren't real and they pose no threat.

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Who says that the FSM isn't real?

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God, unlike the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, has always had that effect, even in the unbeliever, to offer a twinge of doubt in the atheist towards His existence.

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Again, how is it that you know exactly what every unbeliever believes?Perhaps you have a weak faith in God, and you have a twinge of doubt that you may be deluding yourself (as you believe all those people who believe 'false religions' are), and you are simply projecting your own uncertainty on to unbelievers.

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But my saying that he is interested in getting back at God was a bit of a Freudian slip on my part. I wouldn't expect an atheist to understand what I'm talking about. I would expect a former atheist who is now a theist to understand what I'm talking about. Its about tacit recognition. I'll just leave it at that.

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Again, how utterly arrogant to presume to think you know this.

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If belief in a Creator(s) is irrational, then the majority of human beings, past and present, fit into this category.

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Yes, you are quite correct.Humans are, generally speaking, incredibly irrational.Why do you think there are so many identified logical fallacies? Perhaps it could be the case that there are so many because humans are prone to so many?Why do you think that the scientific method is specifically designed to compensate for human bias? Maybe that's because humans are inherently perceptually biased and unless compensated for, this bias will skew results?

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And if they are irrational, then something is fundamentally wrong with nature that gave them such a prediliction to begin with?

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Nothing is "fundamentally wrong" with human nature. We are well adapted to a hunter/gatherer life on the savanah. All of those "irrational" biases served us well when making snap judgements about whether or not to trust that approaching person over yonder, for example.However, for the sorts of things we do today, and the technologies and people and cultures and ideologies and political stances we must deal with, all of those old propensities are inadequate, and often get in the way of effective thinking.Now, logic and reason are needed more than ever, not reliance upon emotion and bias and prejudice as was effective for the majority of our evolution. Unfortunately, logic and rationality are mostly acquired skills, and are not all that simple or easy to learn. These concepts of logic are not particularly natural for humans; hence the numerous fallacies, prejudices, and biases we have always displayed.

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Can I assume that you must think of yourself and those of your ilk to be, perhaps, superior from an evolutionary standpoint?

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No, not at all. We still have all the same inborn irrational minds.

So, if we gave you a test on the Theory of Evolution similar to the one you provide for the bible, and you failed, would that mean that you aren't qualified to claim anything about Evolutionary Biology, nor is your explanation for why you reject the ToE to be considered legitimate?

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When Christians discriminate against atheists, they find themselves in a court that openly asserts the existence of God, makes people swear on Bibles, and has a legal tradition of disallowing the testimony of atheists on the grounds that they can't take a meaningful oath to truthfulness without a God to be swearing to.

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FYI, I recently registered to vote in New Hampshire, and they had me raise my right hand and swear that what I had written on my voter registration form was correct, but they did not say "so help you God" or anything religious at all. No Bible either.I immediately and happily noted the absence of any mention of God in my secular government.

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The inabililty of so many (otherwise) intelligent people to reconcile a God of Wrath/Justice/Love has been the most astonishing aspect of my time here.

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{AbE}This especially since we are so capable of being the same ourselves. Any parents here?

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If any parent in the US treats their child the way that God treats his children in the Bible, we put them in jail.Edited by schrafinator, : No reason given.

Polio is also either the product of a Higher Power or a natural evolutionary occurence. And I should like to see that wiped from the face of the Earth. How about you? Clearly, then, Dawkins believes that religion is a credible threat. I find that just as likely as Dawkins' epigram. I agree; I would also point out that this applies just as well to atheists. Why yes. Or to advance a religious agenda. If Lemaitre supposed he was helping prove theism, that doesn't make his maths wrong, does it? Scientists may also be motivated by personal pride, or careerism, or love of money, or a desire to show up that bastard Professor Furtwangeler for the pompous, senile windbag that he is. So far as I can see, a scientific endeavor can be motivated by any of the Seven Deadly Sins except sloth. The quality of the science is determined by the facts, not by the motivations of the scientist.I should prefer, of course, that all scientists were motivated by a pure, high-minded search for the truth, but I am not so green as to suppose that this is the case. Communism is orthogonal to atheism; you can be a communist but not an atheist, or an atheist but not a communist.

The website you link to says that Hitler was never a member of the Thule Society and that he forcibly suppressed it when he took power.Some quotations from Hitler:For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. (Mein Kampf, vol. ii, ch. x)Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise. (Mein Kampf, vol ii, ch. i)God ... sent [us] into this world with the commission to struggle for our daily bread. (Mein Kampf, vol ii, ch. xiv)My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them. (Speech, April 12 1922, published in My New Order)Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people. (Speech, April 26, 1933)Oh, and I can't resist ... since this is EvC ...The fox remains always a fox, the goose remains a goose, and the tiger will retain the character of a tiger. (Mein Kampf, vol. ii, ch. xi) How the heck can someone believe something without knowing that they believe it?If they can, how do you know that you're not a Muslim?

Everything has purpose to it. If parasites were gone, don't you think that would effect the ecological order of things rather profoundly? But anyway, that really wasn't the purpose of the inquiry. Nature, as you alluded to, does not have a cognizant mind and has no real cares. But natural selection is not a random function. Therefore, if there are more religious persons than non-religious, and we live in a purely naturalistic world, what does that say about both parties? The irony coming from Dawkins is that he's expressed that ID is psuedoscientific at best, and yet, he invents a unit he calls, memes, that has no scientific merit to it, whatsoever. Memetics is a psuedoscience by classic definition. As of now, it is strictly theoretical. I will go so far as to say that it is a very interesting concept worthy of investigation, but nonetheless, someone that cries foul ball at ID should take a hard look at his own theory that has no scientific support.

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"There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility." -Theodore Roosevelt

It is probably worth me saying that the main area with which I would disagree with Dawkins is his stance on children in terms of faith.Faith based formal education in a secular society I do not believe is justified.
However banning parents from raising their children to believe in a particular faith (or anything else I can think of for that matter) is A) Totally unrealistic on any practical grounds and B) Smacks dangerously of state run thought control.The argument could be made for teaching children to think for themselves, to place rational evidence based conclusions above all others and to question any faith based conclusions. Dawkins would probably make that argument.
However I think the whole issue is too loaded with potential for equal but opposite indoctrination, pretty much as you suggest.We are possibly in danger of agreeing too much so far in this thread........I look forward to your thoughts on the Dawkins interview and response to the EP issues raised.

D'oh! I'm sorry; it's actually "Rind et al." My honest mistake. Papers in evolutionary psychology pass the same peer-review process, but that doesn't seem significant to you. I guess peer-review is only legitimate in so far as their conclusions are in line with the Great and Powerful Holmes. Well, that's absolutely false. The Rind study is deeply, methodologically flawed on a number of levels. Firstly, the metastudy restricts itself to convenience samples of college students, introducing a bias against victims so scarred as to leave their lives devastated with no realistic possibility of entering college. Moreover, Rind et al seem to have no clear criterion for which studies they chose to include and which they chose to omit, opening them to charges of cherry-picking data. Furthermore they make no attempt to standardize variables between studies, making the results of their metastudy difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from.The contention of "character assassination" seems unsupported; the only instance of character assassination I can see comes from Rind et al, who assert that their critics are "victimologists" obsessed with discrediting science to further an agenda; Rind et al give no reason why the same charge can't be leveled at them, considering their years of involvement in controversial studies advocating the legitimacy of child-adult sexual contact.The study is methodologically flawed, Holmes. But you overlook those flaws because the study tells you something you think is true. Who, exactly, is acting like a creationist? Any time you feel capable of doing that, feel free. But I've never seen you offer a legitimate criticism of the science of those papers; merely statistical quibbles that are far more minor than the major methodological flaws that you readily overlook in the Rind et al study. (Oh, and of course, plenty of misrepresentation of my arguments. That's an old Holmes favorite.) Of course, that's not what I accused you of, so there's another Holmes-brand misrepresentation. Using the passive voice to address an argument I made to someone else isn't consistent with your stated desire not to respond to my posts.If you want to reply to my argument, reply to me. Don't half-ass it. Just, don't get all indignant when I point out another round of your constant misrepresentations and straw-men. I've got no problem with pleasantries. I assumed that there would be no way you could argue with advice on how to refresh your browser cache. Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

(The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.) Yes. For example, we eliminated smallpox, and now there's no smallpox. Profound.Are you in favor of that, or against it? That people all over the world tend to commit the same mistakes: a fact borne out by psychological research.A huge majority of people --- 90% or more --- also make errors concerning really simple questions about logic and probability. This is because, in the words of Samuel Beckett, "people are bloody ignorant apes". Our response to this should not be to abandon logic and probability theory, but to educate people more carefully.Natural selection is, as you say, not a random function: but this only means that, intelligence having been strongly selected for in our lineage, we should be smarter than the other apes. Clearly it does not imply that we should be infallible. An "interesting concept worthy of investigation" is not, "by definition", pseudoscientific. I have myself criticized the concept of "memes" elsewhere on this board: but what claims has Dawkins made about the idea? He has only floated it as an "interesting concept". His attitude to it hardly differs from yours.

No, you still don't understand my point. Natural selection doesn't select what's best for humans; it selects what's best for survival.Not the survival of humans; the survival of what's being selected. Religion in this case. What about this are you having a hard time understanding? Religion hasn't been selected for qualities that are advantageous for humans; it's been selected for qualities that are advantageous to religion. Fair enough. But guesses seem to be all we have. You certainly haven't put forth anything better. Um, no, I pretty much can. People make the choice to be reasonable or not. Plenty of people have naturally negative proclivities that, through reason, they keep in check. If you couldn't tell the difference between things that exist and things that don't exist, how could knowledge exist? Nonsense. Look, two guys come up to you. One of them tells you that magic pixies exist, and the other tells you that they don't exist.After some pretty thourough research, you don't find any evidence at all for magic pixies. And you're going to sit there and tell me that you have absolutely no idea which one of those two guys is right? That their contradictory positions are both equally well-supported?That's idiotic, and if you really believe that it's significant reason to question your faculties of reason. What, do you check your bedroom every night for blue whales? But when you pray, you don't say "Ra-men" at the end, right? You don't believe in the FSM any more than you believe in Zeus or whatever, right?Why do you suppose that is? Their function is to survive and spread. The function of religion may very well be the same, and nothing more. Really? I'd like to marry another man, perhaps. Funny, though, a bunch of theists seem to think I shouldn't be allowed to do that.Of course decisions are being made for me. Every time the theistic majority demands that their peculiar morality be reflected in legislation with no compelling secular purpose, decisions are being made for me. There you go, proving my point. Abortions happen long before you'd be able to see limbs. Your objection to reproductive freedom, your advocacy of forced birth is not based on reality but on religion. False statement based not on reality but on religion. People aren't killed during research on embryonic stem cells. False statement based not on reality but on religion. Adult stem cells are not plenipotent, and no researcher believes that adult stem cells hold the same potential as embryonic cells. Adult stem cells do not "work just fine." Their capacity for theraputic use is quite limited. The theraputic capacity of embryonic cells is unknown, which is why research should be allowed to continue.You continue to prove my point. Your objections are not grounded in reality but in religious dogma and misinformation, whereas mine are informed by factual information. But our viewpoints are supposed to be considered equal? It's ridiculous. Patently untrue. Even towards the end of the war, before his suicide, he consistently reiterates his Christianity and what he believed to be his Christian duty to promote his Aryan race. That's the point. They promoted Lysenkoism because it wasn't Darwinism. Seriously, try to keep up. I'm not a Buddist; it's not for me to say whether or not Pol Pot violated the tenants of his faith. I can only relate his faith as he reported it. If his actions were sufficient to belie his statements, you'd be unable to point to a single person who was a real Christian. Yes, exactly. Does that mean you'll drop the ridiculous premise that the crimes of Soviet communism had anything to do with atheism? Somehow, I doubt it. And yet, the government was viewed to have the power to supernaturally listen in on your private conversations through ordinary radios. Paintings of Stalin were held to have the power to act as a conduit through which Stalin could view things. And everybody knows that the KGB was trying to develop psychic powers as an intelligence tool.Sure, the Soviet government was opposed to the Orthodox church, obviously. With the Tsars gone the Church was the last opposing power. But atheists? Not hardly. They certainly imbued themselves with supernatural powers, and demanded worship of the state by the populace.That's a religion. "God is the state; the state is God." Don't you remember that famous saying? Not exactly the position of atheists, don't you think? You've repeatedly asserted that I have a secret belief in God, even after I've told you that I know that's not true. So you're calling me a liar.It's pretty simple, NJ. If you didn't intend to brand me a liar, stop telling me I'm lying to you.

Of course it would. But affecting ecology is not the same as having a purpose in it. If that were the case then anything going extinct would mean the loss of a functional unit, and nature would be in dire straits by now. It tells me that people's minds are fertile ground for things like religion.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Schrafinator, That is encouraging. Applause for the amish!Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't