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

Or, alternatively, he is not trying to "get back at God", but to promote atheism, and he realises that the best way to promote atheism is to promote atheism.You see how much easier human psychology is when you suppose that people are motivated to do what they're actually doing? Despite being dated, Russel's works still rank third amongst books which persuade people to become atheists. So I'm not sure Dawkins would object to the comparison.Aldous Huxley? Don't you mean T H Huxley? I don't follow you. No. No. In the first place, I don't think anyone blamed all war on religion; in the second place, no-one has fought a war for atheism, which I think is the point.

Dawkins believes that "religion makes good people do bad things". Hence it would serve a moral purpose. I said no such thing.I said that he was not "trying to get back at God". He is certainly attacking theism. These are two different things.If a Christian apologist attacks Islam, is it correct to say that he is "trying to get back at Allah"? A while ago I went to a website (I think it was positiveatheism.com) which maintains a file of "deconversion stories" from ex-Christians. I made a list of the reasons and broke them down into categories.The second most effective book was Sagan's Demon-Haunted World, which perhaps demonstates the virtues of moderation, since it never struck me as strongly anti-theist.The number one book for making atheists, and indeed the number one reason why people deconvert, is, of course, the Bible. The charge against creationists is that they do pseudoscience and pass it off as science to further their religious agenda. If I catch Dawkins doing that, I shall be the first to complain. I didn't know that. Er ... it is true? True, but (a) he didn't fight a war for atheism (b) it was communism, not atheism that was the problem. All the evil atheists you list were in fact fanatical communists. If they'd merely been atheists, there wouldn't have been a problem.With communism, they replaced religion with a secular belief system which was based only on faith; and to speak for myself, I think that when men do that, it is almost certain to turn out worse that if they'd just stuck with Christianity: the problem is not theism as such but fideism.

Evidence? That's exactly what I was trying to say about communism.Remind me ... if you and I agree ... isn't that one of the signs of the impending Apocalypse?

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?

(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.