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Author | Topic: Anti-theistic strawmen? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
Dawkins' basic point is here as well - without faith, without the system in which everybody reinforces the idea that faith is good despite the lack of evidence (or even despite contradictory evidence), the death cults could not function as they do now. are you then willing to defend the idea that atheistic or non-theistic nationalism can't breed the same thing? or that any variety of mobilizing political or social factor couldn't breed the same thing? humans are capable of being polarized and radicalized and those who seek power will utilize this no matter what mobilizing phychology or theology or whatever they choose to use.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
nothing. but often, nationalism has a theistic tinge. i was excluding this from my query.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
i'm simply saying that his assertion that without religious faith the level of commitment these individuals demonstrate wouldn't happen is indefensible.
His point needs to be made, as unlike the others, religion is often described as "spiritual" or "good". Considering its historical record, this is strange. see, my problem is that i think logically and see that if the religion is being used by the power hungry who have any number of such tools at their disposal, then the problem is the power-hungry and not the tool they choose to abuse.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
He's saying to people like you that the promotion of the "faith comes first" attitude will automatically result in people like them. who's promoting a "faith comes first" attitude? dawkins isn't against "faith comes first," he's against "faith at all."
But you know as well as I that the "evolutionists" on this site have a mixture of philosophies, and they only support the ToE on the basis of evidence. i'm not convinced that most evolutionists can comprehend it. they just don't like religion.
So is Dawkins' view of religion a strawman? i have no idea. i just don't think it's an accurate view of reality. it's really easy to say "the idea of god is evil." it's a little harder to say "there are a few bad people in the world and they abuse more or less harmless ideas to get other people to do bad things, and also people are in general easily corrupted." blaming the religion instead of the people who participate in it, is an excuse to ignore the evils hiding within yourself and that you are capable of the same things and are probably already guilty of some. Edited by brennakimi, : No reason given.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
Still, it's interesting how many of the stories describe rejection as a young adult of theistic ideas the speaker held as a child. Never discussed is whether the person's understanding of theism at age 10 might not be as every bit as rudimentary as the same person's understanding of, say, natural science at that same age. I'd say theists have a legitimate gripe here.
i would agree. but what i'd also say is that even the bible describes that people who are "young in the faith" have a tendency to gravitate twards childish or simplistic ideas. i'd say that those nuances of mature faith are generally lacking from those who worship (for want of a better word) "getting saved" rather than growing in the spirit or whatever you'd like to call it. a large group of christians tend to follow people with "miraculous" conversion stories. these tend to be later in life and start grown men and women off as spiritual babies. because people are crazy enough to think these people's conversions might make them good leaders or advisors, the outside community views them as examples of christianity, and the internal community tends to follow them into folly. it's like children having children and worse. so we have aetheists or other "former christians" whose spiritual experience is that of a child and christian "leaders" whose spiritual experience is that of a child, and altogether we end up with blind people complaining about blind people leading blind people. this is not theology, and it is not religion. it's a pep rally for legalism.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
He states up front that if your brand of theology is metaphorical wishy-washy stuff that makes no particular claims other than subjective theobabble, then he isn't really arguing against that because it would be futile to do so. He focusses his effort on the kind of theology that has real world implications, and why those implications affect us and why we should challenge the faith-based reasoning that leads to them and the undue respect they gain. i could be mistaken, but last i heard, his opinion was that moderate theism is just as bad, if not worse than fundamentalism becuase it serves to legitimize faith which legitimizes faith-based thinking. it's like the trojan horse of mental diseases.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
because it does not illustrate the full range of theistic thought when it claims to.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
Or does it only address the dangerous part of the range? i think that depends on who you ask. it seems to me that some think that all of the range is dangerous.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
true enough, but the use of this generalization of theism *is* part of the discussion here and part of the particular threads referenced in this sub-discussion.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
"I'm ok, you're ok, God is when you love someone"? "The feeling I get from eating chocolate, hearing birds, and smoking pot, that's God"? moderation and wisdom does not require this crap.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
If you're going to say that "God" is just a metaphor for human community and everything good about us, not an actual conscious being who takes real action in the universe for our benefit, in what sense are you a theist? i said no such thing. god can be a real being taking action in the universe without being the malevolent beast most christians take him to be. mature theology moves past legalism (read: fundamentalism) into an understanding of who god is and what he does and does not do and what people have said about him and how those things differ. it has nothing to do with "feelings" or "hand-waving". but it may still give more questions than answers.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
complete fucking secret it isn't. you just have to actually study it with people who've studied it for a long time and not people who are "leik omgz! when wuz you saveed!!!"
Regardless of what you said, what I described was the beliefs of the "mature theologians" whom Dawkins is accused of ignoring. The reason that it's appropriate to ignore them is because their "theology" isn't; it's completely content-free. There's no "there" there. says you.
Dawkins refutes that God, and I have as well, on many occasions. dawkins is a biologist. he can't possibly refute god with any authority.
the fact that you assert a God who actually exists makes you a country bumpkin that's nice.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
it's not that he could be an authority on god, but that biologists deal with life and not extra-universal junk. my assertion here is that --aside from anyone's ordinary philosophizing-- no one can refute god.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
How is one person's ordinary philosphizing distinguishable from another's? it isn't.
how can you separate childish theology from mature theology? i think it's some rubbish about considering multiple sources and cultural insights and experience rather than charisma and good feelings.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3958 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
i thought it was really a blatantly obvious part of this whole discussion that no one can disprove god. this is no giant proof, but it is what it is.
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