Richard Dawkins: Enemies of Reason - Page 2

Speak for yourself. I play guitar.

The possibility's there. The follow-through has everything to do with the individual.

Removing religion from the equation doesn't automatically lead to a curious, open-minded individual. Religion can be replaced with nationalistic feelings that restrict one's ability to question the country's leadership. Religion can be replaced with a strict adherence to a devout sort of Marxism that restricts one's ability from viewing the world in terms of anything but economics. Religion can be replaced with a belief in a philosophical system like Objectivism that restrict's one's ability to understand the perspectives of pretty much anyone else.

To say nothing of the fact that segments of some religions (Buddhism and Judaism, to name two) encourage questioning. Generally speaking, I would guess that the Dalai Lama is more open-minded and pro-rebellion than King Jong Il.

No, I'm not.

They're all potentially meta-narratives. As is any given religion.

I'm training to become a Buddhist monk, and I get fewer odd looks and comments than my atheist friends, and they're perfectly nice and personable about their system of unbelief. Well, most of them, anyway.

It's kinda fun, the only one of them who's just a huge cock about it is a huge Dawkins fan. Tickles me a bit, as I'm certain that that isn't Dawkins' intention.

I'm guessing it would be equally (if not more) rebellious to be a Scientologist in your circumstances, though, right?

If you worked at a job (or lived in a country) composed largely of atheists, it wouldn't be rebellious at all to be an atheist, but it would be pretty rebellious to be a polytheist.

I figured we were talking about the concept of atheism, itself, not the circumstances in which an atheist might live.

Yeah, but living in America at this time, inundated with all the religious trappings that we have, to declare oneself an atheist would have some sort of rebellion attached to it. I know what you're saying in regards to the circumstances. Maybe to live undeclared as an atheist doesn't require any rebellious nature. But there would have to be some kind of personal resistance to the common way of life of some sort.

And I actually think if someone declared themselves a Scientologist it would be less difficulty than to declare themselves an atheist. At least, to them, it's some kind of value system. I was doing a deposition the other day and the court transcriber discovered that she lived in the same subdivision that I did. She then asked me, "What church did you choose?" I told her that I don't go to church and she was noticeably cooler to me for the rest of the depo. It's still something of a social stigma to not be religious.

Sure, but this is all about the social ramifications about being an atheist, and that has everything to do with environment, not the qualities inherent to atheism as a (non-)belief. Rebelliousness* and atheism don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, which is what louse seemed to be claiming.

Is one an atheist because it's important to be a rebel or because one doesn't believe in God? It seems like a silly question, but I think some (primarily young people) actually come by their rebelliousness first, their atheism second. This suggests to me that were they to grow up in a predominantly atheistic culture, they'd be the first to gravitate toward religion. The act of rebellion is more important than the belief systems in play.

* Yeah, I know I'm conflating rebelliousness and anarchy here a little, but I didn't get the impression that louse meant that atheists tend to lean toward anarchy as a legitimate political system, but that they have a generally anarchic spirit - a rebellious nature. If he meant the former, I'd highly disagree. Most atheists I know lean leftward toward socialism, more government programs, etc., not libertarianism and its limited government.

There's no way we'll really know, though. It's an interesting question. Does Western atheism come from a sense of rebelliousness or a genuine lack of belief, seperate from all social rules? I came by my atheism (or lack of religion, that would be a better term) gradually, after years of learning and then disregarding my religious background. I come from a Catholic household and I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through high school, and even then I didn't consider myself overly religious. It wasn't until I was out on my own that I decided that I just wasn't religious by nature, first by disavowing my Catholicism, then religion in general. That's not to say I don't believe in God; I just don't care much. This didn't come from being rebellious, I don't think; it's just that I didn't buy the idea that my morality had to be tied into a theological belief structure. I don't need the idea of God to be a good person.

I don't want to force my views on anyone, and I resent it when people do it to me. Am I anti-religion because it bucks the trend? I don't know. I do know that I like my life without all those trappings, and I manage to not beat my wife or kid or kill anyone in the process.

I have a similar perspective, but I didn't have to reject any particular religion to get to it - I wasn't raised in a religious home. I guess that's why I don't really buy that anarchic tendencies and atheism are all that tied together. I don't consider myself particularly rebellious in my atheism.

If anything, I'm the contrarian in this particular context (this board) for being the atheist with a good attitude toward religion. I like to think I'm not in that position because of a fundamental leaning toward rebelliousness, but because there are genuinely good arguments to be made. But then there's always the possibility that I researched and developed these arguments, specifically so I could be a pain in the ass. Hard to say, really.

*cough* noitsnot *cough*

I don't know you, but like I say to everyone on the fence - to be an atheist, you have to let go of the false hope of Heaven.

To talk more directly about Dawkin's stuff, I'm kind of stumped to find any other sort of rationale behind it other than the validation one I brought up earlier. No one is going to "convert" to atheism because they watched a few Dawkin's videos on the internet. The people being interviewed and those who share their views aren't going to change, because their religious views come from something deeper (or different) than reason or logic might unearth.

Changing your religious outlook is an intensely personal journey. And I don't think a few internet videos are going to have much of an effect on it.

Sure, they won't change and we won't change, but what about a kid who sees this? Leaving aside the political baggage, these videos are basically Mythbusters. They show that it's possible for something to seem correct, yet not hold up to a controlled, scientific test. A very important lesson, one that's way way too easy to forget - all the more reason to repeat it again and again.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Did anyone here turn to atheism because they watched some TV? Went on the internet? Listened to a radio program?

For me, my chucking of religion happened after some serious reflection on myself, my world, and how I relate to it. You might argue that this sort of media creates an environment that lends to self-reflection and critical analysis but I would argue that anyone willing to toy with religious disbelief was liable to do that anyway, and those who aren't are not going to be swayed in the opposite direction.

Religion is not some "myth" that once disproved instantly changes a person's world-view. For most people that believe in it, it is something that is incredibly more essential, sustaining, and integral to their view of themselves.

Yes. Not everyone, not instantly, maybe not even knowingly. But this stuff affects us, especially when we're young, and can determine the way we think. I think most of the really influential material is fiction as opposed to documentary-type stuff, but they work in similar ways.

I'm not saying that as much information as possible shouldn't be stuffed into kids (like making sure science books are full of actual science). What I am saying is that this kind of confrontational, purposeful mangling of religious viewpoints is at best fruitless and ineffective. But that's just my opinion.

I was a lazy agnostic until I read Carl Sagan. What you see, read and hear most definitely can influence your conclusions.

And I really don't see how Dawkins is mangling anything, purposeful or not. What is it about this that's pissing you off so badly? I'm really not seeing it.

But would you consider him more open minded than The Pope?

edit to add: oh and reading this thread reminds me of how incredibly grateful I am to live where I do and not in a society that seem to insist I have to publically proclaim my beliefs or lack of them.

No ones fucking business frankly and anyone that would judge me based on that aint worth my time.

I understand, and I hope you understand that I'm not arguing for purposeful mangling of anything. It's just that, if there is a good teaching tool out there (and it can be anything, there's nothing special about Dawkins), then I hope we don't hold it back out of fear of shaking things up. (Though I have to admit, for me that's a positive - DaveB was right in that for some people the contrarian aspect did come first.)

Carl Sagan talked about the wonders of the universe. Dawkins interviews religious fundamentalists to poke holes in their beliefs. One expanded the knowledge of the cosmos and of ourselves. The other aims to show the backwardness of divergent views. One is not like the other.

It's not that I'm mad at Dawkins. More power to him for all I care. I'm just skeptical of the effect that his efforts might entail.

Im not religious. Im agnostic. But what I am is bored with this lazy approach people have taken to recently in saying 'oh man, all religion is crap, all religious people are idiots, religion is the root of all evil'.
All modern day western civilized values which we hold dear are informed by religion, dont kid yourself otherwise.

Lies. If you look back on history up to the present, you see increasing advances (ie. discovering the earth isn't flat) that spite religion, in a struggle against dogmatic prejudice.

What Western values are you speaking of specifically? "Thou shall not murder"? Yeah, that one's exclusive to this area...

If you're talking about any of the major religions then no. The development of the values that we hold dear today predates them. By quite a long time I might add. In fact you could say that "western civilized values" have altered religion more than the other way round. Read for example about how different Christianity is now from the proto-Christianity of 1st century A.D. Especially the huge change that occurred post-enlightenment.

As for this: 'oh man, all religion is crap, all religious people are idiots, religion is the root of all evil' change to 'oh man, all religion is wrong, all religious people are wrong, religion is obsolete' and I would agree.

Citing history as some kind of proof that religion has consistently held us back as a race is nonsensical. To say that religion is some kind of static, non-evolving thing that prevents positive change doesn't hold up when you consider that religious thinking has informed pretty much everything from art to politics to philosophy to, yes, even scientific advances.

Most of the world's great thinkers until fairly recently were religious and didn't make their decisions independently of this factor. Were some of the world's dumbest people religious, too? Of course! Practically everyone was religious. But you'd have to be an idiot to attribute all of the good impulses of the great men to secularism, and all of the worst impulses of the terrible men to religion. It just doesn't scan.

And, yeah, "thou shalt not murder..." all of those important human (not just Western) values? They may not be specific to religion, but one could argue that religion came about so that we had a way to codify and discuss them.

You can play "what if" all you want, but religion did have an impact in the way that values were developed. Could they have developed without religion? Possibly. We'll never know. But for whatever reason, humanity chose to develop them in a way that was dependent upon a spiritual element. You can dismiss it with an "Eh. We would have gotten around to developing a value system one way or another," but it's kind of laughable. We didn't develop it "one way or another." We developed the foundations of our values almost entirely through religion.

I think what bugs me most about these conversations is the lack of historical perspective. You can't just deny the stuff that doesn't support your argument.

Also...

Hey, thanks for an overly reductive tip that should be obvious to any 15 year old who ever put a minute of thought into the matter. I'm not on the fence, and I don't believe in Heaven. There are also theists who don't put much stock in Heaven. There are also some atheists who do believe in a Heaven (very roughly speaking). They're called Buddhists.

Modern religion may be the egg, but where did that "Western civilized values" chicken come from?

First of all "Western civilized values" is not the phrasing of my choice as I don't believe there is anything inherently "Western" about civilized values. Hence the quotes.

Second, the seed of said values was planted by the stoic and humanist philosophers of classical Greece. They were spread to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East during the Hellenistic period where by mixing with Judaism gave birth to the Christian religion. Someone with better knowledge of such things can correct me if I'm wrong.

You see I don't believe in the supernatural, at least until scientific proof is available. So I view all religions as social movements. When they have completed their course and outlived their usefulness it's only natural to abandon them and move on to more beneficial ones.

Agreed, which is why I retained the quotes. Didn't mean to attribute the phrase to you.

I'm not so sure about that. A lot of the values we hold today were evident in Judaism before the Hellenistic period. I don't think one can downplay the role of Greek rationalism in the formation of our society, in general, but I think it's intellectually dishonest to pinpoint the one notable ancient atheistic movement as the source for all that's good about our value system. Plus, if we go back further, the stoics and humanists emerged from a polytheistic society; religion inevitably informed their philosophies, even as they might have rejected it in some respects. More chickens, more eggs...

I agree with you insofar as this addresses literalist religous beliefs.

This goes without saying, which is why I find it strange that some (on both sides of the discussion) view religion as stubbornly rooted to the spot and fundamentally averse to change. If you look at religion from a historical standpoint, various faiths burn out and are reformed based on how well they address the needs of their believers in any given context. The fundamentalists we see today (esp. in Christianity and Islam) look particularly boneheaded because they deny this aspect of religion, even as they're inspired to sometimes violent action by the inevitable and ever-so-nigh collapse of their particular forms of belief.

Dude, that's like, so deep and shit. Were you smoking and reading Camus when you came up with that?

No worries. I just thought I should clarify.

These basic values (condemnation of murder, of theft etc) seem more like common sense self-preservation than fruits of something more spiritual. They grew out of a need for a functional society more than anything else. Atheistic or not a society would self destruct if these values weren't in place. What I feel like the first step towards the modern world was the rejection to a man's need to defer to a higher unseen authority. And according to my limited knowledge classical Greece was the first place where this idea appeared. Again someone with a better knowledge of philosophy might disagree.

I agree completely with that.

Edit: Dammit I have to go. I'm getting off work and my home connection isn't working. I was enjoying this...

True. But beyond any general impulses we might have had to not self-destruct as a species, there was codification along the way, and much of this groundwork was laid in various early religions. Plus, beyond obviously self-destructive behavior, like murder, most societies came to an agreement that stealing from each other is worthy of scorn, established templates for marriage, maybe even made move toward developing the concept of charity.

I don't disagree with you on this paragraph, but I think it's placement here encourages a weirdly circular reading of the whole argument.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your central argument seems to be that the largely atheist classical Greek philosophers were more important in forming our modern-day value system than religion has been. Now, if you believe that the most important value of the modern world is the lack of need to defer to a higher power, you're clearly correct - but that's sort of dirty pool (unless you didn't mean to conflate your earlier idea about the classic Greeks and modern values with this one about the classic Greeks and the modern lack of deferral to a higher power). There are probably good arguments to make in that direction, but I'm pretty sure that isn't among the values to which EchoBase was referring nor is it generally considered a value at all, per se, in terms of ethics, legality, or how we interact with one another.

The idea that "killing is bad" is a moral that would be lost without religious culture is ludicrous. There are certain rules and mores that are relatively universal throughout human civilization. Religion of some kind also happens to be relatively universal. The fact that the two cross-pollinate shouldn't lead one to posit a relationship between them. "Religions teach us not to kill" should not lead to the conclusion "Without religion, we wouldn't know that killing is bad". There is no causal relationship there.

But to me, the issue here isn't whether religion has had a positive effect on culture. It's the fact that religion is a primitive form of science that's no longer necessary. The purpose of science to explain the world we live in, and how it works. The first attempt at a theory was that gods make everything work. Rather more complex theories have since been formed, thus making the original theories quaint and outmoded. It's time to let go of them now. People hold on to those theories not because they're useful, but because they're simple. They boil the entire vast expanse of reality down to something that's easy to deal with, and requires no thought. "God has a plan, therefore I don't have to worry about it". It requires no intellectual effort. It's lazy.

I don't know exactly how you are defining religion at this point, but that seems like a far from obvious fact. I'll grant that many religions included natural philosophy in their domain and did play some explanatory role regarding the natural world, at least before the disciplinary split between science, philosophy, and theology in the West. But, it doesn't really follow that that was the soul or even the primary function of religion for the people who practice.

Separating a particular group's religious practices from their overall cultural practices isn't really a very straightforward thing to do. That being the case, it seems likely that religion did just as much to help define the cultural identity of a group of people and the identity of individuals within that group as it did to define the natural order or the way objects in the world behave.

All that said, you'll probably reply that we don't need religion for any of that either. You're probably right about that too. I just don't think we should set up religion as some useless and out-dated straw man of a cultural institution. It isn't science for dummies. It's been one of the fundamental parts of human culture for most of our history. That doesn't mean it has to stay that way, but we should at least see it for what it is.

Now, that's not a fair substition I've made. Not even close. But the point is that just because a particular concept worked for a long time doesn't mean it's the only way to be.

I totally agree. My point wasn't that we should keep religion around because it's old and we've had it a long time, but rather that we don't need to paint religion in an unrealistic light in order to have a discussion about that.

Rereading my reply to Greg, it sounds like I am saying it's wrong to say religion is no longer necessary. I should have been clearer. What I meant is that it's wrong to say religion is just crappy science.

True. But in my mind there's nothing fundamentally religious about the concept of marriage, for example. Say that you have two neighboring tribes. In tribe A every fertile female is up for grabs. In tribe B there is a custom where once a relationship is consummated both the male and the female are 'taken out of the circulation'. As the instinct of procreation is perhaps the strongest one in humans tribe A will be either in perpetual unrest from the males' competition or it will resemble the organization of a pride of lions resulting most likely in a low mature male population. Tribe B meanwhile is much more stable and the males can focus on more efficient resource management and territorial expansion. Soon tribe B will either control or eradicate tribe B. Similar examples can be made of every one of these common values without taking religion into account. Religion served as a shortcut to that. "Remember the guy making the thunder in the clouds? He says sleeping with another man's wife is bad and he will punish you if you do it."

I'm sorry but I don't quite get your argument here. What I'm saying is that the values we speak of were not borne out of religion. There are logical reasons for their existence and all religion did was act as a tool for their general adoption by humanity. As to the importance of philosophy vs. religion to the formation of Western society all I'm saying is that modern religion is pretty much a product of philosophy. So much so, in fact, that even a model Christian by today's standards would be condemned as a godless heretic not that long ago historically. As for the atheistic at heart humanistic philosophy, although it hasn't been accepted outright by religion, it has diluted it from the much more hard-line early version of it. Again I'm sorry if I can't make myself clear enough with English being a second language and all.

The brevity is nice, though, isn't it?

I'm not going to get anywhere with this argument, I realize (oh, I've tried), but it's historically inaccurate to say that religion is simply a matter of punishment/reward or lousy science. It's easy to say that it is, but the various manifestations of religion are too complex and varied to address in those terms. Some people (both believers and non-believers) devote their lives to understanding the intricacies of their own beliefs and the beliefs of others. To pin religion down as "If you don't follow the rules in this book, the thunder god will punish you" displays sort of an intellectual shortcoming, honestly.

Regardless, my point above is that, while things could have happened any number of ways, they didn't. Yes, tribe A and tribe B might have come to their conclusion using Greek-approved notions of logic, but that hadn't come along yet. Religion got us to where we are, in many respects. Various beliefs have become outdated in some way, but you can't just say it's been causing harm all along when it had very obvious benefits (perhaps more than harmful ramifications, but that's not something that can be debated objectively).

Your English is excellent, actually. I wouldn't have known you weren't a native speaker if you hadn't said anything.

If anything, your point that secular humanism has informed Christianity supports my earlier statement that religion is not inflexible, but is informed by the needs of its users in any given culture and period - this is not a weakness, but a strength. But you see this flexibility manifest prior to the Greek influence on Christianity that occurred in the Hellenistic period. To take the easiest example, far, far earlier, Judaism evolved out of a polytheistic belief system that no longer resonated for the Israelites.

As for why your argument seemed circular, let me try to explain again. You said that our modern-day value system was most informed by the classical Greeks. However, you later implied (I think) that the perhaps the greatest modern value that we have is the lack of deferral to a higher authority. Here are my problems with this:

• There are others who would count other values (compassion, justice, tolerance - basically, the ability to get along with others) that have probably reached more people through religious teaching than Greek rationalism as more essential to modern living.
  
• I'm not convinced that a lack of something can be termed a value (not that you did, explicity, but I think it was the implication).
  
• For something to be considered an important modern value, I think it has to have majority acceptance. The number of believers worldwide still outnumber those who refuse to defer to authority.
  
• Even non-believers might still defer to higher, unseen authority - it's just not the celestial kind. They embrace ideas, philosophies, and governments just as readily as believers cling to God. Ever talked to an objectivist or a militant feminist or Marxist? To say nothing of those who embrace higher, seen authorities like those who readily accept fascism.
  
• My single biggest problem, though, is that you've loaded your argument. To accept one arguable part of it (the Greeks were the most important influence on our modern values) requires you to accept an even more arguable component (the most important modern value is the refusal to defer to a higher, unseen power - a notion conveniently invented by the Greeks). Since both of these points are highly debatable, they only function as a loop. One leads inevitably to the other, but is either true?

We can argue those points ad infinitum but I'm afraid we'd grind the argument to a halt. So at the risk of sounding like I don't take the matter seriously I'll try to put what I think as succinctly as possible.

I think the time has come for humanity to come together as a whole. Religion, together with various other ideologies, being exclusive is in the way of that. It seems more efficient to me that everyone should renounce religion rather than everyone adopting the same religion as everyone else.

Edit: Thanks for the kind words about my English. Especially from someone as eloquent as you.