9 replies to this topic

[advancedatheist]

From,

http://www.salon.com...kins/print.html

The atheist
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages.

April 28, 2005

....

Fifty years ago, philosophers like Bertrand Russell felt that the religious worldview would fade as science and reason emerged. Why hasn't it?

That trend toward enlightenment has indeed continued in Europe and Britain. It just has not continued in the U.S., and not in the Islamic world. We're seeing a rather unholy alliance between the burgeoning theocracy in the U.S. and its allies, the theocrats in the Islamic world. They are fighting the same battle: Christian on one side, Muslim on the other. The very large numbers of people in the United States and in Europe who don't subscribe to that worldview are caught in the middle....

How would we be better off without religion?

We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment....

Humans may not be products of an intelligent designer but given genetic technologies, our descendants will be. What does this mean about the future of evolution?

It's an interesting thought that in some remote time in the future, people may look back on the 20th and 21st centuries as a watershed in evolution -- the time when evolution stopped being an undirected force and became a design force. Already, for the past few centuries, maybe even millennia, agriculturalists have in a sense designed the evolution of domestic animals like pigs and cows and chickens. That's increasing and we're getting more technologically clever at that by manipulating not just the selection part of evolution but also the mutation part. That will be very different; one of the great features of biological evolution up to now is that there is no foresight.

[susmariosep]

To be a well-balanced intellectual.


Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment....

Halleluia! I have all that attitude, except I still have this fondness for religion, my kind of, which is rational, provisional, and optional.

I think that makes me a well-balanced intellectual.

You can be also when you reach intellectual maturity like me.


Modesty aside of course, but learn from me.

Susma

[susmariosep]

Briefly, easily, and quickly, i.e., beq writing.


These are my thoughts, figuratively shared aloud. If necessary, I'll prune this post for clarity. -- Cosmos

Please do, oh please do, for the sake of a brother with dense brain.

And I am waiting. Also don't forget to be 'beq' (briefly, easily, and quickly).


By the way, I am still waiting for you to visit Sense and Nonsense and help me with those dense texts there.


Susma

[godsend]

BEQ

Disbelief still equals a belief.

Atheism, like theism, represents a dogma concerning a specific metaphysical claim.

[Mind]

I am agnostic, and I don't think it is that weak of a position. It is basically Bayesian reasoning. Based on the evidence available, there is an extremely low probability of a god existing in the Christian sense (or even for other major religions). Everyone of us probably has a threshold of belief, and for me the probability of god is very low, so low that I have mostly abandoned the precept.

[advancedatheist]

BEQ

Disbelief still equals a belief.

Atheism, like theism, represents a dogma concerning a specific metaphysical claim.

Atheism makes a specific claim about the contents and structure of reality, so it's not unlike the heliocentric theory of astronomy. Theism, like Ptolemaic astronomy, got bogged down because it had to add more and more arbitrary assumptions to try to patch all the embarrassing discrepancies that kept popping up. Descartes in the early 17th Century tried to clean up theism by deriving a god from a handful of plausible assmptions, but the project failed because his philosophy led to predictions about physics that Newton showed were wrong later in that century.

BTW, Abrahamic theists aren't in the least bothered by their "disbelief" in all the deities their religions have displaced. "But, but, what if Odin is real? If the Valkyries don't choose me when I die, I won't be able to hunt and feast upon the wild boar Schrimnir forever!"

[Omnido]

I think his opinion upon Agnosticism is due in part to a huge majority of those claiming to be Agnostics, whom do so merely for the sake of oppositional argument, indifference, or exclusivity with respect to religious or rational immunity.

Im Agnostic myself, and I find no weakness in it at all, other than having to make the wise admission that there exist things in the universe to which I will most likely (not saying never) have a conclusive, objective, and definitive answer or solution to.