The Root of all Evil : The God Delusion
POSTED BY: Calhoun
UPDATED: Thursday, December 17, 2015 06:12
VIEWED: 49488
PAGE 5 of 32
Quote:
Originally posted by Calhoun:
One of the main points of the documentary was that to believe in god one must cease all rational thought processes. Disregard all empiric and scientific evidence regarding the world and universe and just accept some words written in an old book to be the way of things.
I don't think Dawkins does atheists much justice when he goes all rhetoric on us like that. The reality is that belief in religion requires the suspension of rational thought, but only where said religion is involved. That in itself is a bad thing but not nearly as bad as Dawkins would have people believe.
Quote:
It was quoted that surveys show around 45% of all americans believe the universe to be only 10,000 yrs old..
I think that's a touch high, but not by much. This is a result of Young Earth Creationism and one of the reasons why Intelligent Design shouldn't be taught in schools.
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Quote:
Originally posted by meg1448:
Hundreds of millions isn't that big of a number when you consider the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the Protestant Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, etc....not to mention human sacrifices and the like.
Hundreds of millions is still a huge number. What's your source on it?
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Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
The reality is that belief in religion requires the suspension of rational thought, but only where said religion is involved.
That's a bold claim. How would you go about backing it up?
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Maybe people should watch the documentary in order to make informed comment.
The initial post asked if anyone had seen the documentary and what their opinion of it was. It doesnt seem like anyone commenting actually watched the show.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Calhoun:
Maybe people should watch the documentary in order to make informed comment.
The initial post asked if anyone had seen the documentary and what their opinion of it was. It doesnt seem like anyone commenting actually watched the show.
Well, you made the claim that religious belief is irrational. How do you justify that claim? Or is that claim itself beyond rational proof?
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Quote:
Originally posted by Causal:Quote:
Originally posted by fredgiblet:
The reality is that belief in religion requires the suspension of rational thought, but only where said religion is involved.
That's a bold claim. How would you go about backing it up?
Now that I look at it again I'd like to clarify, I wasn't trying to say that suspending rational thought was necessary for religion in general, what I meant was that situations come up where religious beliefs force irrationality. The same can be said for many other beliefs (political, economic etc.) but few people cling to those as strongly as religion.
I'll give an example, in the Bible there is the story of Noah's flood, there is no physical evidence that the flood ever happened and much that shows that it couldn't have happened given the world we have today. Yet there are many people who, when confronted with the evidence, simply deny it or go through a series of mental gymnastics to get around the evidence. The rational thing to do is to simply say that the story wasn't meant to be taken literally (which it most likely wasn't) and move on, or accept that it isn't literally true and re-evaluate your beliefs, yet their absolute faith in their religion makes them take the irrational route.
These same people are probably perfectly capable of rational thought, but when confronted with the irrationality of their beliefs they take positions of irrationality in order to justify their beliefs.
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Quote:
Causal wrote:
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 13:41
Well, you made the claim that religious belief is irrational. How do you justify that claim? Or is that claim itself beyond rational proof?
I actually didnt.. I said the documentary made these assertions. I do however tend to agree with those assertions.
How can anyone claim to be "free thinking" if they deny all the evidence of evolution?
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Quote:I don’t believe that is a mistake I’m making and I don’t think that kind of hair splitting makes sense, which was my whole point to begin with. First of all, I’m not sure what the difference is between violence done in the “name of theistic philosophies” and violence done in the “name of theism.” That’s a degree of hairsplitting that doesn’t make any sense, since both of them seem likely to be defined as religion.
Originally posted by fredgiblet:Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
Furthermore, it ignores the violence perpetrated in the name of atheistic philosophies, such as Communism and Fascism, which far exceeds the violence perpetrated in the name of religion.
The mistake you are making here is that you are equating violence done in the name of a philosophy that includes atheism with violence done in the name of atheism. By this same logic all violence done in the name of theistic philosophies (which have outnumbered atheistic philosophies since the dawn of time) would be done in the name of theism. I'll grant the first point if you will grant the second since that still means that religion gets the higher body count.
Were the Crusades fought in the name of theism or in the name of “theistic philosophies” or something else? The correct answer would be something else, because the actual Christian casus belli of the Crusades had nothing to do with religion. The Crusades were fought for defense of the Eastern Roman Empire or some Christian held territory against Muslim expansionism or simply Christian expansionism into the Middle East. But people who insist upon blaming the world’s violence on religion will always attempt to simplify it down to religion, just as the Christian leaders during the Crusades always simplified it, but this is just rhetoric. The actual motivations of both sides (Christian and Muslim) always boiled down to political, not religions, motivations. Hitler often used Christianity as a rallying cry to unite the German people just as the Popes during the Crusades did, but his motivations had nothing to do with Christianity either; he wasn’t even a Christian. He was operating on purely political, albeit twisted, rationale. Wars are not fought for religious reasons. They are fought for political reasons.
So I’m not willing to make the concession that you ask, because I don’t even believe in the concept.
And although, it is somewhat of a moot point, given that I don’t accept how the argument is qualified, I also don’t accept how the argument is typically quantified. If you add up all the deaths that have been the result of purely secular and political wars and genocide during the 20th century alone you will likely come to a number so large that you only have to go back a thousand years before you come to a time in history when there weren’t that many people on the entire planet. And that’s just the 20th century. So I’m not even sure that it is even possible for there to have been more deaths as a result of all the wars fought up to the 20th century then there were in just the 20th century. Much less to attempt to quantify this along religious lines.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:All of the casualties of all of the Crusades are probably not more then 10 million. The Thirty Years War is probably not more then a million. The Inquisitions: a few thousand a piece.
Originally posted by meg1448:
Hundreds of millions isn't that big of a number when you consider the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the Protestant Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, etc....not to mention human sacrifices and the like.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by Finn mac Cumhal:
If you add up all the deaths that have been the result of purely secular and political wars and genocide during the 20th century alone you will likely come to a number so large that you only have to go back a thousand years before you come to a time in history when there weren’t that many people on the entire planet.
But that's just it, most of those either were not fought for atheism or it was only a side issue. You are saying that Stalin was an atheist thus the millions of people he killed were killed in the name of atheism which simply isn't true, it's a non sequitur. The argument you were making sounded like you were saying that every conflict between groups that were not explicitly religious was somehow caused by atheism which is absurd.
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