September 17, 2001

12:14 AM

Promise a man death is not the end and he will slam himself into a skyscraper. Evolutionary biologist and arch-skeptic Richard Dawkins writes about religion in the Guardian.
posted by dydecker (28 comments total)

'Promise a man death is not the end'
just don't cut it, bud.

edit to:
'Promise a man forced to live a chaste life on Earth that death is not only NOT the end, but a slammin' whorehouse full of dedicated virgin sluts will be at his beck and call. Hey, hey...ya know what I mean? Say no more, say no more."
posted by HTuttle at 12:50 AM on September 17, 2001

INSERT: forced to PRETEND to live a chaste...

(can't forget those those forays to the stip clubs! "HEY! no photos please! I'm aGOOD Li'l boy...Hide them magazines." )
posted by HTuttle at 12:57 AM on September 17, 2001

"This is what happens when people take their religion far too seriously." --Kevin Smith
posted by kevspace at 12:59 AM on September 17, 2001

It's a piece, BTW. Dawkins is sharp as hell.
posted by Optamystic at 6:00 AM on September 17, 2001

Well, not only is Dawkins using this for his typical "all religions are evil" screed, he's also fallen for the canard of "72 virgin brides", which grossly misstates the Qur'an (as noted in the very same paper). But what did we say about people using the bombing to further their own political agendas?
posted by holgate at 6:40 AM on September 17, 2001

And how do we determine what's free speech and agenda-pushing? Whether we agree or not, perhaps.
posted by skyline at 7:02 AM on September 17, 2001

holgate, you remind me of an ostrich with its head in the sand. No matter where you look in this disaster you find religion, back to the creation of Israel itself. Expanding outward to another terrorist organization, we have the Irish Republican Army and another conflict based in religion.

And for what purpose? So people can overcome their fear that death is final, they kill each other trying to prove that their vision of an afterlife is the one true vision.

A solution to the terrorist problem will never be found if we continue to ignore that religion is the root cause.
posted by mischief at 7:09 AM on September 17, 2001

A solution to the terrorist problem will never be found if we continue to ignore that religion is the root cause.

mischief: you don't need religion to convince people to martyr themselves for a cause, any sufficiently violent dogma coupled with brainwashing will do it. Remember state-sponsored atheism? That worked really well in China and the Soviet Union in creating a loving, peaceful society as I recall. I know, maybe we should turn the Scientologists loose on the Middle East!
posted by MrBaliHai at 7:38 AM on September 17, 2001

Religion is entangled with the WTC bombings, but that's because religion is entangled with everything in our world. If there were no such thing as religion, do you think that people would suddenly all magically get along? Do you think there wouldn't be madmen willing to carry out suicide attacks? Dawkins can't be that naive; surely he doesn't believe that atheists won't go to war, for instance, and risk their lives for a cause they believe in. Of course they will. If bin Laden and his group were a bunch of atheists who believed that bringing down the United States was more important than any of their individual lives, you could easily see exactly the same result.

I happen to believe that humanity would be better off without religion, but it would be better off in millions of small ways, not in big ways like this. Humans would still be irrational, they would still have differing points of view, they would still occasionally go insane.

What Dawkins really wants is for all human beings to become perfectly rational. That would be the end of religion, true, but it would also be the end of humanity as we know it. Atheist I may be but I'm not quite ready to see us turn into a species of Spocks.
posted by kindall at 7:55 AM on September 17, 2001

Suicide bombings have also been carried out by 100% nihilists-indeed if you really believe the death of 5000 people last tuesday was fundamentally nothing more than the rapid oxidation of 5000 discrete physico-chemical assemblages, i dont see any reason to be upset. After all, per the first "law" of thermodynamics, energy can't be destroyed. Personally, I believe any person holding such a view is far more dangerous to humanity than any religious fanatic.
Ancient man saw spirits in all matter. Now, we think it quaint to believe a tree has a soul. Of course, Dawkins et al think it similarly quaint to believe a human has one. So then the WTC bombing was really just a "clearcut" of humanity.
God is dead no doubt. We need to re-enchant the world,however, for our ultimate survival.
I can't fathom how dawkins and his ilk have missed the undeniable EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGE conferred by religion.
posted by quercus at 8:09 AM on September 17, 2001

BTW Joseph Stalin was a confirmed atheist. His rule was hardly exemplary for those advocating an enlightened rationality engendered by the death of faith. Stalin's calculus of brutality is captured in his bon mot: "The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million a statistic."
I hope our hopeful atheists do not have to learn in practice what they fail to grasp in theory.
posted by quercus at 8:20 AM on September 17, 2001

> What Dawkins really wants is for all human beings to
> become perfectly rational.

What he needs, to eliminate religion, is for everyone to become both perfectly rational and perfectly well informed, i.e. omniscient. Most of us have never seen a virus; none of us has ever seen a black hole. We take their existence on faith, which is to say religiously, because authority figures in our culture say they exist.

If we all knew the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth there wouldn't be any arguments, would there? But I foresee, uh, problems of implementation. Until this ultimate solution is implemented, however, all of us (including all the ultra-rationalists who stick their tongues out furthest at the Mad Mullahs and Pat Robertsons of the world) will continue to take a very great deal on faith, which is hard to distinguish from being religious.
posted by jfuller at 8:20 AM on September 17, 2001

mischief: if you think the problems of Northern Ireland are rooted in religious tenets, then you're another ostrich.


What annoys me most about Dawkins is that he tries to distinguish religion from other ideologies: including his own which, as jfuller suggests, is based upon a kind of scientific "omniscience". Actually, what annoys me most is that by making himself the spokesperson for that ideology, he comes across as a smug, self-satisfied bastard.
posted by holgate at 8:24 AM on September 17, 2001

I used to be active on alt.atheism.moderated and these sorts of points came up again and again: Who has done more harm over the centuries, atheists or theists? It's a fairly sick calculus of genocide, though on the whole the atheists are generally in a better position if only for the fact that there are far fewer of them. But Stalin did his best to even the score. I'm an atheist (though not an 'anti-theist' if you get the difference). Like most thinking people, I wish that fundamentalist religions--of all stripes--would go away. And like most thinking people, I'm pretty sure they won't. But despite Dawkin's curtness, I have to agree with his essential point. To deny the importance of religious intolerance in this whole fiasco is to miss a valuable lesson. But to committ it in the name of rationalism can be just as bad.
posted by wheat at 9:22 AM on September 17, 2001

Both Islam and Christianity promise a paradisical afterlife for their faithful. Both Islam and Christianity deny that paradise to murderers. It's not religion that those bombers were fed, it was propaganda designed for a specific purpose.

Any ideology, *if you take it to stupid extremes*, is a harmful and dangerous thing. That includes atheism, nationalism and any sort of ism.
posted by Foosnark at 10:02 AM on September 17, 2001

indeed if you really believe the death of 5000 people last tuesday was fundamentally nothing more than the rapid oxidation of 5000 discrete physico-chemical assemblages, i dont see any reason to be upset

This offensive tripe, which is also being pushed by Danielle_T in one of the other effed threads, is truly hurt-producing for people who don't ascribe to your religion. The lack of a soul, as Fellor points out, increases the value of life to those who don't harbor the wishful belief in a redeeming afterlife to mute the pain of this one.

If you kill an atheist's mom/dad/brother/sister/friend/acquaintance, they still hurt. To suggest say otherwise makes me want to vomit.
posted by norm at 10:11 AM on September 17, 2001

Most of us have never seen a virus; none of us has ever seen a black hole. We take their existence on faith, which is to say religiously

The difference is, I can show you a picture of a virus and I can show or prove to you that black holes exist. I can do so in a manner that can be broken down into simple logical steps, whose truth is impossible to deny. Faith based on a lack of scientific knowledge isn't the same as faith based on belief of things that, as a part of their definition, cannot be proven.

From a scientist's viewpoint, I find that most of the religious arguments against science have to assume that everything we observe is intended to deceive; and I can't believe in that kind of a God.

Nor do I believe that rationality destroys humanity; the stars are just as beautiful to me wether they are ascended souls, pinholes to "the other side", or massive fusion reactions. Nature's patterns can teach us a lot about how we should live, and define a kind of morality that sadly often is directly opposed to religious/mythological thought.
posted by skyline at 10:26 AM on September 17, 2001

Sorry to cause offense, Norm. I apologize to anyone else offended by my comment. I am not trying to cause hurt. Of course, an atheist can suffer. An atheistic position can be just as, if not more, life affirming than a traditionally religious one. Still, these issues need to be confronted. My basic premise is that the end of religion will not bring final enlightenment to humanity and usher in the long peace. Quite the contrary, I believe the triumph of a nihilistic/atheistic belief will only serve to increase human misery, because LIFE, as presently experienced by the vast majority of humanity, offers NOTHING to affirm. Our material comfort has shielded us from the absurd sadistic carnival that life on earth really is. Atheism is a luxury item. There's a reason why most atheists live in western democracies. Myself-I believe in evolution. I believe religion evolved early on precisely for the purposes it presently serves. Have you seen the quote from the Afghani woman saying bomb me and my kids for "life has no pleasure." She and others like her (about 80% of the world) don't need to hear that her suffering is just random emotions devoid of ultimate meaning superimposed on the periodic table, but that the great thing is, in the absence of deity, she is "free" to affirm and celebrate life, to "believe only in herself" as someone said. This woman has enough trouble providing food for her family, please don't task her with providing meaning for her suffering as well.
posted by quercus at 11:24 AM on September 17, 2001

Caveat: you're not talking to a Holy Roller. I worked for most of the last decade as a bench chemist and director of a sizeable environmental chemistry lab. I read Carnap and Popper with understanding. (I do not read Stephen Hawking's journal articles with understanding.)


Skyline:

> The difference is, I can show you a picture of a virus and
> I can show or prove to you that black holes exist. I can
> do so in a manner that can be broken down into simple
> logical steps, whose truth is impossible to deny.

Each one of those steps (if mathematical) depends on and can be traced back to axioms that are merely asserted, not proven; or (if observational) depends on equally unprovable assertions such as that an external natural universe exists and our minds and senses are appropriate for investigating it. What's more, for observational/experimental steps, connecting any causal event to any effect requires appeal to other events at other levels of observation, and these in turn have gaps that must be bridged by appeal to yet other events. Explanation is fractal in nature. The idea of a "complete causal explanation" is a myth; historical explanation (this happens and then that happens) is the best we have and the best we're ever going to have.


> Faith based on a lack of scientific knowledge isn't the
> same as faith based on belief of things that, as a part of
> their definition, cannot be proven.

Kurt Godel showed long ago that in formal systems the things that are true and provable form a very small subset of the things are merely true. Since science's principal activity is to model natural systems using formal systems, the incompleteness carries over. The basis of science is as unprovable as the basis of any other set of assertions.


> whose truth is impossible to deny.

Nonsense, of course they can be denied. What you mean is, they can't be denied without causing the game to collapse, or morph into some other game, as Euclidean geometry morphed as soon as somebody denied the "self-evident" parallel postulate. The fundamental foundation of science is as much thin air as the fundamental foundation of any other set of beliefs. We don't crash because we assume we can fly...
posted by jfuller at 11:48 AM on September 17, 2001

We don't crash because we assume we can fly...

No, we really can fly. Our belief has nothing to do with it, which is where science and religion truly part company.
posted by kindall at 11:52 AM on September 17, 2001

whose truth can not be denied?
The history of science is replete with the overturning of concepts whose truth could not be denied in their day, e.g. the ether, acquired characteristics, etc.
Similarly, scientific history would seem to indicate virtually everything we accept as true today will not be seen as true after 300 further years(much less 3000) of inquiry, so I wouldn't look for life's meaning in the latest research.
Of course, 2+2 will always 4, I assume
posted by quercus at 12:07 PM on September 17, 2001

> No, we really can fly.

You tell it, Reverend :-)
posted by jfuller at 12:12 PM on September 17, 2001

While science is often overturned, it is overturned because it includes in its structure a mechanism by which new, more accurate models of the universe can replace older, less accurate ones. And the older ones do not necessarily become obsolete; Newton's laws of motion are perfectly adequate for putting a satellite into orbit, even though relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated that they only hold for objects of everyday size moving at everyday velocities. You can still, even, calculate the apparent motion of the stars and the planets using the epicycles of pre-Copernican astronomy.

I "have faith" in science because I understand how it works and because I have done scientific experiments. I have no serious doubts that if I equipped myself to do the really difficult experiments that require lots of resources I don't normally have access to, I'd get the same results, and that my results would be duplicable by others. Scientific methodology is a powerful tool for overcoming our innate tendencies toward subjectivity. More to the point, science works. It can be seen to work by anyone.

Not having "faith" in science is like not having "faith" that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. We don't know that the sun will rise again just because it always has in the past for as long as we can remember -- but it would be foolish to bet against it. Perhaps the universe only seems to behave in the ways described by science, cleverly arranged by God to fool us. But then, perhaps I am merely an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. You've got to start believing your senses at some point; solipsism is pointless.

There is a qualitative difference in a belief based in nothing at all (e.g. religious faith) and a belief based on things that we can't prove absolutely, but which seem to work and have seemed to work for centuries.
posted by kindall at 12:56 PM on September 17, 2001

Solipsism is actually great-more people ought to try it.

let me just quote the old master:

"Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man."

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."

Both quotes from Albert Einstein, "Religion and Science", New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930
posted by quercus at 1:12 PM on September 17, 2001

So Einstein wasn't perfect. Who is?
posted by kindall at 1:32 PM on September 17, 2001

Why an athesist's heart might break at the sight of the WTC tragedy:

If there is no heaven, no afterlife, we have just this short precious time on the earth. All those people in those toweres were cheated of their most precious possesion; their daily lives. All their families will never see them again. They won't meet in heaven. They won't meet in the next life. They are gone.

A "clear-cutting of humanity" is a crime. Each life is endlessly precious. The souls of the good will not continue after. An empathic athesist would not want a war, especially one in which innocent humans might die early.

and monsters of any religeon, or of none, don't care.
posted by christina at 5:41 PM on September 17, 2001

I hear you Christina-however my point is that for the vast majority of humanity present and past "this short precious time on the earth" is just so much time spent in a bizarre torture chamber. The reality in Rwanda in 1994 exceeded anything ever imagined as hell, and so on. True, for a well off American, God and a higher reality is probably superfluous. But for this world as a whole, I just don't see any value to be gained by denigrating religion, no matter its admitted faults. Ideas have consequences. God may well be dead, but it is far too early to bury Him.
posted by quercus at 8:48 PM on September 17, 2001