The problem here is that atheists are defining god in a certain way, X which they say they don't believe in. Then you have he sort of erudite philosophical theists define 'god' in another way, Y and then claim that the atheists arguments are wrong because they don't have a good argument for the non-existence of Y (which is often some non-falsifiable philosophical mumbo jumbo)I think what he's saying is that many public atheists define religion in a certain way and then refuse to acknowledge that actual religious believers are often operating with completely different ideas about how religion works and why it matters to them. And therefore these atheists come across as ignorant, bombastic and condescending, and they alienate not only religious people but also non-believers who have a more nuanced experience and understanding of religion.
So when people start to talk about how a purpose comes out of a non-physical concept like biology, this doesn't seem to me very different from some modern theological notions of God.Hmmm. Biology is pretty physical, actually. And the concept that "ultimate purpose" is reproduction doesn't come from abstract philosophical musings, but observation of physical reality. You can argue that there are other less visible purposes -- things that are subtler and more nuanced and more "deeply true" to humans -- but at the end of the day, it's not exactly speculative to say that humans are here to make humans. Heck, biological life is here to make more biological life. That's practically a truism.
Anti-theists are primarily concerned with the religious believes that appear harmful in modern society. Any others are either ignored as non-problematic or actually supported.That has utterly not been my experience and in fact is contradicted by two-thirds of the comments on this thread.
The emphasis on “joy” and “fullness” inevitably asks secularism to provide what Bruce Robbins calls an improvement story—to bring the good news about the consolations of secularism. Yet Lily Briscoe’s (or Terrence Malick’s, or my philosopher friend’s) tormented metaphysical questions remain, and cannot be answered by secularism any more effectively than by religion. There are days when Philip Larkin’s line about life being “first boredom, then fear” seems unpleasantly accurate, and on those days I might be more likely to turn to a tragic Christian theology like Donald M. MacKinnon’s than to this book, in which the tragic or absurd vision is not much entertained. Thirty years ago, Thomas Nagel wrote a shrewd essay entitled “The Absurd,” in which he argued that, just as we can “step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way.” Secularism can seem as meaningless as religion when such doubt strikes. Nagel went on to conclude, calmly, that we shouldn’t worry too much, because if, under the eye of eternity, nothing matters “then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.” This is impeccably logical, and impishly offers a kind of secular deconstruction of secularism, but it is fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.What constitutes 'good' for humans, too, is often pretty bad for other entities in existence, as well, so humanism might at best be morally a wash. The most enlightened thing we could do might be able to work toward taking the majority of humans out of existence.
Atheism and theism are metaphysical stances, not empirically reasoned conclusions. In their intellectually honest forms (excluding fundamentalists of both stripes), they couldn’t possibly claim to have pat answers, but each does provide a metaphysical ground from which to explore these questions. Neither Sir Isaac Newton’s theism nor Percy Shelley’s atheism caused them to search the universe for easy answers. Instead they analyzed the big questions in a spirit of awe and wonder.posted by Miko at 7:03 AM on September 16, 2011 [9 favorites]
....Many religionists assume that life without God would be life without meaning. Where secularists cherish autonomy and choice as qualities that make life meaningful, religionists often emphasize self-abnegation and submission to a higher power. This would appear to be a wide gulf. But Kitcher suggests that religionists and secularists actually agree about how to create meaning in a life. Many believers think of their submission to God not as compelled, he points out, but instead as "issuing from the choice of the person who submits." Life develops meaning because someone identifies with God's purpose. This identification must spring from an act of evaluation, a decision that there is value in serving a deity whose purpose is deemed good. Believers, then, make an autonomous choice "to abdicate autonomy in order to serve what the autonomous assessment has already recognized as good." Both athiests and believers are involved in making independent evaluations of what constitutes life-meaning. They draw different conclusions about what that meaning is, but they go about finding it in similar ways."posted by Miko at 7:46 AM on September 16, 2011
When you discard the concept of ultimate good - you are stuck in a quagmire of relativity.I think that anyone who's honest is stuck in a quagmire of relativity, because it's not like religions don't change their teachings about ultimate good.
Who do you see as "trying to farm it out?" It could as well be that people gravitate toward religious communities because of the consanance with their own self-established values, not in order to accept a package of values neatly delivered. In fact, in my case, that is quite true.That's completely my experience, too.
If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do. 'cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today. [...] if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.Angel - "Epiphany"
Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.That Pew study is generally pretty fascinating.
If one were to substitute the word “Being” for “Lord” throughout the Bible, this would make for some startlingly fresh translations. Just to mention one, the central Jewish creed, the Shema, which is often translated as “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” (Deut. 6:1) would now read as, “Hear O Israel, Being is our God, Being is one.” In other words, rather than religion being the impetus for divisions between people and inciting hostilities among them based upon differences, this creed emphasizes the unity, not only among and between peoples, but with the entirety of creation.--"Richard Dawkins: Vox Populi" / Jason Giannetti. In Journal of Liberal Religion, v.8 no. 1.posted by No Robots at 9:27 AM on September 16, 2011 [1 favorite]
Moses conceived the Deity as Being, that has always existed, does exist, and always will exist, and for this cause he calls Him by the name Jehovah, which in Hebrew signifies these three phases of existence.--Spinoza, TTP, chap. 2.posted by No Robots at 9:50 AM on September 16, 2011 [1 favorite]
I can readily allow, said Cleanthes, that those who maintain the perfect simplicity of the Supreme Being, to the extent in which you have explained it, are complete Mystics, and chargeable with all the consequences which I have drawn from their opinion. They are, in a word, Atheists, without knowing it. For though it be allowed, that the Deity possesses attributes, of which we have no comprehension; yet ought we never to ascribe to him any attributes, which are absolutely incompatible with that intelligent nature, essential to him. A mind, whose acts and sentiments and ideas are not distinct and successive; one, that is wholly simple, and totally immutable; is a mind, which has no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred; or in a word, is no mind at all. It is an abuse of terms to give it that appellation; and we may as well speak of limited extension without figure, or of number without composition.Hume was such a strident, shrill new atheist, a bit like that Dawkins fellow.
Pray consider, said Philo, whom you are at present inveighing against. You are honouring with the appellation of Atheist all the sound, orthodox divines almost, who have treated of this subject; and you will, at last be, yourself, found, according to your reckoning, the only sound Theist in the world. But if idolaters be Atheists, as, I think, may justly be asserted, and Christian Theologians the same; what becomes of the argument, so much celebrated, derived from the universal consent of mankind?
They include some of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus and Anaximander.[citation needed] The Stoics were Pantheists, beginning with Zeno of Citium and culminating in the emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, Stoicism was one of the three dominant schools of philosophy, along with Epicureanism and Neoplatonism. The early Taoism of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi is also pantheistic.[6]If you mean, there were no completely heterodox pantheist societies, then, well, you could say that about any beliefs. There are no known early human societies which held any single set of beliefs as far as we know, excluding small, culturally homogeneous tribes.
In the West, Pantheism went into retreat during the Christian years between the 4th and 15th centuries, when it was regarded as heresy. The first open revival was by Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake in 1600). Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, finished in 1675, was the major source from which Pantheism spread (though Spinoza himself did not use the word). John Toland was influenced by both Spinoza and Bruno. In 1720 he wrote the Pantheisticon: or The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society in Latin.
a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs."especially," but not "always." And there is a lot more going on in this definition which someone could use to call themselves religious -ritual, community relationships, traditions, ideas about moral conduct - even if they only have questions about whether there is a God, not certainties, and even if by "superhuman agency" they mean a natural physics.
I think both you and the author of the linked article are suffering from a debilitating condition called "never meeting the people who make up the majority of Christians".What is it with militant atheists and equating religion with Christianity? It's bizarre and offensive.
For Kant, God is not an object in or above the world because we do not have sense impressions of God; therefore, we cannot know God scientifically and cannot prove the existence of God as an entity.Kant is a very major and perfectly mainstream philosopher, the Catholic Encyclopedia is reasonably friendly to him. I think most Christian denominations find him pretty inoffensive.
A. Although we cannot know that God exists, Kant claims that it is, in fact, rational to believe that God exists, that it is rational—indeed necessary—to postulate the existence of God.
B. With respect to theoretical reason, Kant treats this rational faith in God in terms of the regulative use of reason.
1. In addition to the categories of the understanding, crucial elements of reason for Kant are the regulative ideas—such as God, world, self—which bring unity at the highest level to experience.
2. Reason needs to postulate these principles in order to make sense of experience.
3. It is, therefore, legitimate—indeed necessary—to think God (which is different from knowing God) as the origin of all that is, but it is illegitimate to speculate about what God is like beyond this.
But nothing there would trouble a Christian dualist. He'd use different terminology: to a Christian dualist, these two classes are just the "material" and the "spiritual" realms. But most Christian dualists would have no problem saying that God is a spiritual entity not a material entity, and that God exists in a different way to a material entity (being omnipresent, for instance).Not quite.
I think what he's saying is that many public atheists define religion in a certain way and then refuse to acknowledge that actual religious believers are often operating with completely different ideas about how religion works and why it matters to them.Right, but the problem here is that lots of people do view religion the way atheists think about it, and they are the most problematic adherents. (The Taliban, crazy evangelicals running the republican party)
Dawkins spends most of The God Delusion engaged in a splendid demolition of what he calls "the god hypothesis", without spending more than a handful of anecdotal pages establishing that the god hypothesis is what most religious people actually believe or have believed through history.It seems pretty obvious, especially in history. I think that's what most people's experience with religious people (who want to discuss it) is.
Since I read the article linked above I've been dwelling on a fundamental issue in that argument: that concern with humanism, in the end, doesn't matter, in a world in which no ultimate good is assumed. 'Ultimate good' is as abstract and unprovable as any conception of the divine.Well, humanism is separate from atheism. There are Atheists who are communists, atheists who are Ayn Rand devotees, and so on. It's completely beside the point.
Sure, but I take the point Miko raises above to mean that your decision to base your values on the welfare of humanity, given that there is no external or foundational reason to do so, is equally bizarre.There is no 'ultimate reason' to eat food or avoid pain or have sex or anything else, but people do those things anyway.
"Does God exist?" isn't a question I'm even entertaining here, and neither are most people here taking the athiest position.It's absolutely the question and the answer for atheists is "No"
Except, as I've said, atheists aren't even really trying to have that discussion. You're the one trying to have a discussion with us, so why don't you go out and try to prove your hypothesis about how many religious people only think of "god" as some sort of nebulous concept rather then the 'traditional' view.It isn't what anyone but a super tiny minority meanIt's precisely this assumption that the "new" atheists need to start making at least some vague effort to provide evidence for, I think, if this discussion is to go any further in a fruitful way. And to be convincing, it really has to go beyond the specific region and time in history that you happen to find yourself.
First response: you mean in America, in the present day, after forcing literally the biggest subjects imaginable into yes/no opinion-poll questions, with all the many problems that entails.No, it's from PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
It doesn't bother me what people say about God. It bothers me what people say about me, and about other individuals who have a religious personal practice.Except we're not talking about people like you. You're defining the word "religion" in a different way then atheists. That's the entirety of the argument.
I think it's better off with individual freedom of thought.Atheists are not against freedom of thought. At the same time, though you have to admit that some people's thoughts are simply incorrect, and there isn't anything wrong with pointing that out.
To accuse atheists in general of aspirations to cultural genocide, on the basis of disagreement. Strikes me as profoundly intolerant.I don't think that most of us are talking about atheists in general. Most atheists, in my experience, are perfectly normal people who don't behave in the ways that we're talking about here. They don't equate all religious people with the Taliban. They don't try to convert religious people to atheism. They don't pick fights. They don't insist that I should be forced to work on Yom Kippur because it's not fair that I get special accommodations just because I believe in a sky fairy. (And yes, I have had people on the internet say that it's not fair that I can take vacation days on Jewish holidays, unless all my co-workers would be guaranteed to be granted a vacation day on the same day for any reason, including that they just wanted the day off.) We talk about the usual things that I talk about with people: how much I hate football season; whether there's any hope for the new Sarah Michelle Geller show; the fact that the new frozen yogurt place is pretty good. Similarly, most Christians I encounter are totally normal, and it's a very tiny minority who try to convince me that I already know that Jesus is my Lord and Savior or scream at me when I refuse to take their Bible tracts.
He's wrong, at least if there are these theocrats who want to oppress and control the world. It's really practical for them. Downright pragmatic.It doesn't matter if the theocrat himself believes in religion, only that his followers do. (Obviously it would be helpful if the theocrat claimed to believe)
Isn't atheism a default?I'm going to guess that you're not from the US, and if so you don't live anywhere near Southern Illinois University. Christianity is the only default in a part of Illinois that is closer to Nashville than it is to Chicago. I don't think it's terribly surprising that any non-Christian student would feel the need for support and sympathetic companionship. And even if an atheist organization was obnoxious and anti-religion, I'm not sure why that would be any more divisive than the people who hang out on college campuses and hand out religious tracts.
No, but religion causes problems same as sexism or discrimination does. It fuels and amplifies both of those bad things, which (iirc) is a point I made a while back that no one ever bothered to reply to beyond a snide dismissive comment from Miko.I think that's because it's impossible to refute within the terms which the atheists participating in this discussion have dictated. If I point out the ways in which my religion combats sexism and discrimination then you hand-waive it away by saying that my religion isn't real religion and that I'm just an unconscious atheist anyway. You set the parameters of the discussion so that the only real religions are those that are sexist and discriminatory, and then you challenge us to prove that religion isn't sexist and discriminatory. And I'm just not willing to debate religion with people who don't acknowledge that my religion exists. Sorry. It's pointless, as well as annoying.
@craichead So far the most vocal defenders of religionism have very coyly refused to express their beliefs in any concrete manner, if there's a failure to address your own personal brand of religionism blame yourself. Like Miko you've chosen to shield your own beliefs from criticism by hiding behind vague and fuzzy terms and refusing to ever set down in nice, concrete, terms what you really believe.You think refusing to submit my beliefs for hostile interrogation is despicable? That's... interesting.
Complaining about a problem you actively helped to create seems disingenuous at best. In fact, I'd say it's a pretty despicable argumentative tactic.
But I do argue that religion should be socially discouraged, that people hooked on it should be made to feel uncomfortable about their indulgence in religion.So here's the thing, dude. I'm Jewish. My family has been Jewish for as long as anyone can document. If "being made to feel uncomfortable" was going to dissuade anyone from being Jewish, I can promise you my ancestors would have converted to Christianity more than a thousand years ago. I think you shouldn't flatter yourself about the effects that snide remarks are going to have on people who have proved their commitment to something.
@craichead: No, I think refusing to define your religious belief and then criticizing atheists for not addressing your particular religious belief is despicable. You're sitting there saying "ha ha, you stupid atheists, you never talked about my religion (which I kept secret)".That's hilarious.
One common understanding of transcendence is an encounter with a world beyond ourselves, beyond full comprehension. But why must this be interpreted as supernatural? A naturalistic world offers an abundance of experiences and understandings beyond our individual lives. There is deep time, extending unfathomably into the past and unfathomably into the future, with our entire lives constituting but a blip. There is deep space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies separated by incomprehensibly vast distances, in which Earth is but a speck. There are concepts of energy, mathematics, human history, and evolution. There is joy in the idea that consciousness even exists. There is the experience of love. Neither a deity nor a complete loss of individuality to a greater power is necessary to experience the grandeur of these great mysteries. There's an awful lot that is bigger than any of us. And when we get it, really get it, when intellect and emotions come rushing together, transcendence seems a powerful word for that experience. After he survived a heart attack, Abraham Maslow felt as if "everything gets doubly precious, gets piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things...every single moment of every single day is transformed." Charles Darwin, in a letter to his wife Emma in 1858, described the following experience: "I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me...and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as I ever saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts and birds had been formed."posted by KirkJobSluder at 8:59 PM on September 18, 2011 [6 favorites]
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:30 AM on September 19, 2011 [1 favorite]
utterly dependent on God's GraceI'm not sure what you're asking. When I was an atheist, I didn't realize that I was utterly dependent on God's grace.
Have you ever had any experiences that differed from that?
The discussion of religious people gaslighting atheists is interesting, too, in light of the fact that Dawkins' most well-known popular book is called "The God Delusion." I mean, I strongly agree that religious people should not engage in gaslighting of atheists. And I think it happens, yes. Still. The entire raison d'etre of the new atheist movement seems to be to advance the thesis that everyone in the world who is not an atheist is delusional and dangerous. So maybe we could work to stop the gaslighting on both sides of the discussion.Eh. How exactly would you gaslight a religious believer? Perhaps I'm missing something, but I'm going by this definition: "Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim with the intent of making them doubt their own memory and perception."
Professor Dawkins feels more than a tinge of regret that he and Professor Gould did not appreciate each other more.posted by saulgoodman at 11:50 AM on September 19, 2011 [1 favorite]
“Gould wanted to downgrade the conceit that it all progressed towards us, towards humans, and I fully approved of that,” he says now, even as he makes sure to add, “But evolution most certainly is progressive.”
There is a final cosmic joke to be had here.
The two men quarreled about everything save their shared atheism. But Professor Dawkins’s closest intellectual ally on progressive evolution and convergence is Simon Conway Morris, the renowned Cambridge evolutionary paleontologist.
And Professor Morris, as it happens, is an Anglican and a fervent believer in a personal God. He sees convergence as hinting at a teleology, or intelligent architecture, in the universe.
Ask Professor Dawkins about his intellectual bedfellow, and his smile thins. “Yes, well, Simon and I have converged on the science,” he says. “I should think in the world there are not two evolutionary scientists who could rival each other in their enthusiasm for convergence.”
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which false information is presented to the victim with the intent of making them doubt their own memory and perception.@The World Famous I think you missed the key word in the definition.
Dawkins is smart enough to know that his diagnosis of every "religious" person in the world as delusional cannot possibly be an accurate assertion.On the contrary. A delusion is "a false belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence." That's precisely what Dawkins believes theism is, and he makes the case forcefully. You can disagree with him, but you're confusing mere disagreement with a campaign of deception.
How does what I just described not fit that definition? Richard Dawkins' novel The God Delusion is a key part of his programmatic approach designed to convince people to doubt their own perception. His diagnosis of all belief in God as a delusion is false information, given the breadth of his brush and his failure to utilize the scientific method in order to arrive at that diagnosis with respect to each and every one of the subjects of the claim.To reiterate, delusion is "a false belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence." The argument hinges on the nature of the evidence -- something that is rather central to most atheist critiques of religion throughout history. Simply asserting that Dawkins is wrong, and that he must know he's wrong, and that thus he must by deliberately lying, and that thus he's gaslighting, is a rather tortured attempt to make your point.
I've never seen someone tell another person they were delusional without it being gaslighting. It's an attempt to undermine rather than engage with their belief system.The question, of course, boils down to whether the information being presented to the subject is false or not. If you tell a schizophrenic that they're delusional, are you gaslighting them? If you tell someone who sees invisible birds circling their head that they're delusional, are you gaslighting them? If you tell someone who hears voices in their head that they're delusional, are you gaslighting them? If you tell a cult member that their delif in the leader's immortality is delusional, are you gaslighting them?
Whether Dawkins is consciously gaslighting or not is surely irrelevant, no?It's quite relevant. Please, once again, read the definition of "gaslighting" or use a less loaded word, like "belligerence."
That depends. Do you know they're a schizophrenic--I'm going to go out on a limb right now, and say this: if you believe that aliens are secretly communicating to you through your mind, you are delusional. That statement could be wrong, and I could later be proven incorrect, but am I "gaslighting" simply because I have not personally, individually interviewed every person who claims aliens are communicating with them through their fillings?
...or do they just happen to be one of the billion or so people you called delusional on the cover of your book?The cover of "The God Delusion" includes the words "The God Delusion," and "by Richard Dawkins." Can you please identify which of those six words specifically referred to each of the billion or so theists in the world? If you want to make a big deal and say that "The cover of his book is gaslighting," you're going to need to try a bit harder.
My point about conscious or not was: how can we know?Perhaps by reading what 'Gaslighting' means.
Those who find themselves liberated from the old superstitions believe themselves now to have freed themselves from all superstition, since in their ignorance of the true nature of superstition, they think that it may be overcome, and so go on arguing about it in purely negative terms, there being now nothing left to believe in....—Constantin Brunner / Spinoza contra Kant.posted by No Robots at 12:53 PM on September 19, 2011 [2 favorites]
verb: if you know for sure at what level of consciousness someone does something you're more perceptive than I am.I've made no such claim, and I'd appreciate you not implying that I did. Thanks!
I tend to look at behaviour and outcomes, just simpler.It's simpler, but often incorrect. For example, in your above comments you've stated that any time someone says that another person is delusional, unless they stick around to "build up the person's ego afterwards," they are gaslighting. You're measuring simple behavior and outcomes, to be sure, but you're also making up fanciful definitions for words that have actual complex, nuanced meanings beyond what you describe.
That's it exactly. People in this thread genuinely believe they have access to a higher form of truth. And they're totally blind to how illogical this is.So, just to be clear... are you gaslighting me?
verb: if the definition of gaslighting is "a conscious effort to..." then indeed the victims would always have to ask.By your definition, you are in fact gaslighting me and everyone else in this thread who disagrees with you. By my definition, it's uncertain.
verb: I don't think "the God delusion" is the same as "and they don't even know!" because where Dawkins wants to be right, I want to be wrong. I win when people engage honestly with me. And so do they. That act of engagement is everything.fraac, both you and The World Famous seem determined to tilt at this particular windmill. Not only are you inventing your own ridiculously broad definition for the word "Gaslighting" in order to piggyback on its emotional weight, you're getting tangled up trying to explain why your sweeping statements are different than other peoples' sweeping statements.
I'd never heard of gaslighting before today and I'm only looking it up now. Okay. Dawkins calling his book that isn't gaslighting, but calling someone emotionally involved with you 'delusional' would be. You can't get out of it by doing it subconsciously. Though that's off-topic.fraac, thanks. I appreciate that and am also happy to acknowledge that 'gaslighting' is a hot button for me, as people I care for have been subjected to it for years by their abusers. Using it as a stand-in for "rude, or even abusive language" minimizes something genuinely and intentionally manipulative.
The entire raison d'etre of the new atheist movement seems to be to advance the thesis that everyone in the world who is not an atheist is delusional and dangerous. So maybe we could work to stop the gaslighting on both sides of the discussion.Advancing the thesis that someone is delusional is not gaslighting. Presenting false evidence to them, in order to trick them into questioning their own memory and perception, is gaslighting. I'm sorry that you are confused by this.
When you offered your definition of "gaslighting," I responded by showing you how its elements may be satisfied. Then I showed you how your application of your definition of "delusional" was incorrect.Your disagreement with Dawkins' conclusions and the means by which he arrives at them does not magically make his book "gaslighting." Again, I'm sorry that you find this confusing or frustrating, but you've made very clear on several occasions in this thread that you believe his book is part of a deliberate campaign of deception. The evidence you have produced thus far is that he named the book "The God Delusion."
Is it gaslighting when you tell me I'm confused instead of conversing in good faith?No, I assume you're intelligent enough to understand what's being said, and that a simple misunderstand must be responsible for the bizarre linguistic contortions you're engaging in.
I didn't say it does. I applied your definitions.My definition was copied and pasted from the Wikipedia article for "Gaslighting."
I said [Dawkins' book title is] part of a deliberate campaign to convince people who believe in God to doubt that particular belief (i.e. their perception of reality).That's not the definition of Gaslighting, however, and given your insistence that you're simply applying the definition from Wikipedia, I can only conclude that you are confused. Either you didn't actually read the definition, or didn't understand it. "Working to convince someone that their belief is incorrect" is not "gaslighting." Even "lying to someone" is not "gaslighting."
We also agree that fighting about the semantics of whether "gaslighting" is a term properly applied to the title of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is a waste of time. Right?Not really. "Gaslighting" is, as I said earlier, something of a hot button for me. I've watched as loved ones endured it at the hands of sociopathic family members. Tossing it around willy-nilly because you take exception to the title of Dawkins' book is offensive. Perhaps not to you, perhaps not to others, but certainly to those who've had to endure the world-twisting, mind-bending task of holding on to reality as an authority figure works to tear it apart.
Not all belief in God is a delusion, and, to the extent that The God Delusion's title states or implies that all belief in God is delusional, it is false information and we can move to the next prong.Making a bold philosophical claim on the title of a book, then arguing in support of that claim inside of the book, is clearly not what was being discussed. One might just as easily say that Pope Benedict XVI is a deliberate liar, as the title of his latest book, "God Is Near Us," is demonstrably untrue. If you'd like to argue that the one-sentence definition I copied and pasted from Wikipedia is insufficient, feel free to read the rest of it. What you're arguing now, though, is ridiculous.
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.Was it all a lie? Empty manipulative rhetoric? Who knows. Probably. But Hitler did in fact use the Christian faith to advance his terrible cause, and he did it in ways that to me seem to bear more than a passing resemblance to the rhetoric we've seen coming out of our own right wing churches ever since 9-11, during the run up to the Iraq War and in the years since.
Most Socialists are content to point out that once Socialism has been established we shall be happier in a material sense, and to assume that all problems lapse when one’s belly is full. The truth is the opposite: when one’s belly is empty, one’s only problem is an empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall really start wondering about man’s destiny and the reason for his existence. One cannot have any worthwhile picture of the future unless one realises how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity.--"As I please" / George Orwell. In Tribune, 3 March 1944Modern man requires a Christianity purged of its superstitious trappings, restored to its primordial godlessness. There is no socialism without Christianity, and there is no Christianity without socialism: this basic formula goes a long way to circumvent the destructive rhetoric of both the religionists and the militant purveyors of progressive physicalism.
M-x doctor in another window.M-x doctor in another window).The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.--Capital.posted by No Robots at 11:00 AM on September 21, 2011 [1 favorite]
You made the starting claim. It is ridiculous to assert things without proof, then demand proof of any counter assertions.She claimed that Christian environmentalists existed and proved her claim by linking to a Christian environmentalist website. You counter-claimed that they were the minority and offered no evidence. She has proven her claim, and you haven't.
Where in important cases courtesy and clarity conflict, one should always choose clarity: with courtesy, one does not make culture.--Constantin Brunnerposted by No Robots at 11:13 AM on September 22, 2011
Bread and wine are supernatural products,—in the only valid and true sense, the sense which is not in contradiction with reason and Nature. If in water we adore the pure force of Nature, in bread and wine we adore the supernatural power of mind, of consciousness, of man. Hence this sacrament is only for man matured into consciousness; while baptism is imparted to infants. But we at the same time celebrate here the true relation of mind to Nature: Nature gives the material, mind gives the form. The sacrament of Baptism inspires us with thankfulness towards Nature, the sacrament of bread and wine with thankfulness towards man. Bread and wine typify to us the truth that Man is the true God and Saviour of man.--The essence of Christianity / Ludwig Feuerbachposted by No Robots at 11:30 AM on September 22, 2011 [1 favorite]
ATHEIST: Christianity is bad, because being a Christian means hating Muslims.The argument, while it seems to be a simple semantic argument about what "Christian" means, really boils down to an ontological argument about whether or not the Christian tradition is itself a valid and coherent thing. And if you aren't a Christian, I see no reason why you'd want to believe that it is.
CHRISTIAN: People who hate Muslims aren't really Christians.
ATHEIST: But most Christians hate Muslims! Here, let me quote a few prominent Christians who say they hate Muslims, and show you statistics proving that most Christians do in fact believe that hating Muslims is part of their religion...
CHRISTIAN: It doesn't matter. That's not real Christianity.
ATHEIST: That sounds like a 'no true Scotsman' argument to me.
CHRISTIAN: You don't understand.
ATHEIST: But most Christians hate Muslims! Here, let me quote a few prominent Christians who say they hate Muslims, and show you statistics proving that most Christians do in fact believe that hating Muslims is part of their religion...I'm very sympathetic -- the "But those people don't speak for me!" problem really is a big one. Some would say that is why 'God Told Me So' is the Doomsday Device of philosophy. Once you allow that basic idea onto the playing field of thought and discourse, the loudest and craziest will always win, because they want it more than you do.
CHRISTIAN: It doesn't matter. That's not real Christianity.
ATHEIST: That sounds like a 'no true Scotsman' argument to me.
CHRISTIAN: You don't understand.
I only mention this because – well, it's a matter of perspective. I know Christians who decry "fundamentalists," but in doing so they make unclear their own positions. Are they against "fundamentalism" because they believe that "fundamental Christianity" is false? Or because "fundamentalist" is just a label now having nothing to do with its origin?Well, "Fundamentalism" is an actual defined branch of Christian theology, one whose practitioners deliberately named "Fundamentalism" set themselves apart from other theological schools of Christianity. It grew out of Evangelicalism and has been a pretty powerful force in Protestant culture over the past century or so.
The fact that an argument bears the form of the "no true Scotsman" argument does not, on the face of it, indicate that the argument is in fact a fallacy. If one has an actual definition of what a Scotsman is, and one can articulate that definition, and can make exclusions rationally based on that definition, then it breaks no logical rules to say that someone is or is not a True Scotsman....Here's the problem: those shifting definitions do happen, and are an inherent part of any discussion about supernatural religious belief. You may think that you're perfectly consistent, and are more than able to articulate a clear and effective description of who a True Christian is and who is just a pretender. (I'm going to focus specifically on Christianity at this point, not because other faiths don't suffer from many of the same tendencies, but because using more precise language helps keep us from the endless rounds of abstract nouns and arguments about whether they're specific enough.)
I don't think any shouting down has happened here, but it's worth, I think, dropping the nomenclature of the "no true Scotsman" argument so that we can actually talk about the core difficulty it's trying to get at – truly problematic shifting definitions that tend to change when presented with new information.
As I said above, you have absolutely no reason for accepting that. You don't (I don't think) believe that Christianity is a coherent and real thing; you don't believe that it's a spiritual Church made up of a long stream of human beings who carry the crucified Christ in their chests, meeting with that Christ and becoming friendly with him, the outward appearance of which is the Christian tradition. So – if you don't believe that's a real thing, why should you believe that a person can be "right" or "wrong" about it?This sentence is a perfect example of definition-shifting. You started out the sentence suggesting that the earlier commenter doesn't in fact believe that "Christianity" is a real thing. Obviously, that's not true. Christians in this thread have made the strongest arguments for the faith's fundamental incoherence by their insistence that no statements can safely b made about "Christianity" without individually evaluating each and every Christian believer.
In short: I don't ask you to go along with my idea of what a Real True Christian is. I don't expect that you have any reason to. I only ask that you accept that it is in fact logically consistent for me to insist that there is such a thing as a Real True Christian.What you're describing isn't just reasonable and consistent, it's a defining characteristic of supernatural religious belief, theism particularly. Everyone who holds to it says the same thing: "I'm right, and they're wrong." They can talk endlessly about the theological minutia that separate the various subgroups, but from an outsider's perspective the underlying similarities are far more striking: everybody says there is an invisible authority talking to them, and that the invisible authority says they're right and everyone else is wrong.
So it is no accident, I think, that the modern view that the death penalty is immoral is centered in the West. That has little to do with the fact that the West has a Christian tradition, and everything to do with the fact that the West is the home of democracy. Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post–Christian Europe, and has least support in the church–going United States. I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? The Christian attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More saying to the headsman: “Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God.” And when Cranmer asks whether he is sure of that, More replies, “He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to Him.” For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence. What a horrible act!Emphasis mine.
posted by Renoroc at 4:57 AM on September 16, 2011 [2 favorites]