SAM:
Actuality: The vast majority of al-Qaida terrorists in the sample came from families with very moderate religious beliefs or a completely secular outlook. Indeed, 84 percent were radicalized in the West, rather than in their countries of origin. Most had come to the West to study, and at the time they had no intention of ever becoming terrorists. Another 8 percent consisted of Christian converts to Islam, who could not have been brainwashed into violence by their culture.
You conveniently skip over what these people, regardless of background, were radicalised into. They were radicalised into holding extreme fundamentalist
religious views.
It's like you have a blind spot.
What tangent? According to Dawkins "real" scientists are naturalists; I am asking you if the religious beliefs of the unreal scientists (like Francis Collins) are a necessary discussion on a science podium.
I can't understand your point here. We've already established, I think, that science is the study of nature. Therefore, scientists' jobs require them to look for naturalistic explanations of nature. That does not, however, prevent them from having religious beliefs as well - Francis Collins is an example of that.
Religion isn't being discussed in the science journals; science is.
But maybe you have some kind of point that I'm missing?
Try any society where an athiest has used anti-religious propaganda to get fame or power. North Korea, China, Cambodia
Look what you just said! "...an atheist has used anti-religious propaganda to get fame or power."
And what you didn't say: "... an atheist has used anti-religious propaganda to advance the cause of atheism."
Now, think.
Yes. Religion alone is not enough to make a suicide bomber. But remove religion and then what?
The occupation goes away? People no longer fight? Kill each other? Except that evidence from primitive societies without "organised religion" shows they were more violent, not less.
Try to stay on topic. Specifically, we were talking about suicide bombings. Here, you are drifting into a discussion of warfare in general.
In Dark Nature, biologist-naturalist Lyall Watson takes a broader perspective on human nature by examining what he calls the natural history of evil. ... He also examines so-called evil in human societies, including his own experiences with the Asmat of Irian Indonesian New Guinea who are inveterate cannibals.
These tribal societies aren't atheistic.
In contrast, Dawkins makes a reasoned case against religion, or at least against belief in gods.
Not that I can see. He talks about child abuse then admits that most theists are not violent criminals, labels then admits that they may not persist and that children do get their values from parents, God being a scientifically testable proposition then adds a disclaimer that the scientists' God is a metaphor. In other words, he dissembles to make his point.
You haven't read the book, so you're hardly qualified to give a correct summary.
Briefly, he does regard indoctrination of children as a form of child abuse. I am surprised that you appear to think that indoctrination of children is not an abuse. Perhaps you would like to comment further on your views on that matter.
He says that certain particular notions of God are scientifically testable. His talk of Spinoza's god is not a disclaimer, but a deliberate and careful discrimination between fuzzy, non-specific concepts of God as an allegory of nature, as distinct from the traditional man with the beard who lives in the sky and answers your prayers and intervenes in the physical world. The God who makes the statues weep and who causes images of the Virgin Mary to appear in hot cross buns is scientifically testable. The God who supposedly heals people at Lourdes is scientifically testable.
I suggest you do some research into exactly how much harm Stalins propaganda did.
I suggest you think about the difference between Stalin's propaganda and his death squads. Apparently, you're struggling to tell the difference.
The fact is, so far you've made no link between atheist propaganda under Stalin and all those deaths you've talked about.
As for Dawkins, he isn't indoctrinating anybody. He is making an argument, which you and everybody else are free to accept or reject. He isn't telling you that you can't have an alternative point of view. He isn't suppressing other points of view. He isn't restricting your access to information.
No, he is merely misrepresenting theism and theists to support his own anti-religion stance.
No? What, in particular, are you saying "no" to in my statement. Which of my statements in the quoted paragraph, if any, is incorrect?
This deliberate diversion away from points you don't like is tiresome. You need to be honest, and look at things that are presented to you, rather than trying to divert onto a tangent every time somebody says something you can't refute.
Comparing Dawkins to Stalin invites the communist equivalent of Godwin's law. You ought to just give up and end the thread right here.
I see no difference between the two, both were aiming for some fantasy society where they could get rid of all the theists and live in a science filled utopia.
Dawkins doesn't advocate getting rid of anybody.
Really, I find your comparison immensely distasteful and dishonest. You must be able to see that yourself, too, which makes it all the worse.
I'm using Dawkins tools of association. Anti-religion propaganda led to the death of millions in this century alone.
This is pure hyperbole without foundation.
You have made no link between atheist propaganda and deaths of millions. Saying it is so does not make it so.
Under the Khmer Rouge which banned all religion and killed all the Buddhist priests for example, following the "model" of Chinese anti-religion propaganda, for instance.
Were the priests killed in the name of atheism? I think you will find they were not.
The same for the people killed daily for their faith in North Korea, the people killed for their faith in the Soviet Union, in China, in all communist societies run by atheists.
You claim that people killed for atheism, do you? Then find me a quote that says "These people had to die, because they weren't atheists", from the killers.
In a dense analysis of how violent terror became a way of life under Lenin and Stalin, Courtois concludes that "the real motivation for the terror ultimately was Leninist ideology, and the perfectly utopian will to impose a doctrine that was completely at odds with reality." This totalizing ideology, Courtois argues, generated murderous intolerance toward all those who were perceived as obstacles to the new regime: "Terror involves a double sort of mutation. The adversary is first labeled an enemy, then a criminal, and is excluded from society. Exclusion very quickly turns into the idea of extermination." That basic outlook, he writes, has been present, "with differing degrees of intensity, in all regimes that claim to be Marxist in origin."
None of this touches on atheism. The authors are not referring to atheism as the "doctrine that was completely at odds with reality", and you're smart enough to know that. This is just another attempt to make a connection that isn't there, and a dishonest one at that.
There is no evidence that atheists who are anti-theists can create a compassionate society.
But there's plenty of examples of theists failing to create compassionate societies.
There is no evidence that atheists can create a compassionate society without some input from religious morality.
How do you propose to disentangle the sources of morality?
There is no evidence that atheists can create a tolerant society
There's plenty of evidence that theists can create intolerant societies.
Actually religion is associated with rise in scientific knowledge, athiesm has no code that defines creation as something that God has provided for man to study and enjoy. Science was born of religion. Atheists are just so much baggage going along for the ride.
Religion has a long history of suppressing scientific knowledge. Atheism has no code defining creation, because atheism has no code defining anything. Atheism is not a belief system. Science was born in spite of religion; religion never helped the progress of science. Theists are just so much baggage along for the ride.
(See how useless this kind of rhetoric is?)
And going by the Dawkins principle that the most extreme define the system, I would say athiesm has no room for secular humanism.
That is totally at odds with the reality that many self-declared atheists are also self-declared secular humanists.
You can close your eyes to reality if you like, but it just makes you look stupid.
They have no code that says love your neighbor, sin to kill etc. Their lack of code makes it unnecessary for them to practise altruism, unless they have some exposure to religious teachings. Atheism per se has NOTHING to do with justice or morality.
Correct. Secular humanism, on the other hand, is a moral philosophy.
