7/7 lest we forget

[stevienicksfan]

It is not true to say that the only wars that exist are religious. Take the most recent war in Iraq. America's attepmpt to scare the rest of the world into submissing to some supposed authority has instead made that nation a laughing stock for allowing someone like George Bush to ever gain power.

However, what is clear is that the current form of terrorism against western countries is entirely linked to religious belief and also that there is the prospect of future wars having a very strong religious basis, which is somewhat ironic given the nature of our supposed modern secularity (though not it would seem in the US where it is clearly ok to be a religious fanatic and at the same time bomb the bejesus out of other countries for doing the same!).

Going back to the original posting of this thread, what is clear is that religion contains a very real prospect for dividing people instead of uniting them because it comes to rule their social lives. If individuals were able to seperate out the belief and praxis side of their life then these troubled individuals would surely come to see they are entitled to their beliefs without having to impinge it on others. Clearly they are unable to do this. Therefore what should be a clash of ideas becomes a clash of cultures.

[LonelyPilgrim]

Quoting Haunted from 19:09, 8th Jul 2008

In order to prevent such atrocities from being commited in the future, the idea that "faith" is a virtue to be championed needs to end. No, not all faith leads to evil, but it opens up the doorway to it. A doorway unavailable to those without it.

Utter nonsense. Sorry Haunted, I often enjoy debating with you, but this is ridiculous. One needs faith to commit evil?

A man in a city near where I live just got caught by the police after robbing three banks, and shooting a teller. I would consider the shooting to be an evil act, but when he was asked why he did it he didn't say "Because God told me to" or some such nonsence. He said, "Because the bank is where the money is, and I needed some, and the bitch wouldn't give it to me."

Now, according to you, he must have had blind faith in some sort of religion or at least in an irrational ideology in order to commit such an act, and his rational "I needed some money" is a fabrication hiding his real faith-inspired intentions, right?

The problem isn't faith, the problem is human nature. Your definition of the mechanics of faith - believing something without proof - is an everyday occurance for everyone, even you. Do you believe that your mother/girlfriend/dog/whatever loves you? You can't know that. Have you conducted every single experiment that would prove what you've learned in classes in order to see for yourself if your professors and books are truthful? No, of course not, and yet you believe them, don't you?

You can't define the mental workings of faith as synonymous to the normal workings of the human mind, and then limit your critique to faith and pretend that we'd just be fine without it. Your argument is, rather, a condemnation of... *gasp* human nature. Golly gee, who would have guessed taht... The flaw isn't in the belief, it's in the believers, and I think human history is a testament to the fact that even if you stripped away all the ideology, religion, and nationalism we'd still find reasons to kill and hurt each other - even one's as simple as "That's where the money is, and I needed some..."

[hr]

Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion. --Giacomo Casanova

[LonelyPilgrim]

Quoting stevienicksfan from 19:16, 8th Jul 2008
However, what is clear is that the current form of terrorism against western countries is entirely linked to religious belief and also that there is the prospect of future wars having a very strong religious basis, which is somewhat ironic given the nature of our supposed modern secularity (though not it would seem in the US where it is clearly ok to be a religious fanatic and at the same time bomb the bejesus out of other countries for doing the same!).

It's really not 'ok' to be a religious fanatic in the US. We just have a little thing called 'free speech' and those nuts tend to shout to the loudest. We really have a deeply secular society and always have, precisely because of the diversity of religious belief (albeit diversity primarily *within* Christianity). A more or less secular society has been the only way to avoid religious conflict inside America, current policies of the current Administration notwithstanding. The religious 'noise', which is what seems to be all you hear about us in Europe, belies the truth of our laws and customs.

Going back to the original posting of this thread, what is clear is that religion contains a very real prospect for dividing people instead of uniting them because it comes to rule their social lives. If individuals were able to seperate out the belief and praxis side of their life then these troubled individuals would surely come to see they are entitled to their beliefs without having to impinge it on others. Clearly they are unable to do this. Therefore what should be a clash of ideas becomes a clash of cultures.

This division of faith and reason in the mind of the individual has been the norm in Western culture since about 1700, particularly since 1800. Hence the lack of wars of religion in Europe or America for several centuries. That Islamic society hasn't been able to articulate the idea of a secular society and private belief on a mass scale, and that such a failure leads to conflict with a 'decadent' West (in conjunction with socio-economic pressures, the West/Islamic class is multi-faceted to an extreme), should be a critique of Islamic cultural development, not of religion as such. But of course, in the modern political climate it's safer to criticise religion than it is to criticise another culture. (Nevermind that religion is an inextricable aspect of culture, particular in the non-West).

[hr]

Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion. --Giacomo Casanova

[Batman]

[Talking]
Oh my god
Becky, look at her butt
Its so big
She looks like one of those rap guys girlfriends
Who understands those rap guys
They only talk to her because she looks like a total prostitute
I mean her butt
It's just so big
I can't believe it's so round
It's just out there
I mean, it's gross
Look, she's just so black

[Rap]
I like big butts and I can not lie
You other brothers can't deny
That when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist
And a round thing in your face
You get sprung
Wanna pull up tough
Cuz you notice that butt was stuffed
Deep in the jeans she's wearing
I'm hooked and I can't stop staring
Oh, baby I wanna get with ya
And take your picture
My homeboys tried to warn me
But that butt you got
Make Me so horney
Ooh, rump of smooth skin
You say you wanna get in my benz
Well use me use me cuz you aint that average groupy

I've seen them dancin'
To hell with romancin'
She's Sweat,Wet, got it goin like a turbo vette

I'm tired of magazines
Saying flat butts are the thing
Take the average black man and ask him that
She gotta pack much back

So Fellas (yeah) Fellas(yeah)
Has your girlfriend got the butt (hell yeah)
Well shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake that healthy butt
Baby got back

(LA face with Oakland booty)

I like'em round and big
And when I'm throwin a gig
I just can't help myself
I'm actin like an animal
Now here's my scandal

I wanna get you home
And UH, double up UH UH
I aint talkin bout playboy
Cuz silicone parts were made for toys
I wannem real thick and juicy
So find that juicy double
Mixalot's in trouble
Beggin for a piece of that bubble
So I'm lookin' at rock videos
Knockin these bimbos walkin like hoes
You can have them bimbos
I'll keep my women like Flo Jo
A word to the thick soul sistas
I wanna get with ya
I won't cus or hit ya
But I gotta be straight when I say I wanna --
Til the break of dawn
Baby Got it goin on
Alot of pimps won't like this song
Cuz them punks lie to hit it and quit it
But I'd rather stay and play
Cuz I'm long and I'm strong
And I'm down to get the friction on

So ladies (yeah), Ladies (yeah)
Do you wanna roll in my Mercedes (yeah)
Then turn around
Stick it out
Even white boys got to shout
Baby got back

(LA face with the Oakland booty)

Yeah baby
When it comes to females
Cosmo ain't got nothin to do with my selection
36-24-36
Only if she's 5'3"

So your girlfriend throws a Honda
Playin workout tapes by Fonda
But Fonda ain't got a motor in the back of her Honda
My anaconda don't want none unless you've got buns hun
You can do side bends or sit-ups, but please don't lose that butt
Some brothers wanna play that hard role
And tell you that the butt ain't gold
So they toss it and leave it
And I pull up quick to retrieve it
So cosmo says you're fat
Well I ain't down with that
Cuz your waste is small and your curves are kickin
And I'm thinkin bout stickin
To the beanpole dames in the magazines
You aint it miss thing
Give me a sista I can't resist her
Red beans and rice did miss her
Some knucklehead tried to dis
Cuz his girls were on my list
He had game but he chose to hit 'em
And pulled up quick to get with 'em
So ladies if the butt is round
And you wanna triple X throw down
Dial 1-900-MIXALOT and kick them nasty thoughts
Baby got back
Baby got back
Little in tha middle but she got much back x4

-- Sir Mixalot

[hr]

Have you ever danced with the Devil in the Pale Moonlight!

[munchingfoo]

Quoting LonelyPilgrim from 20:26, 8th Jul 2008

Quoting Haunted from 19:09, 8th Jul 2008

In order to prevent such atrocities from being commited in the future, the idea that "faith" is a virtue to be championed needs to end. No, not all faith leads to evil, but it opens up the doorway to it. A doorway unavailable to those without it.

Utter nonsense. Sorry Haunted, I often enjoy debating with you, but this is ridiculous. One needs faith to commit evil?

To be fair - I don't think thats what he said. He said "such attrocities", which I took to mean the sort where the person did it for religious reasons.

Of course its true, because it proves itself. Without religion how could one kill in the name of religion.

On its own, I'm not sure how helpful an argument it is though.

[hr]

"The entirety of these definitions lie outside the gamut of the sRGB color space — such a pure color cannot be represented using RGB primaries. The color swatch to the right is a desaturated approximation, created by taking the centroid of the standard definition and moving it towards the D65 white point, until it meets the sRGB gamut triangle."

[Senethro]

Quoting Batman from 20:59, 8th Jul 2008
etc etc

[househunter]

[quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
[quote][quote]
-- Sir Mixalot

[/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote][/quote]

(Admin edit: Thanks for that)

[househunter]

^^^^ Nicely framed! ^^^^

[munchingfoo]

Are these multiple posts quoting Sir Mixalot a pisstake of the person who posted Dulce et decorum est?

If its something else, I don't get it.

[hr]

"The entirety of these definitions lie outside the gamut of the sRGB color space — such a pure color cannot be represented using RGB primaries. The color swatch to the right is a desaturated approximation, created by taking the centroid of the standard definition and moving it towards the D65 white point, until it meets the sRGB gamut triangle."

[stevienicksfan]

Thanks Sir Mixalot for an incredibly uninteresting diversion.

I think your premise that the US is a secular society is quite simply ridiculous. Maybe on the East-coast where thankfully some rationality seems to prevail in your country this is true. However, the very fact that both McCain and Obama have had to take into account to such a large extent the musings of their pastors and really come out against them both displays the importance the religious sector in that country has.

To be frank people pay a little attention to what the Archbishop of Canterbury says here as they know he is a genuinely nice fellow and wont say anything to nasty. Then they disregard him. Not so in the US where faith is a huge issue for peoples politics and personal lives. I see no difference whatsoever between evangelicals and muslim extremists. They both believe in entirely irrational beliefs.

Go back and look at the statistics of "believers" in your country and you will see you are quite simply wrong.

[Humphrey]

Quoting tom from 16:06, 8th Jul 2008
why on earth is it called "7/7", like its on any scale as bad as 9/11. i myself just call it 'the london bombings', everyone would know what i'm referring to. about 50 people died that day, but thats nothing compared to the 3000 that got wiped out on 9/11.

no disrespect to the dead, mind.

Returning to the topic for a second. It's worth remembering that 67 British nationals died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks which put it in the same league of national tragedy as the 7/7 attacks. I only say this because popular memory seems to suggest that 9/11 was something that happened to America but it was actually the UK's worst terrorist atrocity, albeit not on our soil.

[hr]

http://humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

[Jos Dad]

Quoting Humphrey from 09:43, 9th Jul 2008
Returning to the topic for a second. It's worth remembering that 67 British nationals died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks which put it in the same league of national tragedy as the 7/7 attacks. I only say this because popular memory seems to suggest that 9/11 was something that happened to America but it was actually the UK's worst terrorist atrocity, albeit not on our soil.

Also, if you look at the Alumnus Chronicle for 2002 you will find numerous references to young alumni who died "September 2001".

[Haunted]

Quoting LonelyPilgrim from 20:26, 8th Jul 2008
Utter nonsense. Sorry Haunted, I often enjoy debating with you, but this is ridiculous. One needs faith to commit evil?

Not once did I say you need faith to commit evil (reread the Weinburg quote). What I did say was that in order to believe your doing gods work (i.e. the "right" thing) by doing something like a suicide bombing, does take faith. Do you contest that? And that such suicide bombers may be genuinely good people and it is only their blind conviction that makes them appear to be commiting evil to those of us without such conviction.

A man in a city near where I live...

Irrelevant in light of your mistake in interpreting me.

Do you believe that your mother/girlfriend/dog/whatever loves you? You can't know that.

Say it ain't so! I've heard this very same 'proof' from the mouth of Ray Comfort. Tell me you're not sourcing him.

To answer your question, actually I do have proof that mother/girlfriend/dog loves me. The evidence abounds for such a thing. Smiles, glints in the eye, them saying "I love you", them wishing to spend time with me, etc etc. You wouldn't count such things as evidence?

Have you conducted every single experiment that would prove what you've learned in classes in order to see for yourself if your professors and books are truthful? No, of course not, and yet you believe them, don't you?

You're right, of course I haven't. What I have done is quite a few of them, enough to trust that what I am being told is true. I've also been shown the mechanisms by which such things work. This is what you call a rational belief. Indeed, the probability that the teachers are conspiring against us telling us all the exact same lies is far less probable than they are telling the truth. It would take faith to believe they were lying to you.

You may have also wished to use such other fine examples as "how do you know you weren't just placed here 5 seconds ago?" or "what makes you think austrailia even exists? Have you been there?" or that timeless classic "what makes you think you're seeing red the way I do?".

You can't define the mental workings of faith as synonymous to the normal workings of the human mind,

Did I?

and then limit your critique to faith and pretend that we'd just be fine without it.

We wouldn't?

Your argument is, rather, a condemnation of... *gasp* human nature.

No thats just you concluding that.

Golly gee, who would have guessed taht... The flaw isn't in the belief, it's in the believers,

Yes because the belief itself doesn't have faith, only the believers do.

[hr]

Now with 100% more corn

[rham]

Quoting LonelyPilgrim from 20:26, 8th Jul 2008


A man in a city near where I live just got caught by the police after robbing three banks, and shooting a teller. I would consider the shooting to be an evil act, but when he was asked why he did it he didn't say "Because God told me to" or some such nonsence. He said, "Because the bank is where the money is, and I needed some, and the bitch wouldn't give it to me."



The problem isn't faith, the problem is human nature.

Surely the argument is that mass or killing in organised manner, does often (exclusively?) require some form of belief system that places different (lesser) value on the lives of others. Religion almost always does so by celebrating the believer as deserving special treatment (I know most religion prohibit killing but many celebrate wars in their holy books).

Human nature is actually quite resistant to killing other humans, that’s why we find it shocking. Pysco's by definition are defective and do not feel this prohibition. Most killing by individuals is either a crime of passion based on some rational reason (self defence or sexual / mating / family issues) or mental illness / delusion. Random killing such as the bank robbers are usually psychos, they lack the empathy to see the bank clerk as human, thus killing has no meaning. These processes do not occur in groups of people at the same time but in isolated individuals.

The whole point of training soldier is to make them kill as a group at the same time. There was a fascinating documentary addressing how the US and UK army studied reactions to killing amongst soldiers (in the 1st world war most fired to miss). They train soldiers now to react in an automatic manner, thus by passing the hard wired prohibition of killing. The well trained soldier (combat infantry man) shows no hesitation (in effect they mirror a pyscho but I stress they are not pyschos). Thus pound for pound, despite popular misconception, in a firefight with even the most dedicated freedom fighters, regular UK or US soldiers will almost certainly win because of their ability to kill without hesitation or compunction people designated as the enemy (they are more violent). There is some debate as to whether PTSD is triggered in part by this process. The use of video games, negative sterotypes. espirt de corps and the very phrase de-humanise conveys what is going on here.

The killing prohibition is of course evolution in action, no self killing organism would have developed to an advanced stage. Humans are unique in that their advanced mental abilities have allowed them to devise systems of belief, training schemes or organise societies where joining together to kill other humans is considered virtuous or at least right (that is where they can overcome the killing prohibition). Ever wondered why most societies including our own keep on about the ultimate sacrifice, dying for freedom, bravery, heroes etc etc. We are creating a belief system (religious or secular) which says killing is acceptable and thus encourage those doing it and future participants.

Humans do not work like this normally, if we were suddenly taken over by Islamic fanatics, the vast majority would choose cooperation (veils, mosque etc) not death simply because it is to the individuals benefit to do so and live another day.

Animals in rare circumstances will fight to the death another of the same species, but almost always over a limited but essential resource. The step father killing the step children in animals is driven to make resources for their own offspring. The same step father (e.g. lions) does not kill other lionesses children in some holy war. Step fathers in humans are more likely to kill step children than the biological father. That does not mean that there are not many loving step dads out there.

There is no equivalent of the organised (where multiple people take part with a common goal) killing indulged in by humans of their own species. What’s worse as technology and science have developed we can and now do mass killing on a spectacular scale.

Suicide bombing has another name, the mission where there is no possibility return. They are one and the same. The second is glamourised in films about our wars. We celebrate the bravery of bomber command, which came pretty close to suicide missions as is blew German civilians to smithereens. Why do we say those who died on 7/7 are heroes or someway special to others who die? All death, especially that terminated unnaturally by violence, is a tragedy and a uniquely special crime. Making special categories of victims encourages us to make value judgments about human life, this can lead to systems which support mass killing.

As for targeting civilians, this was pioneered by General Sherman for the simple reason that civilians supply and equip the military. Thus if you oppose British occupation of Iraq and have a belief that says killing humans is OK, then killing UK citizens is a fairly rational way of stopping it. It could work and it is certainly much easier than fighting the warrior elite or murdering well protected decision makers.

What would I suggest? We are all humans beings. Killing except in a very limited set of cases (for example when your own life is directly threatened by the attacker) is wrong. What is always wrong is organise society or a group within that society in such a way that it can go along with mass killings of the "other". Celebrating this by the glorious dead, heroes etc is wrong




[hr]

Never trust a camel or anything else that can go for a week without a drink

[Humphrey]

Quoting Haunted from 16:11, 8th Jul 2008
Though I was hoping for you to rigiously defend your accusation that the "new" atheism is intrinsically christian.

Hi there, as promised here is my best shot at a rigorous defence. Apologies if its a bit long winded but its a sprawling topic.

First of all it’s important to point out that there are many types of atheism and that I’m only engaging with the so called ‘new atheism’, which is really another round of the Positivist atheism we had in the 19th century. Other groups of atheists, regard this particular strain as retrograde and atavistic for reasons I’ll go into; Onfray, a writer inspired by Nietzsche goes so far as to call it ‘Atheist Christianity’. I’ll inevitably be making some unfair generalisations as I’m really addressing the writings of Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett which I am taking to represent the movement as a whole.

The new atheism is a reaction against western monotheism but it is also a derivative of it. While the central belief in a creator god has been eradicated, the categories of thinking are still in place despite having been seriously undermined. Most Atheists think that by rejecting monotheistic beliefs they have rejected religion. They get tremendously angry when you suggest otherwise. Actually they always get tremendously angry but that's by the by.

‘New Atheism’ is characterised by the movement’s suppression of its religious heritage and the passing off of ideals that developed from the western religious tradition as somehow the true state of human nature once all superstition has been swept away .The problem is that many of the categories of thinking that go with liberal values come from within Christianity and Judaism; which was partly the reason Nietzsche condemned them. They do not come as an attack on religion. Two examples are the writings of Milton and John Locke, whose philosophy is saturated with Christian references. Then of course there is Spinoza who was a rationalist but also a mystic who, although a critic of his own religious tradition, was certainly shaped by it. It is historically demonstrable that modern ideals of toleration go back way before the enlightenment together with a profound tradition of scepticism in western thought. One thinks of such writers as Pierre Bayle and Michel de Montaigne. All of these came from within western religious tradition, they didn’t attack them although they sometimes criticised them for inhuman practices. One of the oddities of the current wave of new atheism is its collective ignorance of the development of liberal ideology in the history of thought and earlier types of atheism. There is a fundamental error in not studying how we have acquired the concepts and categories we use, how they emerged and developed in the western tradition. This mirrors the tendency of new atheists to erase or play down the significant contribution from religion to the development of western science.

Let’s take the example of American secularism which has cropped up in this discussion. This emerged not from deistic writers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. It emerged in the 17th century from religious dissent that is to say from a type of religion rather than an attack on religion. So even secularism which really goes all the way back to Jesus’ statement ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ which was developed by St Augustine, can be seen as a development from western religion not from the attack on it. The concept of inalienable rights came from Locke who developed his ideas from monotheism.

The present atheism shares two very important features with the Positivist movement of the 19th century. The first is the idea that through all of human history, civilisation is moving towards a global society based on science. There was a period of religion which involved ‘magical’ thinking, then a period of metaphysical thinking which was the middle ages and then the modern age based on science and finally the end of history. What we have is a sort of a revival of the whiggish forms of history that were popular in the late 19th and early 20th century with of course the pious Christianity of the whigs airbrushed out. The very idea that history has this kind of directionality comes from within western theism. In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. The ‘new atheist’ history is often one of crude stereotypes, idiotic medieval, villainous clergymen and heroic rationalists fighting the darkness of superstition. Salvation, in the form of reason, emerges triumphant.

The second feature is that Positivism was a cult of humanity. Positivists like Comte said that now we have got rid of religion we can worship a new supreme being, ourselves basically. Within some of the ‘new atheist’ debate you get a sense of this kind of divinisation, humanity without limits, knowledge will emancipate us and this will lead to the end of wars and all conflicts. The problem is, as history shows, knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.

Let’s return to the conclusions of Provine, namely no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning exists and no free will exists. It’s fairly obvious that while these are the conditions for a materialist world view, the new atheists all seem to choose to live higher than the logic of their own beliefs. For instance the central thread of Bill Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy is the assertion of free will against faith. The young heroine sets out to thwart the Magisterium - Pullman's metaphor for Christianity - because it aims to deprive humans of their ability to choose their own course in life, which she believes would destroy what is most human in them. But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is derived from Genesis. The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith. Dan Dennett denies the existence of free will and consciousness but because he is a really nice bloke he asserts it anyway, showing he retains a residue of Christian humanism with its emphasis on the special status of human beings as rational creatures in the cosmos. Instead we are supposed to take a half hearted leap of faith and create a new kind of mythology for human dignity. If we really did chuck out the concept of free will and regard it as the way our genetically programmed selves react to the environment rather than rational choice, there would have to be a wholesale restructuring of our ethical and legal systems as Onfray has proposed.

Having disposed of god, is there any foundation for ethics perhaps through the natural law found in biology?. Christian theologians like Aquinus have been almost unanimous in finding that natural law is a part of the natural world. It is a universal property of healthy humans regardless of their religion or culture. But it is only machinery. The software of specific morality and ethics requires something more. The evolutionary explanation for morality does not actually explain why slavery and genocide are wrong; it only explains how we became creatures who are capable of having the argument in the first place. We are forced back to the position that almost all the specific morality of our society is a product of our Christian heritage, not our genes or those elusive memes of popular imagination.

I’ll end with some of my own observations. Firstly despite an antipathy towards Judeo-Christian faith, the new forms of atheism retain some seriously faith based concepts. For example both memes and multivere theories are fringe science or metaphysics with little or no evidence to support them but they have been accepted by Dennett and Dawkins respectively and perform a key role in their theories. Secondly despite advances in our understanding, the mythology of the bible still lurks on in some of the writings of the ‘new atheists’. In ‘The Selfish Gene’ Dawkins argues that we are blindly programmed sex robots, marionettes suspended on strands of DNA at the mercy of selfish replicators. And yet despite the fact that selfishness lies at the heart of our behaviour, we alone have the capacity to defy our biology. This is basically a rehash of the fall depicted in Genesis in which man is born imperfect with original sin but has the capacity to seek redemption through our free will. Lastly, most atheists are content merely to sneer at theists. The 'new atheism' is more akin to monotheism in that it is aggressively evangelical and dogmatic. There are even 'new atheist' churches springing up just as happened with logical positivists.

Dawkins and Hitchens are eager to assure us that while they reject the Judeo-Christian God, they do not reject the values of compassion, human dignity, and equality that were developed in the mental landscape of Christianity. This is a noble aim but it would be good to do the decent thing and give credit where credit is due. Religion didn’t poison everything; rather it shaped some of our most precious values.

Look forward to the death from a thousand quotes.




[hr]

http://humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

[MaverickMenzies]

Not once did I say you need faith to commit evil (reread the Weinburg quote). What I did say was that in order to believe your doing gods work (i.e. the "right" thing) by doing something like a suicide bombing, does take faith. Do you contest that? And that such suicide bombers may be genuinely good people and it is only their blind conviction that makes them appear to be commiting evil to those of us without such conviction.

Counter-example: The secular Tamil Tigers.

see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation ... amil_Eelam

Pre the invasion of iraq, they had carried out the majority of suicide bombings in the world.

[WashingtonIrving]

Humphrey - that is the best post I have ever read on the sinner. You'll probably get hammered for it though. I'll respond with my (mild) objections when I get the time.

[hr]

"I said farewell honey, I'll see you Judgment Day"

[Senethro]

Given that Christianity saturated western thought, how can any atheism come about without being a development of or a conscious rejection of it? You'd need to raise a generation of new minds with no access to previous culture. Shit, why not invent a new language as well as english and other European languages might influence this kind of thought!

If the current atheists aren't atheist enough because they came second or because they don't act like complete amoral cunts to each other, what atheist would be good enough for you?

Alternatively, are you saying other religions are incapable have having "values of compassion, human dignity, and equality"? If these are present in other religions, then why acknowledge Christianity for them? Are they not possibly ideas from an early proto-religion or capable of independently arising because we have a pre-disposition towards them?

[stevienicksfan]

That is indeed a well-thought through expression of where social morals came from but it doesn't tell the whole picture. The interesting precept that the poster seems to be presenting is that these morals are de facto of a religious basis and should only be seen as such. What is interesting about what was said was the action to reject religion yet the capacity to retain the morals. The question then stems from the question do these morals have an apriori requirement for a previously existing religion?

The simple truth is that secular society has not existed yet in the "modern" history of mankind. Even if we take for example the communist era Soviet Union or China more recently what we see are religious practises being maintained despite persecution.

Clearly there is something in this process that could be described as anthropological fact, namely that in some ways religion possibly is a common denominating factor within societies of people regardless of cultural history. However, what I think is the interesting mistake with the labelling of the basis of our society as Judaeo-Chrsitian is that in a society of non-believers can you still maintain that the morals are maintained by religious praxis?

Where does the rule of law fit into our precept that these so called christian fundamentals frame and shape our society? For an example take abortion. The bible clearly states at certain points and as we are so often reminded by fundamental nutters and interestingly many sane catholics that life starts at conception. Even if you remove the premise that the bible is the authority and instead place the church as the social body presiding over such spiritual matters, we clearly see a fundamental division between religion and law.

The question that is important here is where now is the foundation of social and common law influenced solely by the church? We all know that during the 17th century even the mention of the word secular would have got ones hands chopped off (example: poor sod at Edinburgh uni who was hanged for not attending church as required circa turn of 17th century.) It is therefore unsurprising that Spinoza and Locke both have floral depictions of an ever-present god, though I think if you read between the lines in a Treatise on Human Nature, Locke is searching for a far greater secularism than he could possibly state in text. What I want to know is why do people keep insisting that we live today in a judeao-christian society when actually our law is removed in all areas from religious scripture and philosophy and utilises a basically utilitarian process?

[Haunted]

Quoting Humphrey from 15:35, 9th Jul 2008
First of all it’s important to point out that there are many types of atheism

I almost stopped reading here. No there isn't. Atheism = lack of belief in deities. Anything someone may be is additional to that. One can be a nihilist or a humanist or communist and still be atheistic. Those are not different types of atheism.

While the central belief in a creator god has been eradicated, the categories of thinking are still in place despite having been seriously undermined.

I'm getting suspicious your about to make the mistake by thinking that because Britian was once a fiercely monotheistic kingdom that we therefore owe it that monotheism for making it the place it is today?

Most Atheists think that by rejecting monotheistic beliefs they have rejected religion.

Reject =/= do not believe

They get tremendously angry when you suggest otherwise. Actually they always get tremendously angry but that's by the by.

Rather an ad hom

‘New Atheism’ is characterised by the movement’s suppression of its religious heritage

All the new atheist authors you cited want religion to be taught in schools in a comparitive and historical context, i.e. they support the teaching of it as a heritage, it is after all part of what shaped our history. The accusation of suppresion needs some evidence.

and the passing off of ideals that developed from the western religious tradition as somehow the true state of human nature once all superstition has been swept away.

Correlation is not causation. Just because free thinking evolved in western culture and western culture also happened to be christian does not imply that christianity inspired free thought, indeed it's easy to argue the opposite.

It is historically demonstrable that modern ideals of toleration go back way before the enlightenment together with a profound tradition of scepticism in western thought. One thinks of such writers as Pierre Bayle and Michel de Montaigne. All of these came from within western religious tradition, they didn’t attack them although they sometimes criticised them for inhuman practices.

This is still only correlation. In fact since these free thinkers attacked the tradition is it even harder to suggest the tradition gave rise to their free thought.

One of the oddities of the current wave of new atheism is its collective ignorance of the development of liberal ideology in the history of thought and earlier types of atheism.

And what of Lao Tse, Confucius, Thacydides, Lucretius, Epicurus and Democritus? All vastly predating the Jesus myth. In fact you don't hear of many free thinkers after Jesus' time, not in the west anyway, the Muslims were actually pretty good (Averroism) at it during the middle/dark ages.

There is a fundamental error in not studying how we have acquired the concepts and categories we use, how they emerged and developed in the western tradition. This mirrors the tendency of new atheists to erase or play down the significant contribution from religion to the development of western science.

Not at all. Of course historically, the church has ruled over the educational instituitions. However this isn't important because it has no bearing on whether god exists. This is approaching the logical fallacy of appeal to negative consequences, i.e. without christianity we wouldn't have the current world we live in. This makes no comment on the existence of gods and a belief in such a thing is (I would argue) a prerequisite for being a christian.

Let’s take the example of American secularism which has cropped up in this discussion. This emerged not from deistic writers such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. It emerged in the 17th century from religious dissent that is to say from a type of religion rather than an attack on religion. So even secularism which really goes all the way back to Jesus’ statement ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ which was developed by St Augustine, can be seen as a development from western religion not from the attack on it.

Again, correlation. I would think it hard to argue that secularism is not inevitable in an advancing society. Only once control was wrestled from the churches did our enlightenment begin.

The concept of inalienable rights came from Locke who developed his ideas from monotheism.

God-given rights of course. Because he used the idea of god to reach this idea does that mean god is therefore a prerequisite for it? Remember the story of Alfred Wallace who discovered natural selection whilst in a fever induced hallucination? Had he been living a century or so before he could've described it as a religious experience. Do we therefore thank whatever deity was communicating with him for the advancement of biology?

The present atheism shares two very important features with the Positivist movement of the 19th century.

Again, atheism is just the lack of belief in deities. Anything else is not atheism.

The first is the idea that through all of human history, civilisation is moving towards a global society based on science. There was a period of religion which involved ‘magical’ thinking, then a period of metaphysical thinking which was the middle ages and then the modern age based on science and finally the end of history. What we have is a sort of a revival of the whiggish forms of history that were popular in the late 19th and early 20th century with of course the pious Christianity of the whigs airbrushed out. The very idea that history has this kind of directionality comes from within western theism. In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. The ‘new atheist’ history is often one of crude stereotypes, idiotic medieval, villainous clergymen and heroic rationalists fighting the darkness of superstition. Salvation, in the form of reason, emerges triumphant.

This is merely a caricature. Why not go with "they both have their unquestionable doctrines, reason and faith." Or "they both have their leaders, scientists and priests". We could go on endlessly looking for parallels, but none of that means anything. Also, I don't recall any of the authors you cited saying that science is a recent end goal of history, all cultures throughout history have demonstated scientific prowess.

The second feature is that Positivism was a cult of humanity. Positivists like Comte said that now we have got rid of religion we can worship a new supreme being, ourselves basically. Within some of the ‘new atheist’ debate you get a sense of this kind of divinisation, humanity without limits, knowledge will emancipate us and this will lead to the end of wars and all conflicts. The problem is, as history shows, knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.

Whilst some of the authors you cite do imagine things getting better without religion (though the usage of the word "worhsip" is again an attempted caricature on your part) it is important to note that those are just opinions of those individuals. Atheism is a lack of belief in deities, and makes no comment on anything else.

Let’s return to the conclusions of Provine, namely no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning exists and no free will exists. It’s fairly obvious that while these are the conditions for a materialist world view,

Non-sequitar. Atheism makes no comment on anything except the belief in the existence of dieties. Besides, Dan Dennett, for example, believes very much that free will exists.

the new atheists all seem to choose to live higher than the logic of their own beliefs. For instance the central thread of Bill Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy is the assertion of free will against faith.

A children's author's work of fiction is now an authority on this? Incidentally it was the struggle of free will against the tyranny of theocracy. Slight difference to "faith".

But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is derived from Genesis. The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith.

This is absurd. Are you really suggesting that until a bunch of bronze age goat herders got together to start a book club that human beings did not think they were in control of their own actions? Now, of course people were very supersitious and believed that things beyond their control (planets, palm lines) could affect them, but not control their will.

Dan Dennett denies the existence of free will and consciousness but because he is a really nice bloke he asserts it anyway, showing he retains a residue of Christian humanism with its emphasis on the special status of human beings as rational creatures in the cosmos.

Utter nonsense. His two books on the subjects (consciousness explained and freedom evolves) very much support the idea of unique consciouness and free will because there is nothing christian about such things, again philosphers that predate christianity have discussed these ideas. "Sure we have a soul," he says "but it's made of neurons".

Instead we are supposed to take a half hearted leap of faith and create a new kind of mythology for human dignity. If we really did chuck out the concept of free will and regard it as the way our genetically programmed selves react to the environment rather than rational choice, there would have to be a wholesale restructuring of our ethical and legal systems as Onfray has proposed.

The fallacy is that you have already concluded that atheism (or materialism, slightly different) is incompatible with x,y and z without demonstrating it to be so. Indeed such as demonstration is impossible because atheism makes no comment other than on the lack of belief in deities.

Having disposed of god, is there any foundation for ethics perhaps through the natural law found in biology?. Christian theologians like Aquinus have been almost unanimous in finding that natural law is a part of the natural world. It is a universal property of healthy humans regardless of their religion or culture. But it is only machinery. The software of specific morality and ethics requires something more.

Arguement from ignorance. You cannot declare that morality needs something more than the machinery of biology just because it seems that way.

The evolutionary explanation for morality does not actually explain why slavery and genocide are wrong;

Because "right" and "wrong" are human concepts which we used to describe actions. What biology can tell you is why you feel something is right or wrong.

We are forced back to the position that almost all the specific morality of our society is a product of our Christian heritage, not our genes or those elusive memes of popular imagination.

And you think christianity first came up with all their "unique" moral ideas? The golden rule was around long before all that nonsense. Of course a cult about how to live your life will include a list of moral do's and don'ts, they all do. Any society that believed stealing from your neighbour and murdering your friends was ok wouldn't get very far, nature would select against such cultures. To say that western morality is christian is to say that western wine is christian.

I’ll end with some of my own observations. Firstly despite an antipathy towards Judeo-Christian faith, the new forms of atheism retain some seriously faith based concepts. For example both memes and multivere theories are fringe science or metaphysics with little or no evidence to support them but they have been accepted by Dennett and Dawkins respectively and perform a key role in their theories.

How many times are you going to make this mistake? Atheism is merely the lack of belief in deities. Anything else is not atheism. Incidentally, memes were coined by Prof Dawkins in his book the Selfish Gene as an analogy only. None of the authors you cite believe multiverse theory is fact, they merely muse over the idea (as we all do), far from a "key role".

Secondly despite advances in our understanding, the mythology of the bible still lurks on in some of the writings of the ‘new atheists’. In ‘The Selfish Gene’ Dawkins argues that we are blindly programmed sex robots, marionettes suspended on strands of DNA at the mercy of selfish replicators.

No, this was near the beginning of the book. He then goes on to show how we have broken free from our "selfish genes"

And yet despite the fact that selfishness lies at the heart of our behaviour, we alone have the capacity to defy our biology.

Yes your quoting Dawkins' own conclusion here.

This is basically a rehash of the fall depicted in Genesis

Caricature no.3. This is just a watered down version of those crazy youtube theists who proclaim that science has proved the bible through things like using "oh the bible had a beginning, and now science has shown so does the universe!"

Here's some other good ones:
Psalm 8:8 "The birds of the air, And the fish of the sea that pass through the paths of the seas."
The phrase, "the paths of the seas" caused a man named Matthew Fontaine Maury to begin a search which led to the discovery of ocean currents, the natural "paths of the seas" created by God. Maury concluded that if God's Book said they were there, they must be there! He was right.

Oh this is a good islamic one, the quran predicted the speed of light!
1400 years ago it was stated in the Quran (Koran, the book of Islam) that angels travel in one day the same distance that the moon travels in 1000 lunar years, that is, 12000 Lunar Orbits / Earth Day. Outside gravitational fields 12000 Lunar Orbits / Earth Day turned out to be the known speed of light!

Lastly, most atheists are content merely to sneer at theists.

Is this an arguement? Does it make any comment on the existence of the supernatural?

The 'new atheism' is more akin to monotheism in that it is aggressively evangelical and dogmatic. There are even 'new atheist' churches springing up just as happened with logical positivists.

Your drawing useless parallels again. See above about my comment on priests/scientists respective leaders.

Dawkins and Hitchens are eager to assure us that while they reject the Judeo-Christian God, they do not reject the values of compassion, human dignity, and equality that were developed in the mental landscape of Christianity.

Compassion and dignity were around long before the romans nailed that jew.

This is a noble aim but it would be good to do the decent thing and give credit where credit is due. Religion didn’t poison everything; rather it shaped some of our most precious values.

Correlation again. Because good things arose during a time of theocracies across europe doesn't mean that the doctrine of those theocracies are to be thanked.

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