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Dawkins gives off “edgy teenager” vibes and doesn’t really go deep into helping understand the real arguments under beliefs in some kinds of God. If you’d like

by HEmanZ 4y ago

Dawkins gives off “edgy teenager” vibes and doesn’t really go deep into helping understand the real arguments under beliefs in some kinds of God. If you’d like something much more thorough and professional, Mackie’s “The Miracle of Theism” is very good.

muyuu 4y ago
In a recent interview he [edit to clarify: "he" here means Richard Dawkins] completely dismissed the fact that a lot of new atheists had religious fervour for their humanistic non-theist beliefs and that he had been on the wrong end of their fanaticism ("cancelled" many times by Universities on the grounds that his speech was contrary to diversity, inclusion and equity, and thus it was hate speech). He was completely dismissive to the fact that religious people had perfectly predicted that in the absence of religion, people would have the same sort of fervour for superficially rationalistic, but otherwise deranged, views. He just said that it might be true but it didn't seem interesting or relevant to him. That's exactly what a fanatic would say. I didn't see it coming back in the early 2000s but his critics were a lot more correct that I could ever have predicted.
- HEmanZ 4y ago
  Just to be clear to other readers here, you are decrying Dawkins, not John Mackie (who died in 1981). Mackie was an exemplary, thoughtful philosopher who treated the topic of theism very seriously and empathetically.
  - muyuu 4y ago
    yes, I meant Dawkins sorry for not mentioning him by name in the post above
- ecshafer 4y ago
  > He was completely dismissive to the fact that religious people had perfectly predicted that in the absence of religion, people would have the same sort of fervour for superficially rationalistic, but otherwise deranged, views. Jung and Nietzsche both had this idea ~100 years ago. When Nietzsche claimed God was dead, it was a lamentation, not an enthusiastic assertion, it was the modern world that had killed God. Jung claimed that people that left religions still tied their ideas to something, New Age Religions, Spiritualism, politics, something. In the French Revolution the Cult of Rationality set up by Robespierre had just as many trapping of religion and blood thirsty fanatics as any religion. The cultural revolution in China has many "atheists" gladly pointing people out for "heresy" to the "inquisition". These is a lot of evidence that religion is not the only source of fanatics out there.
  - muyuu 4y ago
    I believe he was always aware of this, but thought it was different this time because of wide access to information and technology, etc. Reading that, it does sound like a sort of religious belief, but that's how he (Dawkins) had posed it in the past since the 90s or so when questioned about it.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    Robespierre's cult wasn't based on "reason" but rather was just a normal religion based on a central God and the belief in an immortal soul. It wasn't really all that different from many forms of Protestantism -- he simply wanted to control the religion himself rather than having the Pope do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being
- orwin 4y ago
  I mean, he's right, no? The fact that religiousness is sometime replaced by other beliefs (that, I will note, tends to be less physically violent) is orthogonal to the fact that gods do not exist. Now, maybe the 1000s of gods humans ever prayed to actually exist, but I refuse to believe only a fraction on them do, as the arguments for all their existence is the same.
  - muyuu 4y ago
    the short answer is "no" this is a question that came up often when he was asked on his motivation to dedicate so much time on debunking religion and religious practice it wasn't a question about God or some God, it was a question on the supposed rational golden era that, according to Richard Dawkins, God and religion were stopping his view that religion would be replaced by a judicious form of rationalism has been thoroughly discredited IMO, so no, he was not right about that Dawkins' fear of the religious person looks to me exactly like the fear of the unknown that serves as the basis for many religious beliefs, and his belief that humanism would save the world completely analogous to Anglicanism, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, all of which have a scientific/gnostic eagerness[*], and a goal to unify the nations of the world listening to Solzhenitsyn describing the humanists of the post-war, Dawkins completely resembles the figure of the zealot of a non-Deistic religion - "Humanism" - so blindingly fanatic of his beliefs that he cannot fathom that, once people are presented with them, some people might just not accept them or agree to them * those religions actually try to track scientific truths, adapt to them and teach them
    - epups 4y ago
      > * those religions actually try to track scientific truths, adapt to them and teach them They do to a minimal extent. They still profess belief in revelation and miracles, to name just two things that are completely orthogonal to the scientific method. I also find it self-evidently false that their goal is to "unify the nations of the world", when you talk about three competing branches of a religion that has a ton of blood on its hands. I don't think Dawkins is afraid of religious people, but the opposite is quite likely.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  What you're seeing may just be a first-generation atheist effect. Most atheists in the US are still first-generation and rejected their parents views within the last couple decades. They also tend to trend younger, and it isn't too surprising that their beliefs are "sophomoric" (in the sense of being like a college sophomore who has just figured out everything about life with their wealth of experience). As a 51 year old that was raised without religion, I'll agree they are in fact really tiresome. [also see this good comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35513850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35513850 -- I've lived in Seattle for the past 30+ years so just never come face-to-face with religiosity in ages. If an Atheist is surrounded by Christian assholes they tend to turn into an asshole right back. That is just normal behavior of humans (or abused animals as well really). ]
  - muyuu 4y ago
    I don't know if it's only first-generation, the jury will be out on that one for a long time, perhaps many generations there is a clear pattern, which Dawkins seems to embody, that new atheists are MORE religious than their parents, but they are pious of their non-deistic beliefs and they very strongly preserve the religious-based culture they stem from in terms of moral values and societal norms the danger in this, which we are observing now, is that their ability to predict the dynamics of society is worse not better than that of plain old religious types - because their own piousness is invisible to them and they engage in deranged stuff like assuming people will just default to their hierarchies of values and morality, once the religious rooting and background of their moral beliefs is removed the obvious thing to assume would be the opposite, that humans would resort to their historically documented patterns of behaviour and repeat the intense conflict of the past to adjudicate moral disagreements, which the previous state of stand-off had already paid its dues to - and those conflicts were violent and bloody, which should bring us pause in our desire to go back to a state of "new religion" even if this one is based on the state-of-the-art science of the day and might be not deistic in the common sense of the word TLDR; in the sense of moral belief, it's not clear whether it would be better to have a non-religious society (non-coherent in moral values and collective moral rules) or even if such a thing is possible, or could be stable over time. My gut instinct is that (moral) atheism and collectivism are a bomb of a combination that is unlikely to end in anything other than disaster, and my egoistic belief is that I'm much happier if people believe in exotic supernatural stuff but it's neatly compartmentalised into the private sphere and controlled public spheres, than if they start a crusade to uproot the collective's beliefs, which will likely affect my livelihood - I see the New Atheists movement as an effort to destroy a very desirable state of affairs, not a grand goal of ushering in a rationalist Utopia

by HEmanZ 4y ago

muyuu 4y ago

In a recent interview he [edit to clarify: "he" here means Richard Dawkins] completely dismissed the fact that a lot of new atheists had religious fervour for their humanistic non-theist beliefs and that he had been on the wrong end of their fanaticism ("cancelled" many times by Universities on the grounds that his speech was contrary to diversity, inclusion and equity, and thus it was hate speech). He was completely dismissive to the fact that religious people had perfectly predicted that in the absence of religion, people would have the same sort of fervour for superficially rationalistic, but otherwise deranged, views. He just said that it might be true but it didn't seem interesting or relevant to him. That's exactly what a fanatic would say. I didn't see it coming back in the early 2000s but his critics were a lot more correct that I could ever have predicted.

HEmanZ 4y ago
Just to be clear to other readers here, you are decrying Dawkins, not John Mackie (who died in 1981). Mackie was an exemplary, thoughtful philosopher who treated the topic of theism very seriously and empathetically.
- muyuu 4y ago
  yes, I meant Dawkins sorry for not mentioning him by name in the post above
ecshafer 4y ago
> He was completely dismissive to the fact that religious people had perfectly predicted that in the absence of religion, people would have the same sort of fervour for superficially rationalistic, but otherwise deranged, views. Jung and Nietzsche both had this idea ~100 years ago. When Nietzsche claimed God was dead, it was a lamentation, not an enthusiastic assertion, it was the modern world that had killed God. Jung claimed that people that left religions still tied their ideas to something, New Age Religions, Spiritualism, politics, something. In the French Revolution the Cult of Rationality set up by Robespierre had just as many trapping of religion and blood thirsty fanatics as any religion. The cultural revolution in China has many "atheists" gladly pointing people out for "heresy" to the "inquisition". These is a lot of evidence that religion is not the only source of fanatics out there.
- muyuu 4y ago
  I believe he was always aware of this, but thought it was different this time because of wide access to information and technology, etc. Reading that, it does sound like a sort of religious belief, but that's how he (Dawkins) had posed it in the past since the 90s or so when questioned about it.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  Robespierre's cult wasn't based on "reason" but rather was just a normal religion based on a central God and the belief in an immortal soul. It wasn't really all that different from many forms of Protestantism -- he simply wanted to control the religion himself rather than having the Pope do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being
orwin 4y ago
I mean, he's right, no? The fact that religiousness is sometime replaced by other beliefs (that, I will note, tends to be less physically violent) is orthogonal to the fact that gods do not exist. Now, maybe the 1000s of gods humans ever prayed to actually exist, but I refuse to believe only a fraction on them do, as the arguments for all their existence is the same.
- muyuu 4y ago
  the short answer is "no" this is a question that came up often when he was asked on his motivation to dedicate so much time on debunking religion and religious practice it wasn't a question about God or some God, it was a question on the supposed rational golden era that, according to Richard Dawkins, God and religion were stopping his view that religion would be replaced by a judicious form of rationalism has been thoroughly discredited IMO, so no, he was not right about that Dawkins' fear of the religious person looks to me exactly like the fear of the unknown that serves as the basis for many religious beliefs, and his belief that humanism would save the world completely analogous to Anglicanism, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, all of which have a scientific/gnostic eagerness[*], and a goal to unify the nations of the world listening to Solzhenitsyn describing the humanists of the post-war, Dawkins completely resembles the figure of the zealot of a non-Deistic religion - "Humanism" - so blindingly fanatic of his beliefs that he cannot fathom that, once people are presented with them, some people might just not accept them or agree to them * those religions actually try to track scientific truths, adapt to them and teach them
  - epups 4y ago
    > * those religions actually try to track scientific truths, adapt to them and teach them They do to a minimal extent. They still profess belief in revelation and miracles, to name just two things that are completely orthogonal to the scientific method. I also find it self-evidently false that their goal is to "unify the nations of the world", when you talk about three competing branches of a religion that has a ton of blood on its hands. I don't think Dawkins is afraid of religious people, but the opposite is quite likely.
lamontcg 4y ago
What you're seeing may just be a first-generation atheist effect. Most atheists in the US are still first-generation and rejected their parents views within the last couple decades. They also tend to trend younger, and it isn't too surprising that their beliefs are "sophomoric" (in the sense of being like a college sophomore who has just figured out everything about life with their wealth of experience). As a 51 year old that was raised without religion, I'll agree they are in fact really tiresome. [also see this good comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35513850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35513850 -- I've lived in Seattle for the past 30+ years so just never come face-to-face with religiosity in ages. If an Atheist is surrounded by Christian assholes they tend to turn into an asshole right back. That is just normal behavior of humans (or abused animals as well really). ]
- muyuu 4y ago
  I don't know if it's only first-generation, the jury will be out on that one for a long time, perhaps many generations there is a clear pattern, which Dawkins seems to embody, that new atheists are MORE religious than their parents, but they are pious of their non-deistic beliefs and they very strongly preserve the religious-based culture they stem from in terms of moral values and societal norms the danger in this, which we are observing now, is that their ability to predict the dynamics of society is worse not better than that of plain old religious types - because their own piousness is invisible to them and they engage in deranged stuff like assuming people will just default to their hierarchies of values and morality, once the religious rooting and background of their moral beliefs is removed the obvious thing to assume would be the opposite, that humans would resort to their historically documented patterns of behaviour and repeat the intense conflict of the past to adjudicate moral disagreements, which the previous state of stand-off had already paid its dues to - and those conflicts were violent and bloody, which should bring us pause in our desire to go back to a state of "new religion" even if this one is based on the state-of-the-art science of the day and might be not deistic in the common sense of the word TLDR; in the sense of moral belief, it's not clear whether it would be better to have a non-religious society (non-coherent in moral values and collective moral rules) or even if such a thing is possible, or could be stable over time. My gut instinct is that (moral) atheism and collectivism are a bomb of a combination that is unlikely to end in anything other than disaster, and my egoistic belief is that I'm much happier if people believe in exotic supernatural stuff but it's neatly compartmentalised into the private sphere and controlled public spheres, than if they start a crusade to uproot the collective's beliefs, which will likely affect my livelihood - I see the New Atheists movement as an effort to destroy a very desirable state of affairs, not a grand goal of ushering in a rationalist Utopia