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I don't want to support this idea because it goes against my worldview as an atheist from a very conservative society. I grew up on Hitchens and Dawkins. But t

• keiferski 3y ago
  Dawkins [1] and Hitchens’ works on religion are pop-science/culture books, not serious academic studies. Virtually no scholars in philosophy, religious studies, etc. agree with the narratives they present. Instead, I would read Taylor, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, and maybe Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. 1. His non-biological work, that is.
  • Err_Eek 3y ago
    (As an atheist who found The God Delusion to be one of the most important books I've ever read, as it gave me a solid framework of arguing in what I already considered to be true) It's okay to read more digestible books, and not serious academic studies. In fact it's more than okay -- in order to understand an academic study you likely need to do a lot of reading on the topic before hand. A pop sci/culture book is very self contained. I can assure you that very few people in the world can read The Genealogy of Morals and understand much of it without having read a significant amount of philosophy before. Personally, I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra before reading The God Delusion. I can't remember much of the Nietzsche book, but The God Delusion's arguments are forever etched into my brain. It doesn't matter if I didn't get the Russell's teapot argument from a primary source, it matters that I got it.
    • keiferski 3y ago
      It’s not so much about accessibility, just quality of argument. As I said, basically no one that has read and thought significantly about religion thinks that Dawkins’ works are anything other than simple-minded polemics. It’s the equivalent of watching a 5-hour YouTube video about programming and thinking you understand computer science, except that books by Dawkins et al are not even very good, impartial introductions to the topic. All I can say is: if the topic of religion is interesting to you, these are not good books to start with. I also really don’t think Genealogy of Morality is all that complicated. Edit: I just remembered this excellent book by Julian Young, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion. I really recommend that if you’re looking for a more nuanced but modern take of what Nietzsche thought about religion.
      • rapsacnz 3y ago
        The more the nuanced the take, the less people will be drawn to it. Hence the popularity of the Bible and the Koran etc.
        • keiferski 3y ago
          The Bible has over fifty books and is perhaps one of the most nuanced works of all time, hence the wide variety of Christian denominations. I'm not familiar enough with the Qur'an to comment on it.
          • atq2119 3y ago
            The Bible isn't nuanced because it's not even coherent. It's pretty much all over the place. This is a feature for its followers, because they can and do pick and choose the parts they like and ignore the rest.
        • lesuorac 3y ago
          I don't think the Bible is as popular as you make it out to be. Its really the songs / performances that carry the Christian belief; few people actually read the bible but they can all re-iterate to you that Christ was born in a manager because there was no room in the inn (not in the Bible).
    • ZainRiz 3y ago
      The challenge with books like The God Delusion is that it's barely one step above strawman arguments. It attacks claims made by some simple lay people, based on their half-baked understanding of their own faiths (which they never really dug into). However, people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims. The arguments being debunked are ones that religious scholars themselves would have disagreed with. Such misrepresentations don't guide anyone
      • andsoitis 3y ago
        > people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims What is a good example?
        • keiferski 3y ago
          This is a decent book and the reviews highlight a few examples of what you’re looking for: https://www.amazon.com/God-New-Atheism-Critical-Response/dp/066423304X#aw-udpv3-customer-reviews_feature_div https://www.amazon.com/God-New-Atheism-Critical-Response/dp/...
        • za3faran 3y ago
          As a Muslim, I've seen Dawkins make very basic and laughably incorrect claims about Islam. It clearly shows he has extremely shallow knowledge about what he claims to criticize. Niel DeGrasse Tyson is also guilty of the same. Here's a short clip of Dr. Sami Ameri, a published author and expert, discussing but one of Dawkin's fallacies in his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNpvZN76zU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsNpvZN76zU
          • mediascreen 3y ago
            Ok, I just suffered through the 13 minutes of nonsens from this "expert". One problem is that he doesn't understand what he is arguing against. Dawkins doesn't argue that, because people tend to have similar beliefs as those around them, he has disproved those beliefs. He just uses it to illustrate the close minded way some people take the supremacy of their particular religion for granted. The question "What if you are wrong?" comes with a lot of assumptions. It's also laughable for an expert (for a number of reasons) to claim that C.S. Lewis has disproved atheism.
  • 7952 3y ago
    But I guess most people are not really interested in religous studies. The useful thing to understand is that thought rooted in religon can be discarded out of hand.
• XorNot 3y ago
  Agnostic isn't a consistent belief position though: if you claim you don't know if a higher power exists, the question is which one and how is the impact of this different to being an atheist. So that bucket collecting random other beliefs isn't too surprising.
  • XajniN 3y ago
    Agnostic is just a pussy version of atheist.
    • fatuna 3y ago
      Nope, any scientist should be agnostic ;). Since the existence of a god can not be proven nor disproven. Do I have an elephant in my living room? Chances are incredibly low, but can you prove it?
      • XajniN 3y ago
        While you are technically correct about the logic, there is no scientific reason to even consider the existence of any higher power.
• SapporoChris 3y ago
  Please remember that polls are often inaccurate. Internet polls are especially inaccurate. YouGov is a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm. https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-online-polls/ https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/29/how-accurate-are-onli...
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    _Good quality_ internet polls these days are fairly comparable in accuracy to high quality traditional polling. This isn't the CEO of Yougov posting a twitter poll; there's a process.
• yorwba 3y ago
  I don't think the poll supports the idea of spiritual morphing. The 30% of agnostics is not much different from the population average of 27% and less than catholics at 31%, while atheists believe in astrology less (10%) than any of the other groups. If abandoning religious beliefs of yesteryear really just morphed them into others like astrology, those new beliefs should be much more common among people who've abandoned the old. I think a better explanation of the data is that some people have strong opinions on spirituality, ranging from dismissing it all to holding up some particular scripture as the single source of truth, which then informs their stance on astrology, while others just go with whatever, so they're distributed across denominations at roughly the base rate and believe in astrology at roughly the base rate.
• vhcr 3y ago
  Maybe I'm reading it too literally, but I think the question is just badly formulated. Of course the position of the stars and planets influence people's lives, that's called the seasons. I think the same when they ask people if they think dinosaurs co-existed with humans, of course the answer is yes, as birds are dinosaurs.
  • midoridensha 3y ago
    I can easily argue the opposite of your assertions, simply by picking different definitions. The "stars and planets" do not influence peoples' lives through the seasons, only the Earth and its relative position to the Sun do, and when someone talks about the "stars and planets" in the context of astrology, they mean other stars and planets besides the Earth and Sun. Dinosaurs do not co-exist with humans, and never have: "birds" are the distant descendants of some of the "dinosaurs", but are not part of the same group. (I'm pretty sure any dictionary definition of "dinosaur" does not include modern-day "birds".)
    • zmgsabst 3y ago
      From Wikipedia: > Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird Bird are in the dinosaur clade, ie the biological group defined by the dinosaur family. Birds are dinosaurs in the same way that humans are mammals.
      • badcppdev 3y ago
        I'm not going to argue with your clear reference but I will reference this article: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-reptiles https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/birds-dinosaurs-rept... which adds a bit of useful context. "So a reptile is any animal descended from the original group called reptiles. Both birds and mammals share ancestors sometimes referred to as reptile-like animals (Reptiliomorpha), but it's not very common for people to talk about mammals as reptiles."
• DrBazza 3y ago
  It seems like these people should be required to read Douglas Adams. Though they'd likely miss the point.