Do you like how Dawkins, Hitchens et al. represent atheists?

Whoa boy!

Yes of course symbolism and mythology were interwoven into everyday life in 'every' society and its natural that they use the World around them rather than the false celebrity culture and worship of false gods that exists today.

If I were to strip your clothes off, Frags, and suck out all the useless knowledge you've learnt over the last 30 yrs or so and handed you over to some tribe existing amidst pure Nature then you'd soon return to the same Source in which we all appeared from.

Its true to say that Chinese astrology still survives.

Now I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand without careful study but my criticism of Chinese beliefs - as a whole not just astrology - lies in the sheer insularity of their ideas. And insularity breeds strange ideas which go largely untested. Thus we have Chinese medicine, Feng Shui, Acupuncture and whilst bit and pieces of these ideas and beliefs have some merit they have never truly been tested until very recently.

Now in contrast...if you compare it with what 'we' commonly know as Astrology..it began in Sumaria travelled through the East and arrived in Egypt and was then further refined when it arrived in Greece (at which point it was carefully anotated). So rather than being stuck in some unchanging backwater, never developing or being added to or removed according to usefulness and worth it just never really developed.

Whereas what we know of Astrology has been refined from the very dawn of time.

 

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<< In his own lifetime, as it happens, Hitchens has himself been a true believer, albeit not in God but in revolutionary Marxism. His hard-won and long-overdue disillusionment with that creed has given him some sympathy for religious believers: “to some extent I know what you are going through.” It has also, he thinks, given him special standing to deal with an anticipated objection to his argument about political evil—the objection, namely, that in every instance where power has been allied with militant atheism, the result has been the systematic, deliberate murder of citizens on a scale that renders trivial the total number of victims of religious persecution throughout recorded history.

Indeed, in the face of the horrors perpetrated by “scientific socialism,” whether of the Communist or Nazi variety, most of today’s atheists tend to fall mute. Hitchens, however, has a riposte. Communism and Nazism “did not so much negate religion,” he writes, “as seek to replace” it. That is, the essential wickedness of “scientific” totalitarian regimes is traceable in his view to the fact that they are themselves religions. For Hitchens, in short, everything religion touches is bad, and everything bad is religious—including anti-religion. This is the sort of reasoning that gives syllogisms a bad name. >>

hmm..

 

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Refined manure is still manure.

 

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Oh! Oh no! Help me! She's presenting me with the terrifying figure of a person able to critically change his mind!

What am I to do? Run around in circles crying that the sky is falling?

 

Critically? *snicker*

Probably the booze, must do wonders to soak the brain in alcohol.

 

Hey! This is fun! Lots of posts.

Anyway, I generally don't like the fact that Dawkins, Hitchens, et al, have had to go to such relative extremes (especially for meek and humble people such as us atheists) as the titles of their books suggest "The God Delusion", "God is Not Great" etc. In other words, a bludgeoning about the collective head and shoulders.

Unfortunately, with the current high profiles of various religions and the splendid things they are doing for our world, a bludgeoning is apparently what's necessary.

I think that both of these gentlemen (well, maybe not Hitchens...) and others are simply reflecting an incredible frustration with mystical and superstitious beliefs playing such a destructive rold in our supposed modern world.

In a nation that was founded on reason and the obvious, critical need to keep religious bias out of public policy, we have a president who proudly flaunts, at every opportunity, his essentially fundamentalist xian dogma and the fact that he "consults with god" for his decisions.

Does anyone study history anymore? Do the innumerable lessons of the past (and even our recent history) mean nothing? Where are the strong voices of the christian and muslim rationalists that are as appalled at the current state of affairs as much as the rest of us? Who know for a fact, that theocratic behavior is bad for everyone?

 

Soviet and Asian Marxism has been a secular religion that is more rational than the old "spirit" based faiths, but it is such a defective ideology, even so, that it has failed to sweep the world and bring an end to the old/older religions. The fact that Marxist ideology is tied in with atheism is an embarrassment to atheism and to atheists like myself. Non-Marxist atheists, however, have no common ideology, hence they lack the unity of all those they oppose. They have no common beliefs except for a common NON-belief, the non-belief in "spirits".

 

Gotta disagree there. The acquisition of a deity in a religion seems to me an important step, and we seem to have a fair representation of atheistic religions with millions of adherents and long histories.

Atheism is the absence of belief in a deity, which in the thoroughly evangelised West usually involves actual rejection of at least one proferred deity.

His emphasis on this rejection, though easy to understand in context, is one of my objections to holding Dawkins a representative of atheism in general.

Whether religion necesarily involves the supernatural is tricky - some would say that Taoism, for example, does not, but instead involves a rather different estimation of the nature of the natural. Is the recognition of a "spiritual" aspect of life necessarily a petition to the supernatural?

 

Most people do, however. And your restrictions

would also exclude sophisticated Buddhism, many Animistic systems, sophisticated holdings of such belief systems as the Navajo and some Siberian tribes have, etc.

And by excluding reason from one sphere, and spirit from the other, dangerous consclusions like this one become possible:

I would rather leave such artificial and politically dubious compartmentalizing of human life to the religious zealots who champion unreason. Reason is too circumscribed, and faith too little accountable, to occupy incompatible and separate realms.

 

I've only just caught up with this..so bear with me.

A lot of psts get unread for various reasons.

I can dismiss the above fairly easily..well very easily actually.

I never mentioned India with good reason...they use a very similar system of astrology.

As for the suggestion that China wasn't insular then that is a new idea that you should publish in some book. Get in touch with David Icke

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Quite frankly its rubbish...trading goods on a fairly small scale is not an intermingling of ideas...hence Chinese astrology has remained static....its like Chinese music..its interesting but as a musician yourself how many americans are plucking at strings in the Chinese Way...

..to quote Level 42

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i think dawkins is a dickhead.
an extremely intelligent dickhead, but a dickhead nonetheless.

he is a member of what i see as a "new breed" of anthropological scientists.

hitchens, on the other hand....its all about being sensational and muddying the waters, with him.

i dont think dawkins intentionally tries to offend anyone, he genuinely wants to help humanity as a whole.
hitchens does try to offend, twist the point, and generally assassinate anything he disagrees with. he is not intelligent at all:
http://www.tv-links.co.uk/listings/9/6964 <--fantastic debate, where both the contestants are idiots, but i find that hitchens loses (i dislike al sharpton too).
it should be noted that i had never even heard of hitchens before watching this debate, but have recently purchased "god is not great", and have found it lacking....i am the owner of many dawkins related materials, and enjoy them regularly, even being a jew.

 

he is a zoologist.

 

Pardon me for only reading half-way through the first page, but...

S.A.M. has a point here. I have noticed that atheists can sometimes be as arrogant as fundamental religionists.

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Look! God's... err... I mean... the Universe's... err... Nature's(???) gift to humanity!

 

Bollocks. Hitchens has an iron grip on the problem: bloody religion again. Not everyone is an equal opportunity offender these days, but give people like Falwell the chance and they will be again. Extremism discredits faith; why do the faithful try to brush extremism under the carpet?

 

zoology and dickheadedness are not mutually exclusive.

 

I disagree. Most people simply do not extend themselves; its laziness or a desire to not be involved, also called the bystander effect. This is coupled with the general human trend to obey authority. They expect someone else to take a stand. Like the boy who was tasered in Florida this week while everyone looked on. They even convince themselves he must have deserved it, since cops could not be wrong and applauded as he was subdued (for asking a question!! ) and led away.

I would presume atheists are as likely as theists to conform; as is evidenced by how they justify the idiots on "their side".

e.g. this

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