Slashdot Mirror
Dr. Richard Dawkins On Education, 'Innocence of Muslims,' and Rep. Paul Broun
In this video interview (with transcript), Dr. Richard Dawkins discusses religious exceptionalism with regard to the teaching of evolution, and the chilling effect of fundamentalism on the production of scientists and engineers. He says, "I can think of no other reason why, of all the scientific facts that people might disagree with or disbelieve, [evolution] is the one they pick on. Physics gets through OK. Chemistry gets through Ok. But not biology/geology, and I think it's got to be because of religion." He also addresses the recent comments from Rep. Paul Broun, who denounced evolution and the Big Bang theory as "lies straight from the pit of hell," and the recent Innocence of Muslims video that led to unrest in various parts of the world. "Freedom of speech is something that Islamic theocracies simply do not understand. They don't get it. They're so used to living in a theocracy, that they presume that if a film is released in the United States, the United States Government must be behind it! How could it be otherwise? So, they need to be educated that, actually, some countries do have freedom of speech and government is not responsible for what any idiot may do in the way of making a video." He also has some very insightful comments about religion as one of the most arbitrary labels by which people divide themselves when involved in conflict. Hit the link below for the video.
Since he retired from "Family Feud", I thought he had passed. Good to know that he is still around.
Hit the link below for the video.
Or do something useful with your time. How many more Obama advertisements can we expect today?
Please, commence the interview in a room with no radio playing on a background, or use sound-filtering. All the background sounds are very distracting.
He is British, he must know what he is talking about.
The problem I see with Islamic theocracies - compared to the US constitution saying that we are endowed with unalienable rights by our creator - is that they get their laws from their god, not their rights. The are therefore free to trample on the rights of the individual in the name of their god. In the US, we are free to act like fools in the name of our god.
Rep. Broun needs to learn than belief in god and even Christianity does not mean the big bang or evolution are wrong. One cannot snap their fingers and make a cake; the ingredients must be mixed together and have heat applied. Why should god be able to circumvent the rules just because his cake is the universe?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Very little consideration went into this audio. Vacuuming, background music? Amateur bro
Well, I can drop a book and it falls to the ground, I can light a paper on fire and it burns... I can pour salt on a snail and it dies.. but evolution is just a poorly defined theory.
I don't believe in spontanous generation, I am a creationist, but I am also a scientist, and the fact is that there are too many loopholes in Dr. Dawkins' theories.
It isn't that I don't want to believe it, is just that I look at things with a critical eye. How is it possible that we can build the LHC and find the Higgs Boson, we may soon discover a cure for cancer, but no one is able at any point to spontaneously create life from inanimate objects? You would think that would be a rather academic activity in our time?
When you can spontaneously create life from raw materials, in a lab, let me know and I'll believe you, until then I'll keep up with my current belief system.
Was there nowhere quieter to record? Piped music, other people chatting and moving about etc. A shame...
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
He should stick to something he KNOWS about - like biology.
His other claims are largely bias - uninformed by fact or context.
There were protests about the film in Libya. How does his "theocracy" argument even apply to a country that was a secular state - more like Cuba? Iran, with a religious institution at the head of government, saw no such unrest.
Dawkins is a bigot. He unfortunately uses his impressive scientific and academic credentials to bolster the audience for his bigotry, and conflate the domains of his expertise to support his prejudice.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Let the atheist self aggrandizing masturbation begin!!!!
and.... GO
He's got it backward here -- it's one of the least arbitrary labels, since it reveals what underlying philosophy and values we stand for. It's similar to wars breaking out between existentialists and determinists, but we've found more interesting ways to encapsulate those philosophies in mythological symbolism.
Please provide links to downloadable files for future videos; please don't force your users to suffer some terribly inefficient and limited player like that of an embedded flash player—not only does, say, mplayer use far fewer cycles to play the same damn video, but I can also speed up playback to nearly 2x the rate (without comical effect!), which greatly reduces the time it takes to watch a video, thereby allowing me to spend more time viewing slashdot advertisements. :-P
have been both a Christian and an Atheist at different points in my life, so have a different perspective than most. Folks like Dawkins tend to be the loudest, but are the most ineffective at changing mids. If I were writing a play book for the Atheist movement, I would instruct all influential Atheists to model Michio Kaku. Dr. Kaku rarely strays into religous discussion, may make peripheral comments but doesn't seek to create a lot of controversy. Instead, he sticks to the main points of what he is proficient at and gives people, even those who are Christian or Muslim, someone to want to emulate. It becomes apparent that he is a non-believer in God, but doesn't alienate those who begin with a diferent viewpoint. Focus on living the life you should and people will follow.
I'd make a similar argument to Christians. Don't try to be like Ann Coultier or Rush Limbaugh. Like your lives like Mother Teresa who instructed people "to find your own Calcutta". Focus on living the life you should and people will follow.
-- MyLongNickName
(Slashdot keeps logging me out when I leave the main page)
...because you'd sound pretty fucking crazy sitting in a flying airplane denying Newtonian physics and most every man-made object in the modern world relies on chemistry to make it -- plastics, composites, even metals.
Those two fields start out so far ahead in working, every day examples of their basic truths that challenging their more exotic variants seems risky and many of them are too complex for the drooling religious zealots to even begin to criticize.
Evolution doesn't have those kind of concrete, hands-on examples in every day life (well, OK it does, but...). To most people it's been distilled down to MAN USED TO BE A MONKEY AND GOD DIDN'T CREATE HIM BECAUSE THERE IS NO GOD AND THAT MEANS GAY MARRIAGE IS OK and they just can't accept that.
I don't think it is. In his own book, The God Delusion, he gives an example of a PhD Paleontologist who ignored all his education so that he could believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible.
Then there are the folks, like my father in law (BSME Texas A&M) who will say that current evidence _may_ show that humans evolved on this planet but one day there will be evidence that shows that we were put here. I am not joking or exaggerating. He uses science's own thinking to "show" that they may be wrong.
All the education in the World will not change the opinion of someone who puts their fingers in their ears and yells, "La la la la la la la ...".
Religion is all about people's emotional "thinking". When you ask a believer, their "proof" of God or whatever eventually boils down to a feeling. They "know" He exists and by "know" they're talking about their feeling.
It's that irrational trap humans fall into all the time and they confuse it with rational thought.
"I can think of no other reason why, of all the scientific facts that people might disagree with or disbelieve, [evolution] is the one they pick on. Physics gets through OK. Chemistry gets through Ok. But not biology/geology, and I think it's got to be because of religion."
Thats an easy answer. Biology and Geology are taught in school. For most middle-aged adults, these were high school requirements. Or the easiest versions were "Life Science" and "Earth Science". Physics and chemistry are electives for the nerds who are interested in the stuff.
Those that just don't "get it" are more apt to dismiss science and fall back on mysticism.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
... and this is essentially why I don't like or respect Dawkins. It's where his rationality fails miserably.
I can think of no other reason why, of all the scientific facts that people might disagree with or disbelieve, [evolution] is the one they pick on. Physics gets through OK....... Rep. Paul Broun, who denounced evolution and the Big Bang theory as "lies straight from the pit of hell,"
Well, apparently physics gets picked on too.
Also, good job adding a transcript! I love transcripts!!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Since you're not a fundamentalist, you agree that compatibility between beliefs is a matter of degree. However, that also means it reflects agreement on a general principle. Thus, it depends on what's in dispute to determine who's going to cluster with whom. For example, if it's materialists versus supernaturalists, almost all religions will be on the supernaturalist side. But if we're talking about more precise measurements, they may represent opposition to each other.
Religious believers actually enjoy believing in non-sense, because it makes them feel good. They like believing in fantasies, same way people fantasize about super heroes, sex, money, etc. You take away their invisible Superman and they go kanipshit!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Good question. The answer is both yes and no.
Was Hitler a Christian? on The Straight Dope
" They're so used to living in a theocracy, that they presume that if a film is released in the United States, the United States Government must be behind it! How could it be otherwise?"
-It doesnt help that the news, even our local news, headlined it as a "US-made" video when actually it was just some random guy.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
religion as one of the most arbitrary labels by which people divide themselves when involved in conflict
Really? I'm pretty sure a guy got stabbed this past weekend because he was wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey in San Francisco. People get shot in LA and Chicago for walking onto the wrong gang's turf. Other people get special treatment because they joined a certain fraternity in college.
It's not often that I say this, but South Park hit the nail on the head. Singling out religion as the culprit for mankind's tendency to find idiotic excuses to justify violence is absurd. It's like blaming gunpowder manufacturers every time someone gets shot.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
I think stupid videos should be released every day insulting all world religions. This would over time de-sensify those who have a problem with it. The 20th time a religion nut calls for reprisals then the people are going to say, FGS, not again, it's just a stupid video, get over it.
Mr. Dawkins should go back to the lab, he is and absolute ignorant about history, philosophy, religion, and many other social subjects.
Shame about the crappy audio.
Video great - transcript better.
Since your Way Of Life at its core depends on your belief of a Higher Power (as 0-N entities with Mu possible) even an atheist is somewhat religious.
Oh btw the In The Beginning X question is at the core of everything so thats why it does not get a "pass".
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
That he says he can't think of a reason people pick on evolution. The fundamental truth of the world that is evolution is dictated by sexual selection, that is to say, the concept that "there's someone out there for everyone" is bullshit that is meant to control you. Admitting that it's possible for a trait to be passed on by genes and children be made by more than one marriage or (gasp) out of wedlock would mean that people might not be good little sheep and contribute to the whole. It makes you not try to excel, not try to put effort into advancing your chances in the whole sexual selection lottery that is life. You instead put effort into bettering the whole of humanity, which don't get me wrong, is wonderful in it's own right, but it's the typical person in charge stance of anything that is possible that they don't like saying "oh that's not possible, don't even look over there!" Understand, I'm not saying that admitting evolution happens would make everyone start rutting like animals, I'm saying the big high mucky mucks in the various religious organizations feel that way. We do tend to externalize those feelings we have that we repress the most..
No doubt. Education is caustic to religious fantasies that are outdated and primitive. Science undercuts the traditional religious foundations.
Apparently Dawkins did not mind making negative comments about the muslim video while complaining about the comments that religious folk make about scientific claims.
Pot calling the kettle black much?
I do not see where religion and science conflict with each other on a merit basis. I only see conflicts with science and religion where people create them.
So what if there is evidence that evolution may be true, it still does not make it true and may only reveal how a Creator propagated new species. As someone who writes scripts I reuse a lot of code and I am sure the Creator was intelligent enough to do the same thing to save on time and effort like any intelligent being would do. So yea, one could say that my constant reuse of old script code would be considered a part of the evolution of my future scripts yet, that technically would not be the case.
A programmer is effectively a God in any program he creates, and the same question of "can a programer program a rock so heavy that he cannot create a program strong enough to lift it", could be applied. Yet despite that paradox a programmer has the exact benefits of Omnipotence and Omniscience where that program is concerned, the same being of a God/Creator. We keep forgetting that the status of a God/Creator implies an entity that operates outside of the same rules our corporeal existence is confined withing to the best of our knowledge. Making the assumption that a God/Creator must also be limited to our rules and understandings, is the very first reason we fail to understand how such a being could exist.
Everyone should get their heads out of their rear ends and stop blaming religion for crap and religion needs to stop hating science for what it finds as though it is some attempted disproof of their religion.
There is a lot of short-sightedness going on here and it is plentiful from both sides.
since it programs what underlying philosophy and values we stand for.
For a website with so many coders, it should be obvious all religious texts are Basic HomoSapiens software hacks.
Viral reproduction, root access(Externalized authority), disabling malware-detectors(Will believe bullshit), it's all in there. Suxnet.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
So intelligent scientists were able to design an experiment that created organic matter from inorganic chemicals, and you think that proves evolution?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
But, nonetheless, Hitler's use of a Christian "us" identity (including the pressure his regime exerted on Christian Churches) and a non-Christian (and, most significantly, Jewish) "them" identity (targetting not only actual Jews, but also tarring other enemies with association with Jews, through portrayals of both conscious collaboration and being duped by Jewish conspiracy) is pretty typical of the way religious identity is used to divide people into "us" v. "them". (You see almost identical things being done with religious identity -- with Islam replacing Christianity, but Judaism still the enemy -- by authoritarian regimes today that are either overtly Islamist, or even mostly-secular totalitarian regimes in areas where the population is largely Muslim; and closely parallel things -- with Christianity retained in the "us" role, but Islam and/or secularism/atheism the leading "them" labels -- in a weaker form in the US; historically, almost exactly the same thing -- with the Christian "us" being specifically Catholic -- was pretty the hallmark of the Spanish Inquisition.)
I cannot believe the kind of false equivalency you just shoved out there. You just compared Dr. Dawkins who publishes well researched biological and philosophical books and levels disagreements with the religious against Coulter who literally calls for the outright slaughter(on multiple occasions) of those she disagrees with, and Limbaugh who makes a profession out of repeatedly misrepresenting facts. That's completely unreasonable.
You make it seem like having publicly stated atheist opinions is somehow equally vitriolic as calling for the murder of those you disagree with. This is why people like Dawkins speak out, because right now, its perfectly acceptable to equate atheists with monsters.
(That said, Dawkins is far less confrontational than many theist portray him as.)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
OT for the content of the video, but please Slashdot - for a place that is so pro-Linux, can't you use a flash video player that works with it? All I get of these videos on /. is a black rectangle. Or better yet, use some <video/>.
Ok, you may now return to your scheduled [topic]
You can say he exists, but that doesn't make it true. You can publish words that you claim he wrote, and pictures you claim are of him, and that's great.
You still cannot prove that he exists. Dawkins is just another "Russell's Teapot".
We're discussing Dawkins comments about the role of religious identity as an arbitrary basis to divide people into "us" and "them". Arguing that Hitler failed to meet any particular theological criteria for being a faithful Christian is not helpful to the attempt to refute Dawkins characterization; indeed, it would seem to undermine the argument that religious identity is one of the "least arbitrary" labels used to motivate "us" v. "them" distinctions because it "reveals what underlying philosophy and values we stand for", since it highlights the vast gulf between religious identity used to motivate "us" v. "them" distinctions and the underlying philosophy that is supposedly indicated by association with the religion.
It was not intended to be an equivalency. You simply read into it the way you chose to read into it.
I never understood why faith and evolution stand so far apart from each other. I'm a devout Catholic, and evolution makes sense, both scientifically and theologically. The Bible talks about God creating humans, but it doesn't say exactly how, other than that he was formed from the dust of the earth... which sounds a lot like evolution.
I've always though about creation like two guys playing pool. The first guy racks the balls, breaks, and hits a ball in. Then another. Then another, until they are all in. No misses - this guy is good. Then the second guy comes up to play. He racks, breaks. However, on his break, he hits the balls so perfectly that each goes in, in order, on the break. Guy #2 isn't just good, he's (excuse the pun) supernatural. He doesn't need to step in after each event - all the events are encapsulated and ready in the break. The same thing could hold true for the universe - God sets up everything from the get-go. It fits nicely with what we know scientifically of evolution, and just seems more beautiful and complete than a God who has to keep stepping in, doesn't it?
"I can think of no other reason why, of all the scientific facts that people might disagree with or disbelieve, [evolution] is the one they pick on."
Maybe its because "evolution" is nonsense pseudo science just like man made global warming.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Why is this tagged idle?
Not only does Paul Brown have a B.S in chemistry (which isn't hard to believe, as he is full of B.S), he has an M.D from a real, accredited university. So the next time you think that your colleague is an idiot, use this to give you a little perspective.
I find his comments to be interesting and insightful, but there's a sort of "why aren't people as smart as me?" arrogance behind it all.
I guess there's no reason someone can't be right AND insufferable.
It's altogether too easy (and becoming a little tiresome) to point at the excesses of religion and say "look how stupid that is". One can also point to the ample number of murders committed with guns and knives, yet it would be asinine to suggest that guns and knives are therefore valueless.
PERSONALLY, I suspect that religious faith has lost its attraction to the West largely because we have little to fear. We eat well, we live long mostly-healthy lives, we have comprehensive social systems that by and large will care for us regardless. We have little expectation that a passing famine, plague, or war will kill us, our children, or our community. Why would we NEED Faith or hope that a Supreme Being has some sort of great plan to explain some horrific tragedy we've suffered?
It's when life hands us inexplicables that we (as a species) resort to (as Dawkins might put it) contrived systems of belief, in order to try to put a human-comprehensible face on the unfeeling universe. Voltaire would call it Pangloss.
I don't know that this is bad. Genuine hope is a significant predictor of success in otherwise-hopeless situations. Faith can be a moral rudder in times of chaos and change. Sure, it can be (and has been) abused as a justification for horrible conduct and brutality. But it seems to me that humans in general are capable of ample brutality with or without the pastiche excuse of religious doctrine, so I'm hard put to BLAME such conduct on Faith.
-Styopa
realize that people have free speech but we also should stop apologizing so much. I don't give a shit if you are offended by what I say. Just because you believe something and I believe that that belief is complete bullshit doesn't mean I need to apologize each time I state my opinion. I'm not bound to the limits of your chosen superstitions.
Constantly devolving to analyzing the edge cases (i.e. Fundamental Bible Literalists, Dawkins-esque atheists, extremism) in any argument only serves as a distraction at best and is damaging to productive discussion at worst.
It's a bullshit discussion. It cares nothing of the truth.
Look at what this pattern of debate has done to politics in the U.S.
There may sometime have been a revolution in France that had nothing to do with religion or the lack thereof, but the late 18th century revolution commonly referrred to as "The French Revolution", which featured the rejection of religion, the establishment of the "Cult of Reason", with its accompanying "Festival of Reason", and radical and violent dechristianization, certainly wasn't it.
As much as Dawkins may get a little direct, considering the treatment he has been subjected to by some of the True Believers, it's little wonder he says things the way he does. Coreligionists of True Believers seem to be quick to attack Dawkins, but slow to admit that some among them are purely immoral vicious bastards.
Or as some holy guy who lived in Palestine once said: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Can Dr. Dawkins be mic-ed. so all the back ground noise is masked and he doesn't sound like he is in a barrel? The vacuum is louder than he is. Should be an interesting interview it I can hear what he is saying. How about posting the full transcripts?
Dawkalds-Torvins: It's very evident that Representative Paul Broun is a fucking moron who should kill himself. Only fucking morons would vote for a fucking moron like that. There was a rather amusing tweet I saw on Twitter, which went something like this. "[Patient:] Doctor, I think smearing chocolate on my teeth is a good way to keep them healthy. [Doctor:] Here's a punch in the mouth, you fucking moron!" Whom do I have to fuck to make people understand that there is no controversy about evolution? It's a fact, demonstrated beyond all possible doubt by scientific evidence. If you look at the evidence and don't see that it's an absolutely secure fact, you are a fucking moron who probably would like using Gnome.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Back when the Tunisian uprisings started, and then started in Libya and Egypt the crowds on the street were carrying around posters of Mark Zuckerberg because Facebook would let them communicate and coordinate and let the world know what was going on. That was a full embrace of freedom of speech, and I even started to build a Twitter encryption tool to help make it even easier to for people to communicate freely (More complete projects have come out since *).
This was also right around the time of the State Dept WikiLeaks reveal, and instead of talking about how we need to encourage freedom of speech, and the press and assembly, Secretary Clinton made a big speech about the primary and absolute need for elections for a democratic transition in these countries. The ground could have been laid then that this was an expression of the peoples rights and take it as an opportunity to have an open accepting forum of competing ideas and that it was OK to have disagreeing views as long as everyone could express themselves.
Instead we got badly run elections more than a year later with the military pushing people around, and women mostly shut out of the process. And, no automatic thinking that uncomfortable ideas can at least be heard. As long as you have freedom of speech you can try to change the system. When that is gone certain changes become impossible. It was a huge missed opportunity to change attitudes about speech.
(*) My project was mostly done over a hackathon weekend and is on github: https://github.com/YasminApp/yasmin-client
Others include CryptTweet which needs improvement but is workable here: http://plexusproject.org/
And SilentCircle which is targeting a different user group https://silentcircle.com/
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
Great choice of location .. what was it .. a starbucks? Loved the vacuum cleaner and background music....
Or put another way:
The difference between an atheist and a believer is only in how many gods they don't believe in.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
People will always murder, rape, torture, etc.. regardless of religion, simply because they are on a power trip, it's all about feeding their huge ego, like Stalin,Hitler, Mao, Castro, etc... . I know a lot of Christians who don't literally believe word for word what is in the bible, it's all metaphors and parables. Dictatorships, communism, theocracies, all about power and control over the masses, nothing more.
The "innocence of muslims" cheesy movie was available 3 month's on youtube before the september 11, 2012 benghazi attacks. Politicians #1 skill is lying. Yes, Obama said that this tragedy invoked terror, but, he did not clearly say that this was a pre-planned organized attack by a known terrorist militant group in regards to the sept 11, anniversary, which it was, for the past 2 weeks he and his administration insisted that the attacks were incited by that movie while those at DOD were saying otherwise.
"Yes, in fact, people -do- kill "in the name of atheism", provably, as a matter of simple historical fact, and do so by the millions."
I read your link. I see a lot of misbehaviour, but not a lot of killing - and certainly not enough to constitute "millions". For instance, "In Tsarist Russia, religion was a major source of violence and conflict between religious groups, and State Athiesm was designed to end these problems. Notable atrocities include the persecution and killing of over 200,000 Jews as "Christ-killers" due to pogroms."
So, confiscations, propaganda, suppression, sure... but please justify this claim of millions.
We have many documents on the subject of the rights of man. Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens was a good one. The UN has theirs and keeps it updated.
Yes, if we ignored centuries of human history, philosophy, and jurisprudence, bad things could happen. I think it's a pretty long leap, however, to go from the oxymoron of "god-given rights" to no rights at all.
God is just a civil engineer, after all, who else would put the entertainment center and the sewage works next door to each other.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
didn't always get a free ride. It's just that most of the stuff physicists know today is either so obvious that even religious people see its truth, or so abstract that it's not even on their radar. On the other hand, evolution by natural selection is concrete and yet non-obvious enough for many non-scientists to have wrong opinions about it.
If the debate were to shift to the simple (teachable, testable, defendable) rules that drive "Evolution", rather than ignorant or deliberately misleading word play (like the double meaning of "Theory"), maybe this "Controversy" could be brushed under a rock where it belongs and the evolution deniers will have a much more difficult time not looking like the ignoramuses that they truly are.
Dr. Dawkins: Please keep writing books like "The Greatest Show on Earth" that focuses on the amazing innovations that life discovers and creates.
Perhaps you can add to this list the simple and important rules that allows life to change over time?
1. All living things on Earth have exactly one or two parents.
2. Offspring have multiple ways that they are different from their parents, usually via sex, less often via mutations, very rarely via natural splicing.
3. Success is measured by how many surviving children you leave behind.
4. Offspring that are unable to run fast enough, eat well enough, unlucky, etc. are removed from the game.
-> we are the results of billions of generations of success.
5. Not much dead material is preserved for us to find later, most is recycled.
6. Older material tends to be found below newer material.
7. We are surrounded by clocks, atomic decay, tree rings, ice layers, etc. which allow us to figure out when large changes have taken place in history.
8. There seems to exist happy accidents which give great survival advantage, push out competition, some exist in all life found on this planet.
-> all live on this planet found so far is part of a single connected tree.
-> man is related to all living things found so far.
9. Anyone claiming man did or didn't descend from apes doesn't understand the basic building blocks listed here.
-> the last common ancestor to apes and man is neither ape nor man.
10. RNA is the basic building code for proteins, but uses semi-arbratry compiling instructions (see rule #8).
10b. Proteins are a basic building block for building almost everything found in cells.
11. DNA is more stable than RNA, and is used for modulating groups and amounts of RNA made.
12. There's another layer above DNA (epi-genes) that allows parents environment to influence offspring's phenotype (what they are like, built, etc).
13. There are genetic parts of sexual animals that only passed through fathers (Y chromosome in mammals), or mothers (mitochondria).
14. There are really no rules or driving forces other than how we got to where we are today. We could all be gone tomorrow.
Or - a couple of points I wish more Christians would take to heart (two come to mind - I'm by no means a book/chapter/verse memorizer of scripture, but these seem pertinent)
"Do not pretend to be wiser than you are", which I take to mean that we should not pretend to know more about God, afterlife, etc. than we really do. It is fine to accept something that is unknown and unknowable on faith, but don't claim or pretend that you really do know it. I think this is from Proverbs.
The other is definitely from Mark, where Jesus berates his disciples for trying to take his teaching parables literally ("Beware the yeast of the pharisees...). To me, this is a clear instruction from Christ himself that scripture is a collection of metaphors and should be treated that way. Those who claim that the Bible contradicts biology, cosmology, or geology simply "don't get" what Christianity is supposed be, apart from them obviously "not getting" science.
(but I'm not sure how many on Slashdot care what normal, non-wacko Christians think about science. It is easier to lump all believers under the heading of "Bible-thumpers" and assume they are anti-scientific right-wingers, who of course oppose abortion rights, gun control, gay rights, admission of climate change, etc).
I'm a Little Ender. My brother is a Jehovah's Witness and therefore a Big Ender. In his mind, the end is Really, Really Big. I think we go out with a whimper, if we go out at all. This is the real theological controversy today, not where we began but if and how we will end? As time moves on, I begin to think that the Big Enders, from James Watt, spelled with a G, onwards may be right. It is hard to argue with self-fulfilling prophecies. I am an evolutionary biologist but creationists don't scare me until they start talking about the end of times. We can't do much about the choice of our ancestors but we must protect our descendents.
try again.
Before there were the new atheists and their best-selling books, there was Paul Kurtz promoting humanism and skepticism through his many publications and institutions:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/remembering-paul-kurtz/2012/10/23/4d4dbdb0-1d19-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_blog.html
Dawkins is brilliant, as ever, but Paul Kurtz brought secular humanism an intellectual clarity that helped pave his way. They are tremendously complementary reads.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Why don't you do the interview at a baseball game or somewhere there is less background noise.
Free speech is not what you like to hear or what you like to say. Free speech is hearing something that makes your blood boil, makes you see red in the front of your eyes, that EVERYONE agrees should be banned, and not banning it and defending its speaker right to say it.
Anything less, is not free speech. There is no free speech in this world. It doesn't matter whether you ban the pedo support group Martijn, give in to fears of protests from Islamic pupils and their parents in teaching about WW2 and/or homosexuality or create a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. All these cases are where a group decides another group should shut up because they are offended by their speech. And someone will ALWAYS somewhere be offended by someone's speech. Give in to one and the next will demand to get what offends them banned as well.
Would those some protesters you talk about STILL carry those posters on Facebooks "draw the prophet" day some while ago? If no... then they were not promoting free speech, they were merely promoting their speech. There is a difference.
One of the greatest western achievements, is it lack of culture. In the west, we have no culture. The US is the best example of this but Europe also has lots of no culture.
We instead got TONS of them often living in the same street and NO I am NOT talking about multi-culturism. I am talking about universities being just a short walk away from monestaries, people studying evolution and genesis dining in the same university hall together with the business students, doctors and lawyers while hippies are campaigning on the doorstep.
It used to be that if you wanted to study, you had to go through the church and you could be ensured that they didn't encourage free thinking. Quite great names had to deal with this, from the bans on anatomy to the line between chemistry and alchemy. Read up on Newton and Da Vinci and their skirting around the religious authorities if the day.
Slowly this changed to the point where you it is fairly common for even religious leaders themselves to say that the bible is just so much hogwash and shouldn't be taken literal.
But in places like Egypt and even China, they might have universisities, they might have bright students, but they are NOT anywhere close to becoming another Oxford or MIT. It isn't just about inventing a faster super conductor but about coming up with new ideas that totally blow humanities mind.
Darwin could ONLY do his work because the religious authority in his days, when he wrote the origin of th species, did not care. Nobody really did at first, it was in fact considered rather dull. People were in fact not a bit suprised about evolution, they knew that, what upset them most was that nature didn't care. They could see evolution in action, it made sense but that nature was cruel with each day a bitter struggle... that was a bit harsh. That man wasn't the prime result of a survival of the fittest but rather the end result of the monkey that outfucked all the others didn't entirely fit with the world view. But it didn't result in any major upset at the time. That happened later. Gosh where have we seen oddly delayed outrage recenctly?
Free speech means tolerating, accepting and not silencing speech that totally upsets your world view. And if you don't... you don't get the Darwins. You get students who know they should only think approved thoughts, those who don't disappear. See Malala/Walala. She thought girls should be allowed to go school, she was silenced and it is western, not Islamic medical care that saved her life. Once Islam lead the scientific world, what changed?
Some early Islamic rulers were remarkably open, allowed other cultures, tolerated different believes. Hollands golden age is contributed in all history books to it being open to all comers.
Free speech, it has huge benefits BUT if you start limitting it by not allowing people to say stuff that offends someone... then free speech dies. After all I can go to North Korea and say everything I want, as
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Anyone know where his statement that 50% of the US population are anti-intellectual and anti-education comes from? Is he assuming that "doesn't believe in evolution" == "anti-intellecual and anti-education"?
"Yet those same SS soldiers were also forbidden to believe in a god (other than Hitler)"
Citation DEFINITELY needed.
They swore an oath to Hitler HIMSELF, but swore to GOD for it.
Seriously, Hitler was a Good Christian.
Religion's economic function is to translate macro-ethics into micro-moral prohibitions. Where science infers with this, and because science must ultimate be concerned with nature external to our petty concerns it will, it is targeted for attack.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Dr. Richard Dawkins is against religion, but practices it himself. I'm okay with that; he has to believe that he's polarized and has the key to (a) Truth;
he's certainly free to do so in this country. As a Christian myself, I disagree with many of the things other Christians profess, mainly because what they
believe is not stated in the Bible. I'm not talking grey areas either, just basic stuff, too. To me, when I hear Dawkins speak, his words only reinforce
that fact that there is a God, and his arguments support this.
As for the idiots/Republicans who say a child from a rape is ordained of God, well, are idiots. However, that should not condemn the fetus to suffer the
consequences of the act of its violent consummation. I've been in churches that feverishly preach the sins of abortion (I admit I haven't been in every
church, either), but have not heard of anyone offering to adopt said life in those churches, if it's that important to them. And, the essence of abortion
is actually in the Bible, just try to get Christians to believe it requires a miracle, though...
But our (U.S.) society is so fragmented that's it almost impossible to have clear answers on anything. We can't all live in a Mitt bubble.
Why not? Is it not delusional to believe in a fairytale? Just because that fairytale has a huge church makes it not delusional any more?
The difference between a cult and a religion is simply the number of followers.
Is it "delusional" to "believe" that their is life on other planets? Is it "delusional" to believe that the "Higgs Boson" exists at some energy level? Believing in something that hasn't been proven isn't delusional. The difference in opinion you are having here is that you believe there is enough evidence to declare "no God exists" others believe that their is enough evidence to declare "God exists" and still others believe something in between.
[b]A delusion is a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. Unlike hallucinations, delusions are always pathological (the result of an illness or illness process). As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information[b/]
Note the second and third sentence, so, yes it is wrong to consider them delusional. Note also that you and them would likely disagree on what is considered strong evidence for or against.
.. religion came about at the time of human transition from living in a subconscious state (as many animals do today) to the creation and use of higher level abstractions which needed a different mindset of consciousness. In simple terms religions are nothing more than different biased interpretations of what all we knew and still do on a subconscious level. Consciousness and abstraction, to separate them from subconscious requires a belief filter or philosophy as the conscious mind has its processing limits based on abstraction. We need abstraction to deal with growing complexity of society as population grew (tower of babel) but today the population if driving the next transition, where the choice of what we want to believe and the deception that abstraction use enabled are breaking down. World wide protest are the evidence of such breakdown as all have in common the people having grown tired of the few in positions of command messing things uo for the people, for only the benefits of the few.
Where we are going now is to re-integrate our subconscious access to all that is with our conscious abstract mind to see past the deception.... the bottomless pit of deception for which any troll can prove and where anyone in teh pit can only see a part of reality, in looking up out of the pit.
Evolution is basically a local optimization algorithm. You are right about that it will start running under the conditions you list. But even with these condition met, complex organisms do not necessary evolve. You will only get more complex organisms, if that complexity is beneficial in that environment. It is quite easy to imagine environments where less complex organisms are fitter than complex ones.
But even if complex organisms would in theory be fitter than simple ones in that environment under some conditions they will never happen. Remember that evolution is "local". Evolution to more complex organisms is only going to happen if there is a way from individuals of your current genpool to more complex ones where almost all steps increase fitness.
E.g.: If you have a rather harsh environment where only super simple or very complex organisms can survive, then evolution from super simple to very complex will never happen because there are no "medium complexity steps" in between that allow for evolution to very complex.
Jan
Dear Slashdot!
Please, could you do not record your great interviews in spaces where music is being played? It is really annoying- from what I see not only for me, but for Professor as well.
Thanks.
Adrian
You can't find enough fossil evidence to prove, it, you can force things to evolve to prove it, and to believe its true requires a leap in logic that is on par with 'faith'.
My favorite example is "What happened in evolution to cause non-flying creatures to develop wings?" I mean flight is not something any 'ol ground based critter can perform. It takes an entirely special set of circumstances to cause a critter to take flight. Even if you start with critters that glide to the ground, how does jumping to your death without the yet evolved membranes cause you to be a better candidate for offspring?
I am SO getting this printed up on t-shirts.
... We need to make that part true.
I presented no logical fallacies. The reason appropriate relative association between the actions and the worldview is that mass-killing is -directly contrary- to the principles of Christianity, and therefore, by definition, -not Christianity-.
It is with reference to sanctimoniousness hypocrisy that people criticise religion as violent. Logic has nothing to do with hypocrasy. Christianity has a lot going for it, but fundamentally, when people start to believe that they have special insight, and that they know better then others, then the greater good will justify all sorts of dangerous and irresponsible behaviour. It really cuts to the heart of psychosis -- religious or otherwise.
Your defence of Christianity would be more coherent if you acknowledged that violence is a direct result of moralism. By comparison, the evil psychopathic murder is only responsible for a drop in the bucket of human misery.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It's interesting to read the comments here, about how he's so wrong, while at the same time they are proving his point : religion is a way to divide us in groups, because we feel 'Christian' or 'Muslim' , etc...
It's not suprising, as religion is forced onto us at a very young age. It's a miracle any of us are unaffected by it.
Why repeat the lie that the Innocence of Muslims video was behind any unrest?
In my experience, discussion with a handful of atheist on and off led me to believe that they are only topped by extremists when it comes to discussion on existence of God. Majority of the believers are busy living a life and thanking God once in a while.
I prefer agnostics to atheist. Atheists, IMO follow a religion that does not believe in God.
Apparently if you talk about wanting evidence for beliefs too much, you will inevitably lead to the gulag. No other way around it.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Because that's a natural way to read it.
It takes the format that "X takes too strong a stance and should be distanced from; Y also takes too strong a stance as an opposite", that naturally implies a similarity that is not there.
You seem to be saying that you can streatch the words in the bible to mean anyting you want. So why even bother with them at all, since really it is you making the bible say what you want it to say.
Man was made from a handful of dust means that proteins turned into single cell beings, that further evolved etc. If you believe in evolution, why even bother with those mental gymnatics to make the bible fit with scientific theory?
Religion so easily uses itself to conduct evil acts. Atheism implies no actions or motivations for actions. And most atheists will scoff at state dogma just as obviously as we scoff at religious dogma. Believing something for which there is no good reason to suppose is true is not desirable. Were there social aspects to the witch trials, sure, people made money hunting witches and got to closely examine the breasts and genitals of young girls, but is there a religious aspect too. Yes. Whereas there's no atheistic reasons to do anything, much less enforce an absurd form of biology on pains of death. You either believe wheat gets coldness power from having their seeds frozen or you go to the gulag, that's not a cry for too much rationality or too much logic. Those are both idiotic dogmas. Dogma is the enemy.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Your grasp of logic is weak, little grass hopper.
Life on other planets - name me some credible scientists who believe in that. Until actual evidence is seen, no one of sound mind or body will *believe*. We can conjecture, and extrapolate, but we don't *BELIEVE*.
Did we believe Higgs Boson existed? The theories said it did. So we tried to find it. Do unicorns exist? I know of no theories that claim it does. But if someone actually finds one, I'll believe it.
You seem to believe that you have this non-testable book that made claims, is the actual truth. Sadly, science and reason does not work that way. Show me a testable hypothesis. If it is not testable, it is not science, it is religion or philosophy.
If you want to continue this debate, please provide me reasons why your God is better or more "true" than my Flying Spaghetti Monster. I have a holy book too. Well, more so a menu. But still holy, damnit!
And seeing as there are TWO *incompatible* creation myths in the bible, TWO *incompatible* locations for the birth of Jesus Christ and TWO *incompatible* dates for the birth of christ, you cannot believe even figuratively that the book is right because you have to ALSO believe it is wrong.
Is a dead one.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And I cannot believe your lack of reading comprehension.
The parent didn't compare Dawkins to Coulter and Limbaugh, he compared the efficacy of their approaches to accomplishing their goals. Not the efficacy of the *actual* GOAL, but how well their particular strategies work for furthering their objectives. And, he's got a good point. You change minds by using empathy and respect to understand your opponents and bring them to your side. You DO NOT win minds by kicking everyone you disagree with in the nuts. That just starts fights, which do not solve the kinds of problems we're discussing in this thread. Fighting just entrenches people in their dogmas and gives them a "bad guy" to hate and rail against.
But you skimmed it over, made some knee-jerk, emotionally charged assumptions about what he was saying, and responded to a comment he *didn't make*.
The irony of your nic, considering your comment, is awesome...
AC
The only reason Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in God is because he approaches it from the point of view that there is no God. And, of course, people like him will immediately tell you that you cannot prove a negative. If he spent as much time wanting to believe in God and trying to prove to himself that God DOES exist, he might learn a thing or two about faith.
But, no matter. So long as he thinks he's happy.
I knew people who thought Atheists were evil people who had no ethics, morals, or maybe worshiped the devil. Well, to be fair to these ignorant people, I think they put everything under that heading and it included Buddhists too. They were quite confused when they found out I was not a christian like them; and for them I take the Atheist positions just to educate them. I do not know if they will be ready to comprehend Agnostics; especially when they think my Catholic upbringing is the reason I am acceptable.
People who don't live in actual functional democracies in general do not understand that the policies of a particular administration are often repudiated and/or reversed by the public and the next administration may go in the opposite direction. Just as those who do live in such places have trouble understanding that people who don't really have to work hard to imagine how they might work.
I'm using the word "delusional" here in its factual medical sense, meaning "suffering from delusions". The idea that there is a god is a complete 100% mass delusion in every possible factual respect, with an exact zero in factual evidence to support it. Zero, just plain zero. Not just rare sightings of a god, not extremely miniscule tiny amount of factual evidence of sighting of a god, but just a nice plain zero.
So if Dawkins says, using scientific terminology, that all religious believers are delusional, he's simply being scientifically accurate, because science is based on factual evidence.
That the delusional people don't like this being pointed out is their personal difficulty with accepting matters of fact. Perhaps they should drop everything that science has given them (basically everything around them unless they dress in animal skins and live in a cave) and return to a pre-science state. That might teach them something about the real value of science to their very existence.
The difference between an atheist and a believer is only in how many gods they don't believe in.
No.
The difference between an athiest and a believer is that the athiest finds the concept of God delusional while the believer does not. The number of them is irrelevant to this.
Dawkins should not be surprised that "physics gets a pass" while evolution does not. Physics deals with things you can actually measure and the concept of falsifiability. While micro-evolution (adaptation) is arguably scientific (and not an argument that I am either making or interested in having), macro-evolution (the origin of life) is pure religion.
Macro evolution is micro evolution on long time scales, and has nothing to do with origin of life. If you think the two are truly different you have quite some explaining to do how isolated populations undergoing micro-evolution are *not* going to evolve arbitrarily apart from eachother. What mechanism would make sure that they stay within the same species?
Thanks for doing this. Great interview. But does it really need a soundtrack running in the background?
Paul Broun is a qualified medical practitioner. He has seen the evidence and understood it. Paul Broun is a politician. Paul Broun chooses to ignore the evidence because it is good for his political career in an electorate that is too ignorant to understand the evidence. Paul Broun is the worst kind of pandering hipocrite. He chooses to play the fool because it is good for his business. Paul Broun has great influence over the education of our children. Paul Broun is dumbing America down so that it will soon no longer be able to compete in the world.
...and yet it sounds like a distant camera mic with a bunch of background noise. Please look into making these videos sound better. Yes, it does matter.
The difference between an atheist and a believer is only in how many gods they don't believe in.
That's an amusing quote that is somewhat nonsensical.
1. Atheists are believers; they believe that no gods exist, rather than that a god/many gods exist. You're trying to distinguish between a subset and the set that it is part of. "The difference between an atheist and an atheist ..."
2. "disbelief" is only meaningful with respect to the beliefs that drive the disbelief. "Adding one more god to disbelieve" makes it sound like an insignificant addition when totaling up all the gods one can disbelieve in, but it only happens because one has a stronger belief that excludes the disbelieved notions. So it is not the number of disbeliefs that matter, but the number of beliefs that do matter.
Here's an illustration for why the saying is really silly. There are an infinite number of wrong answers to 1 + 1 = ?. But the person who looks at the number of wrong answers to 1 + 1 and then decides that there is no right answer to the question is also wrong. The person who rejects "1 + 1 = 3" because "there is no right answer to 1 + 1" is right for the wrong reason. No matter how many wrong answers to 1 + 1 he can find, his core belief is still wrong.
What matters is not how easy it is to adopt a conclusion. ("just another god to not believe in") What matters is truth. That's something we can all believe in.
So yes, I do think they are very different things, and I think the context explained sufficiently.
The point I was making is that Dawkins simply talking about "evolution" and how it doesn't get a pass from religious people implies he's using the "origin of life" term and not simple adaptation term. It is always hard to tell because the two concepts are repeatedly switched mid-discussion. A believer will talk about the origin of life and an evolutionist will talk about all the scientific evidence to prove evolution, as if the evidence of adaptation of a species was sufficient to prove how life began. The fact that Dawkins calls religous believers delusional might be another clue that his reference to religion and evolution involves creation.
Origin of life Evolution is, indeed, a religion. Dawkins should not be surprised when science steps into religion and religion responds with less than an open-armed invitation to join the congregation.
In Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Latest version of Flash is installed.
I see all these posts about people arguing that their fairy tale is superior and some say atheists don't believe anything...
I don't get it. I am not an atheist, I am not an a-leperchaunist either... I'm just a normal, educated, rational, and logical individual that performs my own investigation if I question someones credulity.
It is becoming harder and harder to separate the 911 truthers and HAARP nutjobs from the religidiots.
So why do you believe in a god? Is the judicial system not moral enough? Or is it fear or the inability to handle life's curve balls?
You can say... what if you are wrong... but I know I'm not. I know because religion is something new compared to the age of the world. Its the biggest meme in history.
For fuck's sake, would people STOP perpetuating the lie that the attacks and killings and unrest had anything to do with a stupid fucking shitty youtube movie edited together by some dumbass on youtube?
It has ALREADY BEEN CONFIRMED that the "unrest" was unrelated and that the violence was a TERRORIST ATTACK. The white house confirmed this like a couple weeks ago and the white house also apparently KNEW about the pending attack just before it happened.
SO STOP SPREADING THE BULLSHIT ABOUT IT HAVING ANYTHING TO DO WITH SOME STUPID FUCKING MOVIE. Or ask someone in the middle east. THEY WILL FUCKING TELL YOU NOBODY WAS "RIOTING" OVER THE DUMB FUCKING MOVIE.
Fucking hell, people.
Isn't that what soccer is for?
Have a search on youtube for Ayaan Hirsi Ali . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFvklPpGZtA
...
Only?
The difference between a murderer and a non-murderer is only in how many people they didn't murder.
Dear Slashdot,
Professional audio personnel, who know and use professional audio equipment, are worth ever penny. Bad audio makes all but the hardcore audience bail.
Actually, you are wrong...
Your source is not "the CIA" but rather a progressive and an Obama supporter
The fact is that according to Obama people under oath giving testimony before the congress there was no protest about the YouTube video or about anything else... NO PROTEST AT ALL in Benghazi but the Obama administration dangled this lie about a protest before the American people for about two weeks. They were counting on their dumbest supporters to think some guy who made a YouTube video caused the violence (thus making it an event caused by an American) and not noticing that heavy weapons were used, and the attack took place on the anniversary of 9-11. To be fair, the Obama team is so used to the mainstream press covering things up for them (took NBC nearly a year to tell their audience anything substantial about Fast & Furious) that they probably assumed the press would keep hiding stuff here too... and the press DID play that role for a few days... until the lies became too numerous, too over-the-top, and then the matter got debate attention. See, there's this intertubes thing now, so when a debate moderator interjects herself into a debate to lie for the President to try to bail him out, we can all go online to see what's really going on. We now know (thanks to the leaked docs) that the Obama administration knew all of this within a couple of hours of the start of the attack (an attack which lasted for hours... which means they knew the facts before the attack was even over) . And finally, it is now therefore obvious that the president boldly lied right to the face of Jon Stewart and his audience on Comedy Central the other night when he said that his administration had told the American people everything they knew, as they became aware of it. Obama clearly has a very low opinion of the people who watch that show... since he either thinks they approve of his lies or he thinks they are too dumb to recognize those lies. There is a reason why the President goes on all the infotainment shows but does not stand for a hard-hitting press conference... he is counting on the no-information voters who get their "facts" from Comedy Central and from Bill Mahr at HBO to pull his butt out of the fire in this election.
Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion...
...and we'll kill anyone who says otherwise.
(Actually I don't single out Islam, they're all as bad as each other).
Holy shit, that guy in Palestine spoke ye olde english.
He is to atheism what Ann Coulter is to conservatives... a person who uses over the top rhetoric to rev-up his/her ideological base supporters and to sell books
First, he can rant all he wants about the dangers of religion generally, and Christians in particular, but he is perfectly safe walking into any typical Christian church in the US or Canada or England and he knows it. The worst his supposedly anti-intellectual Christian opponents ever do to him is try to engage him in debates. The thing he fears most from religion is that people with beliefs other than his continue to question his. Islam is a convenient foil that because its insanely violent behavior is a convenient way to tar all other religions (this is as rational as saying that because some scientists killed people in 1940's Germany, all scientists are evil and dangerous). What a person believes is far more important than the intensity of those beliefs. A crazy fundamentalist extremist Muslim might just saw off the head of an atheist... the most crazy fundamentalist extremist Amish person will probably just not talk to the atheist. (Oh, the Humanity...)
If, after all the debates he has engaged in, he has no clue about why so many Christians love Chemistry and Physics but reject Darwinian Evolution, then he is either deaf or dumb. Chemistry and Physics are "hard" or objective sciences; the scientific method rules in these fields. Theories are proposed, experiments are proposed to test those theories and the theories are verified or disproved by the experiments. Everything is rigidly methodical and verifiable. Darwinian evolution is an exercise in faith... no experiments can be done (any experiment man can do is setup by an intelligence and is therefore an experiment in "intelligent design") there are HUGE glaring holes (many millions of steps needed between lifeforms and not many millions of intermediate fossils) the fact that the theory calls for a continual gradual process but the world lacks a population of millions of current intermediate life forms, the fact that adherents to evolution are too gutless to try to live according to the beliefs they profess (care to publicly name which peoples are more/less evolved than others?) much of the fossil evidence for human evolution has been collected by one family of avowed atheists (the Leakeys... and atheists would complain if all evidence for some other theory came from Jerry Falwell and his sons, right?) Need I go on?
To Darwin's followers, like the followers of every other religion, everything is proof of their beliefs... if you point out the insanely bad statistical chances of creatures as complex as people or cats evolving by random chance, the answer you get is that "it happened" so even if it's very unlikely, it happened here! Proof! Shazam Kablam! When S.J.Gould confronted the problem of transitional lifeforms, he came-up with another out-of-the-butt solution... "punctuated equilibrium"... Shazam! Sudden great leaps with no evidence!... what's the proof of this new add-on theory? Why, the very lack of evidence for the gradual theory, of course! Abra Cadabra! No evidence for how life sprang from non-life on Earth? Panspermia!!! (it came on a meteor from elsewhere)... and please don't notice that this just shifts the problem off-world and does not actually answer the start-of-life problem at all...
I'm an atheist. I think gay marriage is an awful idea. Really, you can be an atheist without being OK with homo stuff.
We don't celebrate any other birth defect, either physical or mental. Decent people try to avoid abusing those born with problems, but we don't let them remake our world in their image. Homo issues are no different than self-mutilation issues, gambling issues, or any other in-born mental defect.
So, if this issue has been holding you back from being an atheist, rejoice! I welcome you as an atheist.
In the long term, the winning foreign policy is the one that causes foreign babies to die. Evolution selects against people who (via genetically determined behavior) tend to chose some other policy.
It has to do with the US government, but more importantly people that live in the US that are arrogant enough to buy into the BS, and believe Muslim religion is somehow about chaos and destroying anything they do not understand.
I would tend to believe that the Christian led US is intentionally trying to attack Muslim beliefs, becuase it is the fastest growing religion and threatens the dominance Christian Beliefs have had for centuries, however the things that have been used to stereo typed Muslims, was the same way Christian Religion came to power, propaganda, violence, censorship, oppressing other cultures and sexes, even it own believers, except those who were rich or in positions of power (somehow they were exempt from such rules) You saw it with sex, rock &roll, science, ect, and it continues today with morons like Mitt Romney, Rick Sanitarium (that where he belongs) ect.
What is it all religious people say? Oh yeah "if it is Gods will"... I have not seen any of the mentioned scientists just randomly combust into flames or explode, with a loud voice saying "you have made god angry stop or I will continue my terrorism of all things science".
speaking of muslims- 'maybe you better ask who is his father' relating to--- pres.obama---! where will you find this answer? use your netflix & "seriously" watch "Dreams of my Father"!!!
You will "learn" our president !!! OMG !!!
"Watch It !!!"
Believing in something that it is possible to prove isn't delusional. If you believe in something which is utterly impossible to prove, and in fact hugely unlikely to be true, is rather delusional.
Delusion: a false belief or opinion: delusions of grandeur.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Since the people who most vocally support evolution almost always conflate the concepts of "evolution" (small-e, adaptation of a species over time) with "Evolution" (capital-e, origin of life)
What? As the GP told you, "Evolution", regardless of how you chose to capitalize it, says nothing about the origin of life. It explains the origin of *species*, not *life*, i.e, the observation that the biosphere today is wildly different than the biosphere several million years ago, giving an explanation of how it happens that is accurate enough to make predictions based on them ("if we do this, we should see speciacion... oh, look, speciacion!"). There is no "origin of life evolution". There is "abiogenesis", but claiming that abiogenesis is science stepping into religion demonstrates a severe lack of knowledge of what "science" and "abiogenesis" are (hint: the evidence for abiogenesis is more than "this self-contradictory book says so". The Miller-Urey experiment was a confirmation of a prediction based on the primordial soup theory -- that's science at its finest).
Why are there so many different faiths? Especially in the US, (I can't count how many variations of Baptists, Methodists, etc. we have).
Scenario: The preacher stands in the pulpit, reads a scripture, then tells the congregation what it means. From the congregation, a person stands up, tells the preacher he is wrong, and that it means something different. Then asks the congregation to follow him to form a new church. Some do, and magically we have a new church. I think it is great that in the US, we have the freedom to do this.
He is a medical doctor with a BS in Chemistry. He is either cynical or deluded. The sad thing is there are many educated people who doubt evolution and the big bang theory. My electronics and robotics instructor in college was a religious man who doubted both.
I'm sorry Dr. Dawkins education is not the panacea we would like it to be.
Here's three great examples of a violation of people's Freedom of Speech, as guaranteed by our Constitution. 1. Ann Coulter trying to give a speech on Conservative values, such as the right to hang onto your paycheck, and she was shouted down by a group of students who had been brainwashed by some college professors. If they want to give a speech they can't rent a venue like Ann did. 2. Ann Coulter referred to retards, as retards. Some dickhead liberal fool had her on his show and stepped on her for using such a term. He claimed that it was offensive to retards. He was trying to shout down Ann. He was the bigot, stepping on Ann because she's a Conservative, meanwhile he wouldn't criticize Obama for his inept foreign policy getting 4 Americans killed in Libya and allowing Iran to develop a nuclear bomb which they'll surely use on Israel and maybe New York (the den of Satan). 3. Evolutionists ridiculing Christians and visa versa is a violation of freedom of speech, such as a College Professor flunking a student who rejects Evolution. Both theories of creation are ridiculous. Evolution doesn't explain the why of life, where the energy comes from to sustain matter, or gravity, and saying it's God's will and telling people they're going to burn in hell is also ridiculous. Creation is a phenomenon, no explanation is adequate, but to ignore obvious psychic elements of life is ridiculous. Inspiration exists, Artists plug into the Creative Almighty and are inspired to do creative works of art that can't be done by the most intelligent mind without that spark of God, which is just a force, don't project a human personality into God. That's so arrogant and self-centered. mensunion org
Bad analogy. Theists never say 'some god exists'. They point to a specific one and go on to describe him/her in great detail. This is the difference between 'I believe that life exists in the universe outside of Earth' (and the implication is usually that this is a statement of probability, not absolute certainty) and 'I believe that there is a planet orbiting the third star on Orion's belt and there is intelligent life on it'. It is quite delusional to believe a bunch of claims with zero evidence. Making a guess about the existence of something (falsifiable that we can go out and test at some point) based on past experience and probability is perfectly reasonable.
What a brilliant insight into the ignorance and its source and consequence
I love that and I want to use it. Shall I cite you as SmallFurryCreature?
Where is the other half of the vid and what the fuck is the point in splitting it into two halves you utter prick? Did you have to go wee wee' s halfway through talking to Richard Dawkins or something? Are you unable to absorb information without some pretentious form of artificial suspense, and therefore busy working on the recap of the first half in order to pad the second half out, to reflect the fact that your attention span has been calibrated specifically to follow the rhythm of the show Jersey Shore?
Lots of love, The United Kingdom
The difference in opinion you are having here is that you believe there is enough evidence to declare "no God exists" others believe that their is enough evidence to declare "God exists" and still others believe something in between.
Athiesm is a lack of belief in a diety, not an affirmative belief in that unprovable non-God (that was a fiction invented by the church to attack agnostic-atheists).
Learn to love Alaska
atheists are the minority ,always have been thank GOD & further more everything he says about religious people is just twisted and biased period, now I'd like tyou little media puppets to think about this for a second societal norms are what dictates your idea or morality ( non religious people) as time goes by everything is Ok with society and its ever diminishing standards of whats right and wrong, So would you rather be in a world where in time every f*cked up thing is A ok or would you rather live bu someone or in a town or people that think all lying is wrong, all stealing is wrong all murder is wrong & all coveting is wrong, DUH the world is not better for less religious practice but worse for it, and has been since the 1960's thats when the pagan nutso death cults came that when equal right was hijacked by panthers and MLKJR was killed that's when lesbo's were writing womens rights books and not regular straight women look it up, thats when the drug culture, free love,AIDS, divorce, murder all began to grow into higher numbers, not less, think with your heads and not your ass.
US voters do. That's why an atheist president is considerably less likely than a muslim one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If evolutionissm's true how come he has'nt evolve'd a less stupord name?
If only his bad logic had died with him
will we get part 2?
Wow I really like that statement.
I think that the key is in your definatin of God which can easily be manipulated in such a way such that the atheist becomes a believer and the believer becomes the atheist.
Why shoot in a bar with music (copyrighted, I add) playing in the background, somebody hoovering, and not use the feed from Dawkins' lapel mic? Completely distracting and difficult to watch
Theocracy? Who assumes that every arab is responsible of 9/11?
They've learned it from the best.