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Dr. Richard Dawkins On Why Disagreeing With Religion Isn't Insulting
In part 2 of this video interview (with transcript), Dr. Richard Dawkins explains the function of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, headlined by his website. They're holding it up as a blueprint for similar groups: "We're trying to encourage, with some success, other organizations to make use of our facility, so that they will use our website, or have their own websites which are based upon ours, and have the same look and feel and use the same infrastructure." One of the Foundation's other purposes is to oppose organizations like the Good News Club. "What it is, is a group of Fundamentalist Christian organizations, who go into public schools after the school bell has rung for the day. So that it's no longer violating the Constitutional separation of church and state. ... And it's actually the Good News Club people masquerading as teachers, and they're being extremely effective." Dr. Dawkins also talks about his own comments, and explains why they're perceived as offensive: "Ignorance is no crime. There are all sorts of things I'm ignorant of, such as baseball, but I don't regard it as insulting if somebody says I'm ignorant of baseball, it's a simple fact. I am ignorant of baseball. People who claim to be Creationists are almost always ignorant of evolution. That's just a statement of fact, not an insult. It's just a statement. But it sounds like an insult. And I think that accounts for part of what you've picked up about my apparent image of being aggressive and offensive. I'm just telling it clearly." Hit the link below to see the rest of the interview.
Hey guys! I'm an atheist! Let me recategorize myself as a Bright Atheist Plus! BA+ for short! I'll get it tattooed around my anus for when PZ Myers rims me something fier.ce Atheism is the one true way. Let me piss all over you, even if you're not hurting anyone. What? Grandma said "Bless you" when I sneezed? Gonna punch that cunt's lights out! How ***DARE*** she!?!? Sorry, God didn't bring this hurricane down upon us. Nature and science did! Unfortunately science isn't powerful like the Holy Trinity to stop a hurricane. QED Checkmate. Let's all go to reddit, join /r/atheism, and share stories of man-to-man handjobs with le epic rage comic memes. Hey guys! I'm still an atheist! Let there be no doubt about this! Atheism, atheism, atheism! Imagine Dawkins saying this, jumping up and down like Ballmer at Micro$oft! Checkmate, closed-source programs!
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Yeah, it usually descends into that after about ten minutes, right after you show them a few rules they're breaking that mean they're not going to heaven - own an iPhione, eat Bacon, etc. (really? Christians aren't supposed to eat pork? The Bible is the same book as the Koran??)
At that point of the debate they'll happily tell you The Bible isn't really what Christianity is all about. Nope, it's about loving everybody and being a good person. So long as they do that they can choose to ignore their own scriptures/rules (uhuh...)
At that point I usually show the verses that make the Bible a horrible moral code. The misogynistic ones, the ones that support slavery, beating of children ("spare not the rod"), etc. I point out there's a much better moral code than that, it's called "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and it was written by Atheists.
At this point the "debate" usually ends.
When you've done it a few times it's like following a script. I'd love a well-informed riposte that made me go away and research something but Christians are depressingly unimaginative. They never really vary in their answers or the order in which they give them.
You won't convert them on the spot, but you can easily get them to deny The Bible and show that religion doesn't make moral people (murder and divorce correlate quite well with number of churches per square mile in American states).
Maybe you can plant a few seeds of doubt...and that's really the best you can hope for.
It helps if they get angry too, that means they're listening...
No sig today...
Western nations say they have the "freedom of speech" to insult any religion as they please. Then why is it that scientists want to outlaw any questioning of scientific theories? By definition, a theory is not absolute truth.
When I got my PhD in statistics, one of the first things I was taught in grad school was to never extrapolate inferences beyond the range of observed data. Yet, that is exactly what evolution, geology, and cosmology does. There are no 5-billion-year-long experiments to verify that everything follows a neat linear (or log-linear) pattern as the theories claim. We have some experiments that lasted at most about 30 years, and say that since they followed a log-linear pattern for the first 30 years, it must also follow the same pattern for the remaining 4,999,999,970 years.
From what we know from the world of biology, patterns that appear to hold in the short term will often deviate greatly in the long term. But somehow, we are required to believe that such deviations could never happen elsewhere.
I was an atheist before going to graduate school, but I learned the huge number of assumptions upon which science is built. Upon close examination, many or all of the assumptions are wrong; but scientists merely ostracize those who question the assumptions, saying it is "irrelevant" or to avoid "paralysis by analysis".
I'm stunned by the number of pro-religious people here. I suppose it's an inevitable side effect of this being a US-centric site, but it's still baffling. It's like reading some Iranian forum.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Well, if we are going with personal antecdotes, I've debated a few folks about evolution vs ID, and most "evolutists" are simply working off script themselves (often fanciful diversions about dinosaurs or great apes and neaderthals and fossil evidence), which they don't seem to have the foggiest idea about. I can summarize most of their arguments in the phrase "creationists are wrong, so I must be right". Unfortunatly, that's one of the biggest logical fallacies (certainly, both could be wrong).
I'd wager that many of the folks that support evolution are equally as ignorant about what the actual evidence for evolution is, or the logical chain of reasoning that supports it. Certainly not all are ignorant, but the vast majority.
BTW, I sort-of believe in evolution, but sometimes I just enjoy debating folks on the subject because many evolutionists are so passionate about their belief, yet so ignorant about how tenuous some of the evidence is. For instance, originally, Homo Habilis was thought to be the oldest direct ancestors to H. Sapiens, but more recent evidence make it appears that HH might be a "dead" branch of H. Erectus or H. Rudolfensis. Also all the evidence is pretty much based on cranial size on very a couple of skeletons and carbon dating of some surrounding rocks. There's no dna, or any direct evidence. As you might say in a court, all the evidence is circumstantial.
Also, now that we know more about how environmental stresses can change the expression of genes, all that bunk about the only thing that can explain adaptation is collections of "fit" mutations passed along generation is also under question. As we learn more about dna and gene expression in progeny, we may find that the simplified explanation of evolution that we teach must change in much the same way alchemy changed into chemistry as we discovered atoms, electron orbits, isomers, and covalent bonding...
As another aside, the evidence pretty much shows that the human ancestors pretty much all died out (~5000 or so about 100,000 years ago), but somehow miraculously survived to populate the whole world. Nobody can say for sure why this is true or if in fact we are actually decendents of 5000 space aliens (e.g, some superbeing buying more goldfish for the tank after they all died out, although I think that is highly unlikely).
Just because creation isn't likely correct by most stretches of the imagination, we are still woefully ignorant about our own orgins, or how what we currently call evolution might work to say that we really know what we are talking about. We are the cocky teenagers who think they know it all, but apparently do not.