Dawkins, atheism & intelligent design

Agatha said:
have you evidence for this?
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Yes, Agatha, my evidence for this comes from growing up and living among people who have rejected religion for these very reasons. I have also read many articles and heard numerous interviews on radio and TV where people have become disillusioned with faith for the same types of reasons: forced as a child to go to a church or a church school against their will, threatened by parents or the clergy with hellfire for having impure thoughts, had a friend or relative who was sexually molested by a priest, not allowed as a teenager to associate with friends of another faith, made to feel evil for being homosexual, etc.

Perhaps you have a different perception of what are the main reasons that lead people to hate religion. I would be interested in hearing your views.
 
Agatha said:
Whirligig said:
<snip> I think you will find most people have become disillusioned with religion for their own personal reasons (such us being force-fed religion as children by overly strict parents, suffering abusive treatment at the hands of the clergy, being preached at by intolerant evangelists, having difficulty reconciling their preferred lifestyle to traditional theistic principles) <snip>
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have you evidence for this?
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I'm the evidence!
 
Hate religion or become disillusioned with it? I think those are two quite different stances.

I don't have any evidence for the reasons for either stance, which is why I was interested to hear whether you had; your recollection of anecdotes can suffer from confirmation bias, and personal stories from the media, while interesting, are selected to be good for ratings rather than a scientific exploration of why previously religious people cease to become so.
 
Whirligig said:
Yes, Agatha, my evidence for this comes from growing up and living among people who have rejected religion for these very reasons. I have also read many articles and heard numerous interviews on radio and TV where people have become disillusioned with faith for the same types of reasons: forced as a child to go to a church or a church school against their will, threatened by parents or the clergy with hellfire for having impure thoughts, had a friend or relative who was sexually molested by a priest, not allowed as a teenager to associate with friends of another faith, made to feel evil for being homosexual, etc.

Perhaps you have a different perception of what are the main reasons that lead people to hate religion. I would be interested in hearing your views.
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I don't know where you live, but I am assuming (possibly wrongly) that you are American. In my country - the UK - most atheists and agnostics were born and bred as such. Church attendance is, at best, 10% of the population. Yes, you can find some people who have rejected Christianity for the reasons you describe. However, the vast majority of atheists (like the vast majority of people in general) were never seriously exposed to Christianity as children or at any other time. They view it, from the outside, either as outdated, simply incredible, or possibly as a malign force in society. They do not personally 'hate' it, in general, or even understand it enough to do so. They simply don't think about it much, if at all.
 
sleepy_lioness said:
I don't know where you live, but I am assuming (possibly wrongly) that you are American. In my country - the UK - most atheists and agnostics were born and bred as such. Church attendance is, at best, 10% of the population. Yes, you can find some people who have rejected Christianity for the reasons you describe. However, the vast majority of atheists (like the vast majority of people in general) were never seriously exposed to Christianity as children or at any other time. They view it, from the outside, either as outdated, simply incredible, or possibly as a malign force in society. They do not personally 'hate' it, in general, or even understand it enough to do so. They simply don't think about it much, if at all.
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Thanks for your feedback. Its good to get another point-of-view. I was thinking in terms of those people who had known traditional religious teachings and then turned against their creed (for those sorts of reasons I mentioned), rather than not having been born and raised in a largely Christian dominated culture such I experienced growing up in Australia in the sixties.

In the context of people who have not been taught the Christian faith directly, but gained an impression of it through reports in the media (eg incidents of priests abusing children in their trust) or the more fundamentalist Christian denominations (especially in the USA) who push Creationism or conservative ‘God Bless America’ type politics with militant campaigning against abortion and gay rights, it is quite understandable they may get the perception that Christianity as something inflexible, intolerant and irrational. Its unfortunate that many others who practice their faith quietly, are happy to believe in a God who could have created life through an evolutionary process, and live out their faith unobtrusively (eg through voluntary charity work and praying for others) without pushing it onto others, are easily overlooked in terms of the values they represent.
 
sleepy_lioness said:
In my country - the UK - most atheists and agnostics were born and bred as such. Church attendance is, at best, 10% of the population. Yes, you can find some people who have rejected Christianity for the reasons you describe. However, the vast majority of atheists (like the vast majority of people in general) were never seriously exposed to Christianity as children or at any other time. They view it, from the outside, either as outdated, simply incredible, or possibly as a malign force in society. They do not personally 'hate' it, in general, or even understand it enough to do so. They simply don't think about it much, if at all.
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I agree with you and I think this was the case for many decades, certainly during most of my life, but in more recent times, the subject has been brought so much to the attention of all, that more change is inevitable ... and a good thing too!
 
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Whirligig said:
In the context of people who have not been taught the Christian faith directly, but gained an impression of it through reports in the media (eg incidents of priests abusing children in their trust) or the more fundamentalist Christian denominations (especially in the USA) who push Creationism or conservative ‘God Bless America’ type politics with militant campaigning against abortion and gay rights, it is quite understandable they may get the perception that Christianity as something inflexible, intolerant and irrational. Its unfortunate that many others who practice their faith quietly, are happy to believe in a God who could have created life through an evolutionary process, and live out their faith unobtrusively (eg through voluntary charity work and praying for others) without pushing it onto others, are easily overlooked in terms of the values they represent.
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Oh, I agree with you. The problem is that liberals and moderates tend to be, well, liberal and moderate, while the loudly fanatical tend to be, well ... This is a problem we're wrestling with in my church at the moment (Anglicanism): the homophobic conservatives are better organised and more committed to purging the place of us nasty gays, while the quiet majority who either don't think there's anything wrong with being gay or, if they do, don't want to split the church over it, get on with being quiet and reasonable. There's quite a lot of debate in liberal Anglican circles about how we should respond to recent events in this area, which makes for the rather amusing, or would be if it didn't matter, spectacle of nice liberal Anglicans trying to organise a political campaign.

As an old priest friend of mine used to say, the Church is like a swimming pool - all the noise comes from the shallow end.
 
bwinwright said:
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution has served as the inspiration for slavery, war, imperialism, racism, genocide, the Holocaust, Fascism, and many other forms of unloving behavior.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Tricky
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I believe that substituting "Religion" for "Darwin’s Theory of Evolution" in the above statement would give a much more accurate statement i.e. Throughout history Religion has served as the inspiration for slavery, war, imperialism, racism, genocide, the Holocaust, Fascism, and many other forms of unloving behavior.
Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Tricky
 
The God Delusion
-by Richard Dawkins

Book review by Joe Boudreault

Richard Dawkins, an Oxford biologist and popular science writer, has well established himself as one of the foremost proponents of both modern evolutionary theory and atheism. It should be of no surprise that these two go hand in hand. In The God Delusion, Dawkins has tried to dispel the whole notion of a supreme deity. He contends that a faith in a God is delusional because it is faith based on false beliefs in contradictory evidence. It’s a huge claim, even bolder than Darwin’s theory itself, as it purports to dispose of not many gods but all gods. Dawkins establishes his main claim on page 54: “That you cannot prove God's nonexistence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable.” With a claim like that (those are his words, not mine), Dawkins has bit off more than he can chew. It’s a self-defeating postulate, and everything he subsequently says goes downhill very quickly. Dawkins simply cannot offer a believable argument for the delusion he thinks exists. I cannot help but be reminded of the wise adage that in order to prove that God doesn’t exist, you’d need infinite knowledge of the entire universe. Since this is beyond anybody’s ability, this professor should have given up, but he trudges on, in a book-length diatribe against all religions.

Dawkins is left with the contention that God’s existence is not probable. Again, this is an argument that cannot be won. For example, the origins of everything cannot be explained by any science. If a Big Bang came from a parallel universe and time, what caused that universe to exist? What scientific theory fills this gap? Did it come from anther pre-existing power that brings forth what we do know about? Where would that power comes from? This is unproductive reasoning which leads to no beginning, no matter how far you stretch it. Atheists admit they don’t know where everything began, but they casually dismiss a creator as being impossible. It’s a common logical fallacy in their camp. The mainline theistic argument is that one supreme God exists and that this God created everything from nothing. Impossible? Where the natural ends, you must consider the supernatural. It’s clear however that Dawkins has intellectually lobotomized himself when he, like other atheists, deny even the possibility of supreme deity, while admitting it cannot be disproved.
Things get really strange when Dawkins makes statements such as “who designed the designer?” and “the little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very, very complex and presumably irreducibly so!” It appears that this man has no concept of absolute deity, or that he has chosen to ignore it altogether. The universe, he thinks, is far too complex to be designed by intelligence, yet he can attribute no origins to any science he would allude to.
Dawkins ignores the very idea of irreducible complexity, something that God must have by virtue of an absolute nature. Even a school child acknowledges that nobody designed the Designer (God); that’s why he is God. In trying to disprove Aquinas’ 5 proofs (of a reason to suppose God’s existence), he categorically dismisses it as being ‘vacuous’. Dawkins hates infinite regress, but he cannot explain his way out of it, and will not admit to an alternative. The Unmoved Mover, the Uncaused Cause, and the Cosmological Argument (nothingness into something) are, says Dawkins, not a reason to invoke a God. But he is unable to invoke anything himself in its place. Good enough to toss out the God he admits he cannot disprove? I hardly think so.
Try this bit of Dawkins illogical reasoning on for size: “Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design...” Why not, Mr Dawkins? There isn’t an existing knowable science that can be applied to an explanation of a Beginning, so what’s your alternative? This allegedly brilliant scientist claims that “intelligent design is not the proper alternative to chance”, yet he admits that though theology is not his department, he arbitrarily throws out deity as nonsense. This is further aggravated by his claim that “it (a first cause of everything...something from nothing) must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name...” Dawkins denies the universally accepted Second Law of Thermodynamics, whereby entropy increases (or in which complexity moves towards chaos). Evolution and natural selection, he believes, is bringing order out of chaos, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Does he believe the universe is a closed system, not subject to natural laws? Where is the Edge of it all, Mr Dawkins? If you even consider reversing this law or abdicating it, it is all the more reason for an intelligent designer.
Contradictions keep piling up with this man. At one point he claims “Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will.” Then he quotes from Steven Pinker: “it [religion] only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false...” Wait a minute, beliefs it can plainly see are false? So, where’s this lack of choice in believing, Mr Dawkins? Oh, of course, it all comes from some sort of “formidable power of the brain's simulation software..[which is] well capable of constructing
'visions' and 'visitations' of the utmost veridical power.” Hearing him put it this way, you just have to wonder which of these constructed visions has caused him to suspend logic and make the earlier proclamation of “...there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine.” Here is the non-theologian, outguessing the professional theologian with impunity, claiming “I would prefer to say that if indeed they [mysteries of life] lie beyond science, they most certainly lie beyond the province of theologians as well.” And we believers have a God delusion?
On what authority does Dawkins rob the theologian of the imagination which he himself does not possess? It is akin to the infamous Arthur C. Clarke quote: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. This ruse, that religion is a way to explain inexplicable science, is painfully shallow. Magic is illusion, not delusion, and religion is in the realm of metaphysics. Nevertheless, Dawkins won’t allow metaphysics (there’s no God, he says), but will allow meta-analysis when it suits him, ie regarding the nature of belief systems. Quoting Paul Bell from Mensa Magazine, Dawkins (ever the evolutionary biologist) thinks that the more advanced the (evolved) human mind, the less likelihood of a God-belief. Again, a classic denial of universal entropy, that energy in all systems is cruising from order into chaos. As always, Dawkins simply refuses to carry his scientific reasoning to the point of explaining origins. At the risk of repetition here, if Dawkins thinks there is a sufficient explanation via the sciences for the beginning of everything, and that we just need more time to unravel the mysteries therein, he nevertheless avoids the paradox of where those explanations themselves come from. Regardless of what is offered as the first beginning, it too must have an origin. Here is an Oxford professor who is stumped by infinite regress and cannot simply and honestly admit it. Everything else he tries to amplify in this book it moot.

The book slumps to a low of scientific petulance when it disregards origins and dismisses metaphysical aspects of human existence all because Dawkins will not enter into alternate reasons for existence other than purely scientific ones. His plea for science is a plea for ignorance, considering he cannot offer a reason for existence itself, but categorically refuses to admit any other possibility than those he wishes to accept himself. This sends him into the self-deluding realm of intellectual arrogance, and there is a lot of arrogance here. Consider again some more of his own words: “It is important not to miss-state the reach of natural selection. Selection does not favor the evolution of a cognitive awareness of what is good for your genes. That awareness had to wait for the twentieth century to reach a cognitive level, and even now full understanding is confined to a minority of scientific specialists.” An awareness that waited, and only reveals itself in a minority of specialists? Would Dawkins be one of those chosen few? He further says (in a subtle nod towards infinite regress and multiple beginnings): “If we are going to permit the extravagance of a multiverse, so the argument runs, we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and allow a God. Aren't they both equally unparsimonious ad hoc hypotheses, and equally unsatisfactory?” It appears that Dawkins doesn’t think a multiverse is allowable; it is, in fact, ‘extravagant’. But he continues: “…People who think that… have not had their consciousness raised by natural selection. The key difference between the genuinely extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistical improbability. The multiverse, for all that it is extravagant, is simple. God, or any intelligent, decision-taking, calculating agent, would have to be highly improbable in the very same statistical sense as the entities he is supposed to explain.” Did you catch that? Dawkins believes a God cannot be more complex than his creation. Still, he plunders onwards: “… The multiverse may seem extravagant in sheer number of universes. But if each one of those universes is simple in its fundamental laws, we are still not postulating anything highly improbable. The very opposite has to be said of any kind of intelligence.” So, some of us have not had their consciousness raised by natural selection. Poor blokes we are, not to have the advantage of the understandings that Dawkins’ class have. Such undeveloped slugs are we, who consider a God behind all of those possible multiverses.
The delusion of a God, which Dawkins says most of us suffer from (and we could not chose to believe in this God, as choice to believe is not possible, remember?) is therefore the basis of all the religions which have ruined and are still destroying the world. Having shot himself in the foot and lost the argument in the first place, Dawkins nonetheless proceeds to castigate every religion on the planet as being unsavory and useless. He doesn’t tread any new territory here – the inhumanity of man towards fellow man is not denied by anybody else. But to appeal to an atheist universe for order is both ignorant and arrogant in the highest order. Dawkins merely illustrates his own lack of knowledge of religion in general and an absolute God in particular. There are hints that he personally suffered at the hands of irresponsible religious behavior as a youth, but is this reason to dismiss God? Apparently, Dawkins thinks so. Morals for good behavior, he states, don’t have to come from a God. “Do you really mean,” he continues to whine, “to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky...” And yet, he is unable to demonstrate how a moral nature can only evolve, and not be embedded by deity. You have to wonder where his moral imperative stems from, or what it is he sucks up to.
To further dismantle the God hypothesis (as he calls all religion), he cherry-picks scripture to illustrate what he believes is “the monster of the Bible.” In Genesis, Lot (says Dawkins) was willing to give his daughters to strangers and later, under the influence, copulated with them. A monster God saw to this! “Is this the best morals that Sodom had to offer?” But Dawkins fails to mention that God never approved of any of this. The same goes for Abraham who prepares to sacrifice his son, Isaac. (“A last minute change of plan? God was only joking...”) Willingness to obey, to trust, to commit to an absolute God who is ultimately good and just and gave plenty of gracious forewarnings, seems beyond Dawkins ability to conceive. So is divine forgiveness. Atonement (ie the Christ story) is “barking mad, vicious, sado-masochistic and repellant.” It is interesting that he regards the moral character of Jesus to be admirable (though Christ, he deems, is fictional), yet he is unable to grasp the need for a divine accounting and forgiveness before a divine God. Redemption should not have been necessary (ie Calvary), thinks Dawkins. “If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them?” What does Dawkins desire, an auto-God who forgets all, forgives all? Such a God, who never allowed evil to exist or things to go wrong, would never allow free will and choice either. We would all be automatons, incapable of doing wrong – clearly not the case with humanity. But once again, the professor who admits he’s not a theist would just erase all semblances of religious logic from the debate.
Yet, fearfully aware of that paradox of infinite regress and a beginning which is ever scientifically inexplicable, Dawkins moans out his atheist plea. “The whole argument turns on the familiar question: Who Made God, which most thinking people discover for themselves. A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us to escape.” Cannot help us to escape? Is it not the very reason that we cannot scientifically explain that infinite regress, Mr Dawkins, that it is only God who can be the originator of it, and be himself beyond it? British literary critic Terry Eagleton was quite right in saying that Dawkins exhibits “astounding ignorance ... about what he’s talking about”. Eagleton says “for deeply intelligent men Dawkins (and Christopher Hitchens) have a crude, childlike caricature of religion that would make any first-year theology student wince.” For a university graduate and an accomplished biologist, you have to wonder why Dawkins pursues the ideas in this book beyond the first chapter. Even in his argument, The Dawkins Confession, writer Alvin Plantinga clearly illustrates the convolutions of this Dawkinesque non-reasoning, that disproving the material basis of religion does not disprove the other reasons for it.
Yet Dawkins rants on. Elevating himself above the mainstream of believers, we find him mouthing the likes of “All I am establishing is that modern morality, wherever else it comes from, does not come from the Bible. Apologists cannot get away with claiming that religion provides them with some sort of inside track to defining what is good and what is bad - a privileged source unavailable to atheists.” This is a truly ignorant statement when you consider that apologists do not make any such claim. Biblical apologists in fact maintain that the moral nature we have from God is available to everyone and is implanted within every person. There are no privileged sources for morality. Just the same, Dawkins then tries to demolish this ‘inside track’ by claiming “the holy books do not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the bad.” Had he simply looked in the Bible’s New Testament a little further, he would have discovered the phrases of “blessed are the pure, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers...”, for surely in the sermon on the mount we have the golden code of moral behavior. Even if New Testament verses were cherry-picked throughout, it is difficult not to see moral instruction and the rules for it. But Dawkins would rather we are pointed toward a set of New Ten Commandments (for atheists) which strangely are similar to the old ones. Ironically, while he would subscribe to these (ie, “Always respect the right of others to disagree with you” and “Treat your fellow human beings...with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect) he taunts the believer in God with his own insulting belief that “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” By this, he means respect?
Dawkins is certainly at his most vain and ignorant when he tries to foist the idea upon the reader (who is smarter than he gives her/him credit for) that a world of atheism would be the utopia we all need. After sharpening his teeth on the monstrous acts of the Stalins and Hitlers of history and presenting them as Christians (in spite of their ungodly nature!), he makes still another astounding claim: “I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism. Why should it?” While Dawkins does not disown the idea of atheistic warfare, he is trying to disown the atheistic reason for them. It is so convenient here for him to forget the wars of communism everywhere, such as Russia, Cuba, Cambodia, Columbia, and China. Millions were slaughtered for simply having religious beliefs in any sort of gods. Even as he wrote this, Dawkins surely was aware of the atheist war against the Falun Gong of China. Communistic warfare is atheistic in its very purpose, and answers the very question Dawkins asks when he whimpers “By contrast, why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?” The mind cries out: to stop religious wars, Dawkins, and to stop religion.
Furthering the hypocritical agenda he loves to throw at us, he unabashedly supports another atheistic war, the war on unborn children. Abortion, to Dawkins, is merely the destruction of a cluster of human cells for the convenience of the mother. Yet even using his “consequentialist moral philosophy” in regards to the fetus, he walks on dangerous ground. Listen to this: “An early embryo has the sentience, as well as the semblance, of a tadpole. A (murdered abortionist) doctor is a grown-up conscious being with hopes, loves, aspirations, fears, a massive store of humane knowledge…” etc. It is only with the reasoning of an evolutionary atheist that you could dismiss an unborn baby as being of no worth. Adding euthanasia to the mix, Dawkins enters the same murderous territory that Hitler trod upon with his extinction of the masses of WW2. It’s not that Dawkins favors snuffing out lives at either end of the spectrum, but rather that he doesn’t recognize them as lives. Even the Great Beethoven Fallacy escapes him – a life euthanized for any reason is a life never given its potential. This doesn’t deter Dawkins; he considers the possibility of a future life being quenched to be “a ridiculous story”, a rhetorical stupidity, and surreal idiocy. But surreal idiocy is what Dawkins then practices in spades: “The evolutionary point is very simple. The humanness of an embryo's cells cannot confer upon it any absolutely discontinuous moral status. It cannot, because of our evolutionary continuity with chimpanzees and, more distantly, with every species on the planet.” A classic evolutionist tactic: assign the human fetus a non-human ancestry, so it can be destroyed at will. “There is no general reason,” continues Dawkins, “to suppose that human embryos at any age suffer more than cow or sheep embryos at the same developmental stage. And there is every reason to suppose that all embryos, whether human or not, suffer far less than adult cows or sheep in a slaughterhouse...” He could learn a great deal about this suffering by watching the anti-abortion film The Hidden Holocaust. But this is not murder in Dawkins view because “there are no natural borderlines in evolution”; therefore species have different values at different stages of development. An unborn child is not worth an adult life; a murdered fetus is not the calamity that a murdered (abortionist) doctor is. Lives in the distant past aren’t of the same moral value as lives now. Do such lives (fetus, dying terminal patient, Australopithecus afarensis) count as human? For Dawkins, “the question doesn't deserve an answer, for nothing turns on it.” Nothing turns on it? Except, perhaps, Dawkins’ own existence. That’s evolutionist and atheist morals in a nutshell.
Religion, then, is an imaginary voice in the head, because we don’t have enough science to explain all of our surroundings. Dawkins would explain that “the simulation software in the brain is especially adept at constructing faces and voices.” God is a voice, so God is a delusion. “Such is the fatuousness of the religiously indoctrinated mind” he adds, “a mind hijacked by religious faith...”. Yet he has no problem whatsoever with other voices, ie the witness of Julia Sweeney who confesses “. . . as I was walking from my office in my backyard into my house, I realized there was this little teeny-weenie voice whispering in my head. I'm not sure how long it had been there, but it suddenly got just one decibel louder. It whispered, 'There is no god.'” But of course, this voice is legitimate because it sanctions Dawkins’ all-beloved atheism.
If there is delusion to be found, it is not with the existence of God, but with the petulant arrogance displayed throughout this book, time after time, by Richard Dawkins himself. It is clear that the thought never enters his mind that you cannot disprove God by sampling the horrid actions of humanity. To believe in a Creator, for Dawkins, is just pure nonsense. It will corrupt our schoolchildren and pollute our society. “The faithful (to God) are encouraged to profess belief,” concludes Dawkins, “whether they are convinced by it or not. Maybe if you repeat something often enough, you will succeed in convincing yourself of its truth.” Strangely enough, if you profess evolutionary theory and atheistic non-theory often enough, you might succeed in convincing yourself of its truth as well. The formidable power of the brain's simulation software is in all likelihood a two-edged sword, and it can cut Dawkins as deeply as it can cut the rest of us. For me, the grand logic of Pascal’s Wager still stands.
 
hereisjoe said:
The God Delusion
-by Richard Dawkins

Book review by Joe Boudreault

...

For me, the grand logic of Pascal’s Wager still stands.
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Uhhh, yeah. "A god might exist who will keep you alive forever, torturing you, because you didn't jump through his odd belief-without-proof hoops."


Ummmm, yey?


How about Beerina's Pith: "...and so you should grow some balls and not kowtow to such a creature because it simply doesn't deserve it."
 
bwinwright said:
Much like Gay Pride, Dawkins is asking people to be proud of their atheism, to stand up and speak out, announce their atheism to the world. Dawkins is successfully convincing millions of people to reject the tyranny of organized religion and think for themselves.
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:) Cool.

Thanks for the update.
 
Marcus Aurelius wrote a response to Pascal's Wager some 1500 years before Pascal came up with it.

Marcus Aurelius (copyright expired) said:
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.
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