Ixion
Inquiring Mind
- Joined
- Mar 26, 2008
- Messages
- 2,431
Ok, a tiny bit of backstory: There were two newspapers available in Tucson up until May: The Tucson Citizen (a local newspaper) and the Arizona Daily Star (a Phoenix-based newspaper with statewide news slightly biased towards Phoenix events). In May, the corporation that owns the papers decided to drop the print version of the Citizen, but maintains a newspaper website that only includes editorials and blogs and advertisements. The deletion of news centric to Tucson in favor of editorials is another matter entirely outside of the scope of this post, although I do have some feelings about that.
With that being said, I was browsing the [online] Citizen today, and came across an article titled "God and Sex" in their religion subfora. The journalist, Renee Schaffer Horton, blogs that human perspective has everything to do with current religion and belief. She argues that dogma and stubborness prevents people from understanding that belief, or lack thereof, prevents reasonable communication between believers and atheists. So far, I am with her. I think there is a huge spectrum of belief and non-belief and that more fundamental believers and non-believers do little to further their cause. Likewise, it is a cornerstone of critical thinking to acknowledge different points of view. Some views are capable of standing on their own and can induce insightful and fervent discussion, but others are easily dismissed. That is all a part of critical thinking and part of skepticism.
Her next few paragraphs though are a couple of anecdotes that sound very "urban legend"-ish. I don't think they do much to bolster her argument and I think that they both include an underlying subtle fallacy (I am not quite sure which one, but according to the stories, children believe in God, so there must be something to it).
Finally, she has a short paragraph linking to a Huffington Post about a sex article praising foregoing climax (isn't that a form of "tantric sex"?). The last paragraph seems just thrown onto the bottom so she could have both "God" and "Sex" in the title. The interesting thing that is stated in the Huffington Post article and restated in the Tucson Citizen article is that:
Anyways, I thought I would share my initial feelings about the article. Do you agree or disagree with my accessment? Perhaps you got something different from the article? I am open to discussion.
With that being said, I was browsing the [online] Citizen today, and came across an article titled "God and Sex" in their religion subfora. The journalist, Renee Schaffer Horton, blogs that human perspective has everything to do with current religion and belief. She argues that dogma and stubborness prevents people from understanding that belief, or lack thereof, prevents reasonable communication between believers and atheists. So far, I am with her. I think there is a huge spectrum of belief and non-belief and that more fundamental believers and non-believers do little to further their cause. Likewise, it is a cornerstone of critical thinking to acknowledge different points of view. Some views are capable of standing on their own and can induce insightful and fervent discussion, but others are easily dismissed. That is all a part of critical thinking and part of skepticism.
Her next few paragraphs though are a couple of anecdotes that sound very "urban legend"-ish. I don't think they do much to bolster her argument and I think that they both include an underlying subtle fallacy (I am not quite sure which one, but according to the stories, children believe in God, so there must be something to it).
Finally, she has a short paragraph linking to a Huffington Post about a sex article praising foregoing climax (isn't that a form of "tantric sex"?). The last paragraph seems just thrown onto the bottom so she could have both "God" and "Sex" in the title. The interesting thing that is stated in the Huffington Post article and restated in the Tucson Citizen article is that:
I have never heard of this before. Is there any biological/psychological data to back it up? Perhaps this is material for a separate thread.Renee Horton said:
Anyways, I thought I would share my initial feelings about the article. Do you agree or disagree with my accessment? Perhaps you got something different from the article? I am open to discussion.
