 |
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
KarlD Great Old One Joined: 06 Jun 2009 Total posts: 348 Location: Behind you Gender: Unknown |
 Posted: 30-07-2009 19:08 Post subject: |
 |
|
|
| _Lizard23_ wrote: | | colpepper1 wrote: |
What makes you think a deity, if one existed, would leave an evidence trail? |
I've never quite undestood why it wouldn't though. Or at least a working customer services' number 
I've changed my views a bit on Dawkins after reading a couple more of his books - when he's not namedropping and boasting I quite like his writing, but I agree he comes across badly on TV, although ridiculing the pitch of his voice is a bit much IMO .... it's a bit like saying you don't like him because he's got a big arse or something!
| Quote: | | Don't come here with your stuff looking for objectivity like that's the cream of emotion. |
I don't like the sound of this though - it's hard to know where to start ... is this directed at the previous poster? Are you saying objectivity is bad? That it's an emotion? That some emotions are creamier than others?!
 |
What i don't understand about god is why he apparently insists on people praising him and why people insist on praying to him and telling him what they want, if god is omnipitant then he already knows what people want and he doesn't need people pestering him to fix aunt sissies veruca all the time.
His son promised to pop back and see how people were doing 2000 years ago and he never seems to have the time so I am sure god will get round to the verucas when he has time.
You can imagine him sitting there with the phone ringing off the hook going
'hoy oi yoy my life my boy already!' |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
| segovius |
| Posted: 30-07-2009 19:21 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| KarlD wrote: | | _Lizard23_ wrote: | | colpepper1 wrote: |
What makes you think a deity, if one existed, would leave an evidence trail? |
I've never quite undestood why it wouldn't though. Or at least a working customer services' number
I've changed my views a bit on Dawkins after reading a couple more of his books - when he's not namedropping and boasting I quite like his writing, but I agree he comes across badly on TV, although ridiculing the pitch of his voice is a bit much IMO .... it's a bit like saying you don't like him because he's got a big arse or something!
| Quote: | | Don't come here with your stuff looking for objectivity like that's the cream of emotion. |
I don't like the sound of this though - it's hard to know where to start ... is this directed at the previous poster? Are you saying objectivity is bad? That it's an emotion? That some emotions are creamier than others?!
|
What i don't understand about god is why he apparently insists on people praising him and why people insist on praying to him and telling him what they want, if god is omnipitant then he already knows what people want and he doesn't need people pestering him to fix aunt sissies veruca all the time.
His son promised to pop back and see how people were doing 2000 years ago and he never seems to have the time so I am sure god will get round to the verucas when he has time.
You can imagine him sitting there with the phone ringing off the hook going
'hoy oi yoy my life my boy already!' |
This is surely near to the crux of the issue; clearly there are two possible Gods as derived from the religious paradigm.
The 'weak' God - which is really 'human, all too human' in Nietzsche's phrase - he needs all the things humans need: praising, attention, bolstering...he also has all human weaknesses, jealousy, pettiness, anger, violence.
Then there is what we might call the 'Omnipotent God' who is remote and unknowable. Traditionally he is the creator, is not petitioned, is not human.
Both these entities are described in the OT with different names btw.
It seems a safe bet the first is a uniquely human construct and has no existence. The second may or may not do.
This brings us to an interesting facet of the issue; both the atheists and the religionists are talking about the first one.
The atheists are correct of course, that God does not exist and is a human fiction. He is also - being human - just as adept at creating violence.
The interesting thing is that neither side seem to have noticed - or perhaps they are merely less than honest - that their arguments do not apply to the second possible entity, indeed, they do not seem even to be aware of this second possibility either of them.
Curious. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| DeeDeeTee Yeti Joined: 17 Aug 2006 Total posts: 35 Location: London Age: 38 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 31-07-2009 21:01 Post subject: |
|
|
|
Weak god? Omnipotent god? What about the doddery-old fool of a god, as demonstrated in the opening chapters of Genesis.
First in a stroll about Eden, he can't find Adam and Eve, who are hiding their nakedness (The omnipotence-o-meter must have been shut off)
Then he gets creation all wrong and has to destroy it. Well the earth bits of it. It suddenly struck me after reading about the flood - what about the fish? I mean are they all the 'evil' pre-flood type ones that live today? But I digress.
Then Abraham talks an angry god down from wanting to destroy Soddom, from 50 righteous to 10.
I do get the impression of an old man wandering about a bit vacant... |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| segovius |
| Posted: 31-07-2009 21:22 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| DeeDeeTee wrote: | Weak god? Omnipotent god? What about the doddery-old fool of a god, as demonstrated in the opening chapters of Genesis.
First in a stroll about Eden, he can't find Adam and Eve, who are hiding their nakedness (The omnipotence-o-meter must have been shut off)
Then he gets creation all wrong and has to destroy it. Well the earth bits of it. It suddenly struck me after reading about the flood - what about the fish? I mean are they all the 'evil' pre-flood type ones that live today? But I digress.
Then Abraham talks an angry god down from wanting to destroy Soddom, from 50 righteous to 10.
I do get the impression of an old man wandering about a bit vacant... |
The terminology is irrelevant.
The point is there are two distinct entities referred to in the OT. One is called "Elohim" and this is always translated to "God" in English, while the other is called "Yahweh" - generally translated as "Lord".
These two individuals are noted as different in the text and have vastly different - and contradictory - characteristics.
The God strolling around Eden is "Elohim" in the first Genesis text - in the second, additional and contradicting chapters of Genesis, he is "Lord" and acts very differently.
These two chapters contradict themselves in several ways actually. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| DeeDeeTee Yeti Joined: 17 Aug 2006 Total posts: 35 Location: London Age: 38 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 31-07-2009 21:35 Post subject: |
|
|
|
Sorry mate, I wasn't being too serious
But I did understand what you meant. The Elohim, as you put it, looks very much like a Sumerian/Babylonian diety, slowly transmuting into the more 'modern' Yahweh. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| segovius |
| Posted: 31-07-2009 21:47 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| DeeDeeTee wrote: | Sorry mate, I wasn't being too serious
But I did understand what you meant. The Elohim, as you put it, looks very much like a Sumerian/Babylonian diety, slowly transmuting into the more 'modern' Yahweh. |
Yea..I realized that when I'd finished being a pompous dick! Hahah....
I think you're right....he probably was a personal deity of that sort.
I think we need to invent some new ones don't you? This is what I find most fascinating about religions - if they are created by man (and to a large extent they obviously are) what mechanism is in operation that prevents them developing now?
Maybe atheists are wasting their breath and religion really died millennia ago and they can't see it... |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 3898 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 31-07-2009 22:00 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| segovius wrote: | | This is what I find most fascinating about religions - if they are created by man (and to a large extent they obviously are) what mechanism is in operation that prevents them developing now? |
Seems to me they regularly sprout up all over the place, with greater or lesser degrees of success.
Some of the more recent ones, like Mormons, Christian Scientists, Scientologists and Jehovah's Witnesses are still going strong, while others, such as Heaven's Gate, or the cults at Waco or Jonestown have self-destructed.
Most religions and sects have sub-sections and spin-offs, some of which become more prominent than their parent group, while others just fade away.
Maybe one day rationalism will wipe all this out, but I'm not holding my breath...!  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| segovius |
| Posted: 31-07-2009 22:05 Post subject: |
|
|
|
[quote="rynner2"] | segovius wrote: | | This is what I find most fascinating about religions - if they are created by man (and to a large extent they obviously are) what mechanism is in operation that prevents them developing now? |
Seems to me they regularly sprout up all over the place, with greater or lesser degrees of success.
Some of the more recent ones, like Mormons, Christian Scientists, Scientologists and Jehovah's Witnesses are still going strong, while others, such as Heaven's Gate, or the cults at Waco or Jonestown have self-destructed.
Most religions and sects have sub-sections and spin-offs, some of which become more prominent than their parent group, while others just fade away.
[quote]
I would differentiate between religions and cults in this regard. They are different things.
Many religions - like Christianity - may start as cults but they bloom into religions...the point still applies; what stops these new cults attaining full-fledged religious status?
| Quote: |
Maybe one day rationalism will wipe all this out, but I'm not holding my breath...! |
Very wise - rationalism is rarer than a Saquatch piloting a UFO with Elvis riding pillion these days. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 6499 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2009 22:13 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| segovius wrote: | ...
Many religions - like Christianity - may start as cults but they bloom into religions...the point still applies; what stops these new cults attaining full-fledged religious status?
... |
I belong to a religion, you belong to a cult.
Whatever became of the pennyfarthing, the dodo, or deely boppers and why is 'Top Gear' so popular? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 3898 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 31-07-2009 22:16 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Quote: | | I would differentiate between religions and cults in this regard. They are different things. |
Not really. It's just a question of numbers.
Just as History is written by the victors, the biggest, most succesful cults call themselves 'religions' so they can dismiss all the others as 'just cults'! |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| DeeDeeTee Yeti Joined: 17 Aug 2006 Total posts: 35 Location: London Age: 38 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 31-07-2009 22:43 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Quote: | | I think we need to invent some new ones don't you? This is what I find most fascinating about religions - if they are created by man (and to a large extent they obviously are) what mechanism is in operation that prevents them developing now? |
Not being religious or spiritual myself (hence fascinated about why a lot of people do and believe what they do) I'm probably not the best person to answer this. But feck it, my turn to be pompous  .
I think the mechanism for religious creativity has been working at full steam for a long, long, long time. However it has been held in check by those in power - and it has been the main religions themselves that have been wielding this power, as they deliberately got intertwined with government and were amazingly successfully for thousands of years. Thus the creativity generated schism, heresy and fractures - i.e. the debate and theological thinking was kept within the parent body or defined against it. Hence new ideas tended to follow existing patterns.
What is interesting now (definitely in the Xtian world) is that as this power ebbs and people are allowed to believe and make up what they want - we should probably expect a flowering of new religions. Because lets face it, there are still (and will always be) loads of people that mentally desire a 'black and white' description of the world and what it all means.
Look at Scientology. Remarkably successful for a 'religion'* that throw some of the old templates out of the window. They would have been hunted and down, tortured and burnt 400 years ago. And they really developed out of those American obsessions Pyschoanalysis and Science Fiction, not Messiah's and The end of the world that Christianity grew up in.
*Well officially the Germans would call it a cult, but you know what I mean... |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| ramonmercado AKA Dora Kaplan Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 7414 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 18-09-2009 18:17 Post subject: |
|
|
|
I reckon this belongs here as its an interview and article relating to The Prophets (PBUH) new book.
| Quote: | A return to his origins
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2009/0917/1224254710483.html
Thu, Sep 17, 2009
SCIENCE TODAY: Richard Dawkins’s new book brings him back to familiar territory, tackling theories of creation head-on, but it is also an accessible, colourful and beautifully detailed look at many scientific wonders, writes SHANE HEGARTY
RICHARD Dawkins is a little distracted. He’s been delayed by an earlier appointment, is a little tight for time and his new computer is bursting into song unexpectedly. But in his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth , he is not distracted at all. In fact, he is very focused on two things in particular: laying out the evidence for evolution; and laying into the creationists who prefer the idea that the Earth is 10,000 years old and all life was placed in it simultaneously.
It is, he says, “a necessary book”.
“Of all the great findings in science, and there are quiet a lot of them, it’s the one that arouses the most irrational opposition from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. They are never against gravity, or against Newton.”
He will be in Dublin this evening to talk with an audience at the RDS (the event is sold out), and those who have already picked up the book will find that it is Dawkins’s return to his scientific speciality following the success, and controversy, of The God Delusion and an addition to works about evolution that began with The Selfish Gene more than three decades ago. And although The Greatest Show on Earth deals head-on with the creationists’ arguments, in keeping with his past writings, it is otherwise an accessible, colourful and beautifully detailed look at many scientific wonders – whether it’s the great variety of dogs or the sex lives of orchids – and a great primer for those coming fresh to the subject.
Despite the obvious tone of impatience and frustration that bobs up in his writing, and which many people find a less than attractive trait, Dawkins concedes that misconceptions that many people have about evolution are not always based on religion.
“Partly it’s because it is, lamentably, left out of most people’s education,” he says. “Most of us have an idea that it has something to do with monkeys. It’s difficult, though, because we do need to suspend our normal judgement of time. It only works on a scale of millions of years, yet that’s difficult to comprehend. But we do need to understand that to understand evolution.”
Evolution can also be traced to Victorian times when so many of those things people think it is about took root in the public consciousness. That idea that we’re descended from monkeys is comprehensively explained in the book (with the exception of very recent splits, no modern species is descended from another modern species). But is it the case that the intricacy of evolution is so complex that it has become too difficult for lay-people to really understand – in the way that, for example, quantum theory is so baffling? Dawkins disagrees. “Well, quantum theory is genuinely mind-blowing. It takes on paradoxes that are enormously difficult to comprehend.
Evolution just needs time to be understood. Besides, you don’t get campaigns against quantum theory.”
Among the preconceptions he tackles is the still-popular notion of a “missing link”. Apart from refuting creationists’ argument that there are no transitional fossils in the record, or some claims that there should be crocoducks or fronkeys, he also argues that all species are transitional – just links in the chain. He takes on the example of the recent unveiling of the supposed missing link that was “Ida”, the 47-million- year-old, beautifully preserved fossil of Darwinius masillae , which was the focus of headlines globally as if it offered something truly revelatory.
It is a useful fossil, says Dawkins, but the furore around it was “badly handled. It was all hype, a deliberate attempt to gain publicity”. Ultimately, it is “one of many fossils” in the record. With Dawkins, though, the discussion cannot fail to come around to religion. The Greatest Show on Earth ends with a certain despair over surveys results which show how many people believe in the idea that the earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs. In Ireland, 27 per cent agreed with that statement. Dawkins calls those who actively propagate the idea “history deniers”.
Isn’t it likely, though, that his book will be read by those who already care for the scientific proof rather than the speculations of creationists? “I fear that you’re right, but that would be a great pity because there are a great many people out there who are in the middle, who are interested in understanding it and who will find a lot in it. They will discover that it’s all rather fascinating.” |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| pinkstarbuck you can never deceive the eyes of a wolf.
Grey Joined: 02 Nov 2009 Total posts: 12 Location: somewhere on Mars Age: 27 Gender: Female |
| Posted: 05-11-2009 01:32 Post subject: |
|
|
|
| Richard Dawkins worries me. I`m sure he`s a nice guy but he comes across as agressively millitant on TV. Maybe thats his TV persona but i know a lot of people are turned off by his almost arrogant aggressiveness as far as his point of view on atheism goes. Its a shame because he does raise some very good points but he does practically scream down members of the clergy and such in his programmes. Why interview somebody for a TV programme on religion if you`re going to ridicule their beliefs and shout at them? Its up to the individual to be entitled to their own beliefs, regardless of how you feel about them yourself. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| drbastard Time travelling pisshead
Great Old One Joined: 28 Sep 2004 Total posts: 284 Location: South West Gender: Male |
| Posted: 05-11-2009 16:06 Post subject: |
|
|
|
I agree, Dawkins reminds me of some pompous academics I have come across in the past. His supporters argue that he is promoting free thought but he's doing the precise opposite in my opinion. And some of the stunts he has pulled- like running Darwinian summer camps and pasting posters on the side of buses seem to me to be deliberate attempts to wind up Christans. I'd love to know what his problem is. Perhaps he was abused by a priest as a kid?
I'm both a scientist and an atheist but if Dawkins fell over and broke his neck I wouldn't be shedding any tears.  |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
| ramonmercado AKA Dora Kaplan Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 7414 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 05-11-2009 16:56 Post subject: |
|
|
|
Ah, we've had this argument here so many times before but it crops up afresh as if it had never been raised before.
Some thing we can be certain about Dawkins:
He doesn't stone people to death for adultery or gaysex.
He doesn't deny women control over their bodies.
He doesn't say people are hellbound because of their sexual-orientation.
He has never ran rapecamps (also known as RC and Anglican orphanages and approved schools).
He was never a member of the Hitler Youth.
Yes, Dawkins can be annoying at times, but when you think of what hes up against I'm not suprised. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
