|
Captain_Maclaine posted:There's evidence of a particularly bad seasonal flood in ancient Mesopotamia during the reign of Ziusudra that in all likelyhood is where the Noah story (and other similar ones from that part of the world) come from, but of course nothing whatsoever like the worldwide one that Conservative is going on about. The theory I'm going with is that the Red Sea was dry recently enough to have been settled by early humans. When sea levels rose and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait was flooded, that catastrophic event is the source of the Flood myth. There would have been a few survivors to spread the stories. You can even have the guy who got the warnings from "on high"; our hero could simply have gone up into the hills to the southwest and seen the water coming up. That would be a chilling scene; standing on a hilltop with the ocean on one side, the valley where your people live on the other, and the first waves sloshing over.
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2012 21:36
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 06:44 |
|
|
mllaneza posted:The theory I'm going with is that the Red Sea was dry recently enough to have been settled by early humans. When sea levels rose and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait was flooded, that catastrophic event is the source of the Flood myth. There would have been a few survivors to spread the stories. You can even have the guy who got the warnings from "on high"; our hero could simply have gone up into the hills to the southwest and seen the water coming up. I think more likely that it's extrapolation of the yearly Nile flood with a cleansing/rebirth metaphor.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2012 21:47
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:The theory I'm going with is that the Red Sea was dry recently enough to have been settled by early humans. When sea levels rose and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait was flooded, that catastrophic event is the source of the Flood myth. There would have been a few survivors to spread the stories. You can even have the guy who got the warnings from "on high"; our hero could simply have gone up into the hills to the southwest and seen the water coming up. nah, I think the Sumerian theory is generally accepted because the Sumerian flood myths are remarkably similar to the biblical ones, and they pre-date it by a few thousand years. Also, the Tigris and the Euphrates were prone to unpredictable flooding, so it makes sense that they'd be sitting around their mud cities talking about how it would suck if one year the floods were so bad they'd sweep the world clean, and coming up with myths to explain why that couldnt' happen anymore. Ron Jeremy posted:I think more likely that it's extrapolation of the yearly Nile flood with a cleansing/rebirth metaphor. The nile's floods are too predictable, and the Egyptians feared the lack of a flood more than a too-powerful one. Could be based from Egypt, I suppose, but as I say, the Sumerian legends pre-date those. Of course, there are probably oral legends from even before that and we don't know where they came from, hence these are just theories.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2012 21:47
|
|
|
Anyone else disappointed by Conservapedia's response to Mitt Romney becoming the GOP frontrunner? I thought they'd be freaking out since they hate Romney so much, but I look in the news section and see this:Conservapedia posted:Former GE CEO Jack Welch talks about a Mitt Romney presidency, “It’d be great for the country. We’d be a stronger country. We’d have more jobs..." Welch took Obama to task for his class warfare "divide and conquer" strategy. [6] The enemy of my enemy, I guess.
|
|
#
?
Apr 13, 2012 22:27
|
|
|
I'm not really sure which thread to post this in, so I'll try here. I'm wondering what your thoughts on it are. I'm thinking it's pretty much BS.. http://www.american.com/archive/2012/april/liberals-or-conservatives-who2019s-really-close-minded
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2012 00:18
|
|
|
Rawr Dinosaur posted:I'm not really sure which thread to post this in, so I'll try here. Considering it says conservatives are silent about their opinions, I think you can safely say it's BS. Also, the American Enterprise Institute isn't known for its moderate, unbiased stance on issues.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2012 00:46
|
|
|
Rawr Dinosaur posted:I'm not really sure which thread to post this in, so I'll try here. Complete and utter bullshit just from reading the article, the book may be vastly different, but I doubt it, don't judge me if I'm far off due to the book being spun by the article. Firstly, he polls self identified conservatives and liberals and asks them questions. When Liberals get a question about how a Conservative would think, it's marked against them. There seems to be no examination as to why in the study, so any sort of discussion beyond the scope of 'Liberals do not seem to understand the Conservative decision making process as well as Conservatives understand the Liberal one' is completely pointless, and unscientific. Secondly, he tries to claim that because Conservatives have six values, as opposed to a Liberal's three, that they are more open minded... without actually looking at the validity and usefulness of those values in determining the characteristic of open-mindedness. Thirdly, he actually uses the example of a Conservative in a big city being unable to find an outlet, while Liberals talk all around him. This ignores the rural areas where the inverse is true, and also ignores metropolitan collectives of Conservatives, and institutions to bring Conservatives together (typically churches, but also things like country clubs and the like - obviously more general than specific, not every church is right wing, and left wingers have their share of rich country club folk too.) Really, it seems like he took one tiny little thing that validated a belief he wanted to find, ignored literally decades of psychological investigation into openness to new experiences as it regards to political decision making, and wrote a book to make a quick buck off the GOP.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2012 03:19
|
|
|
nucleicmaxid posted:Really, it seems like he took one tiny little thing that validated a belief he wanted to find, ignored literally decades of psychological investigation into openness to new experiences as it regards to political decision making, and wrote a book to make a quick buck off the GOP. According to the wikipedia entry for the author of the book referenced in the article, he seems to have a penchant for that. quote:Criticism Also, don't forget that he's also wrongly conflating two disparate concepts, on one hand being able to predict behavior and on the other actually understanding that behavior. Just because conservatives were supposedly better able to predict the behavior of liberals doesn't necessarily mean that they actually understood why liberals took those positions, the process it took them to come to those decisions, how it informs on more general moral principles, etc. Basically, the author is trying to make it seem like conservatives are some kind of super-knowledgeable empaths, when it's more likely that the conservatives are just familiar with the stereotypes of liberals from conservative media to the degree that they become better able to predict how a liberal might act in a given situation. Their reasoning as to why liberals hold those views is probably wildly off the mark due to these same stereotypes and rhetoric from conservatives in the media, e.g. they can predict that many liberals would support someone's right to burn an American flag, but they probably think it's because liberals hate America, rather than that those liberals are just so adherent to the principles of the 1st Amendment.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2012 08:50
|
|
|
Bruce Leroy posted:Just because conservatives were supposedly better able to predict the behavior of liberals doesn't necessarily mean that they actually understood why liberals took those positions, the process it took them to come to those decisions, how it informs on more general moral principles, etc.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2012 09:24
|
|
|
Strudel Man posted:That doesn't sound very credible to me. How could they better predict positions without having a better understanding of why those positions were adopted? Because every position is spelled out in (apparently accurate) stereotypes? Think about the example I used, a conservative would be able to predict that many (if not most) liberals would support a person's right to burn the American flag because they have heard right wing pundits complaining about flag-burning commies, liberals, hippies, etc., but it is usually framed in the context of opposition to US foreign policy or some other deplorable action of the US government being protested with the flag burning. The conservative then associates those liberals who defend the flag burning as those who ideologically agree with the views of the flag burner, but the supporters may not actually support the message, they are simply supporting the person's right to burn the flag as free speech. So, if you were to include a question about "why do liberals support flag burning" you're likely to get a not insignificant proportion of conservative respondents who can predict the liberal position on the issue, but are unable to accurately define the motive and mindset behind such a view. Or take another tangible example, when Liz Cheney's group "Keep America Safe" ran the infamous "Al Qaeda Seven" ads about how several Obama DoJ lawyers were once defense attorneys for enemy combatants imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. These ads literally included the unsubtle rhetorical question, "Whose values do they share?" Those lawyers defended the detainees for a variety of reasons, including genuinely believing they were innocent, fulfilling their legal obligations to provide a zealous defense, and fundamentally disagreeing with post-9/11 abridgements of constitutional rights, but universally and unequivocally not because they support terrorism (National Review's . So, if you polled conservative voters on this matter, they'd likely be able to accurately predict liberal support for robust legal defenses for Gitmo detainees, but a not insignificant portion would probably get the entire mindset of those supporters wrong, especially due to the influence of conservative media and advocacy groups. Mark Thiessen was on The Daily Show to defend the ads shortly after they began to air and Jon Stewart specifically asked him, "You don't honestly believe that a lawyer who defends someone accused of a crime actually supports the commission of that crime, right? You don't believe that a lawyer who defends someone accused of child abuse actually supports child molestation, right?" to which Thiessen responded something along the lines of "Maybe not if they just defend one person, but if they defend multiple people of child molestation, you have to wonder whether they support it." And I'm not saying liberals would be any better at establishing the motives and thoughts behind conservative positions, as humans in general are pretty awful at attributing cause and motive to other people's actions. Humans are so fallible and filled with cognitive biases that it's worthwhile to be extra cautious when trying to figure out why people do/say the the things they do/say. My problem with this study, or at least the article about it, is that it's lovely social psychology research that is drawing a conclusion that doesn't necessarily follow from the methods (i.e. survey questions) used. You have to be incredibly careful when you create a survey that your items/questions have construct validity to the trait/behavior/thought/feeling/etc. that you claim it does. You really have to be as cautious and measured as possible, because there are so many confounds, methodological problems, leaps in logic, and various other problems that can really harm the entire study.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2012 11:21
|
|
|
That smug article aside, I do think Haidt's theory about the sets of moral criteria used by liberals/conservatives makes a lot of sense, and helped me understand previously baffling positions held by conservatives. Not using "disgust/purity" as a moral standard doesn't make liberals "less moral" that conservatives, but recognizing that many conservatives do makes their positions a lot more intelligible.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2012 18:26
|
|
|
In the end, the book and study are more or less useless for several reasons, Haidt is a nobody who has a very South Park - TRUTH IS IN THE MIDDLE - sort of mntality about literally everything in terms of morality. He's not a well respected researcher, and his whole academic career is mostly based off getting foundations to write books so that he can make money. Plus, this survey is a shallow examination with no ability to offer a deeper statement than: Conservatives are better able to predict some Liberal talking points better than the reverse. It could easily be because the Overton Window has moved so far to the right, and political discourse on the right is so hosed up on the national level that Liberals are no longer easily able to identify Conservative positions with any sort of accuracy. He's a self-help book swindler (who may or may not drink his own kool-aid) wrapped up in a PhD and tenure to add some thin veneer or credibility.
|
|
#
?
Apr 14, 2012 19:50
|
|
|
I don't know that it's really that hard to predict conservative positions. I mean, conservatism (American-style) prides itself on boiling down complex concepts into the simplest terms possible and then presenting them as an either/or, black or white viewpoint with a lot of emphasis placed on orthodoxy. I mean, conservatives don't like abortion because they think it's babycide. They don't like gay people doing things straight people get to do, be it marry or serve in the military or whatever, because the Bible says being gay is a horrible sin and they don't want to reward sinners by giving them access to the same societal institutions non-sinners have. They think millionaires should get tax cuts either because they think that they'll be millionaires one day and are voting to preemptively keep their own taxes low or they think that giving millionaires more money will somehow create jobs. It's not exactly rocket science.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2012 08:03
|
|
|
I just want to point out that no one should ever trust a one-off, non peer-reviewed piece of research, ever. Even peer-reviewed pieces of research are problematic. We humans like to think we understand things a lot more clearly than we do. So in the case of something like this, where the person is obviously massaging language to fit his definitions ("open-mindedness") and is using suspect methodology (self-reported liberals and conservatives), even his apparent discovery of a trend doesn't necessarily mean anything. VVVVVVV Very true, but I think people above pointed out the serious flaws in his assumptions. I just hate it when people bring up something like this, or some other variation of  which purports to explain how people function in easy clear cut terms. So often the research is terribly flawed, but people seem willing to accept it because SCIENCE!
Political Whores fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Apr 15, 2012 |
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2012 08:16
|
|
|
colonelslime posted:I just want to point out that no one should ever trust a one-off, non peer-reviewed piece of research, ever. Even peer-reviewed pieces of research are problematic. We humans like to think we understand things a lot more clearly than we do. So in the case of something like this, where the person is obviously massaging language to fit his definitions ("open-mindedness") and is using suspect methodology (self-reported liberals and conservatives), even his apparent discovery of a trend doesn't necessarily mean anything.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2012 09:25
|
|
|
Strudel Man posted:On the other hand, ignoring it because the results don't mesh with our preconceptions is probably not the most defensible course either. Very good point. I'm not really even being critical of Jonathan Haidt's work itself, because I obviously haven't read it and all any of us seem to have to go on is the incredibly biased writings of another author. I'm basically criticizing the second-hand summary and pointing out how that author, not Haidt, is full of poo poo. It's pretty much never a good idea to reject or accept research before you've actually read it in its entirety. poo poo, I've read journal articles where the abstracts are wildly different from the body of the article, so even abstracts can't necessarily be trusted implicitly.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2012 10:59
|
|
|
In The News! Yes, why haven't the Pulitzer people recognised Andys groundbreaking work in exposing the "Fidel Castro has been dead for years, those are all body doubles, really" story?    No commentary needed, although four posts down, Ayn Rand seems to have stumbled in the quest for Conservapedia favour.  And then just the usual, with a shoutout to Raul Castro. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2012 21:48
|
|
|
jojoinnit posted:Interestingly, Sam Harris did try and make a case for an objective morality in atheist/humanist terms, although it ends up looking exactly like utilitarianism.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 02:50
|
|
|
I looked up the 15 questions for their "Question Evolution!" thing. It hurt my head. There are answers to every single one of these questions. People who claim to be scientists should really know that...
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 03:28
|
|
|
The problem is that they ask for adequate answers to those questions. Which means, the actual scientific answers that exist do not count because in the opinion of the Question Evolution people, those answers are not good enough.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 03:39
|
|
|
Axelgear posted:I looked up the 15 questions for their "Question Evolution!" thing. It hurt my head. it literally does not matter how robust the answers are because the entire point is to make creationists feel more secure in their beliefs rather than to encourage critical thought.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 03:43
|
|
|
andrew smash posted:it literally does not matter how robust the answers are because the entire point is to make creationists feel more secure in their beliefs rather than to encourage critical thought. So what can you do? It's probably mostly pointless to argue the point to someone who has already made up his mind. Instead, perhaps there is a way to "overaccept" their position. We should not accept things that are wrong when others promote them, but rejecting those people may not lead them to a path through which they can grow out of something. "Overaccepting" (as in improve as I understand it) is an inclusive act that opens new opportunities for growth that do not exist when we simply reject the positions of others. On the other hand some people may really be looking for evidence, but again, they have to be engaged. People do change, but you can't change them.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 04:13
|
|
|
Axelgear posted:I looked up the 15 questions for their "Question Evolution!" thing. It hurt my head. They're all points that have been refuted a thousand times over, you'd thought they'd learn by now. But hey, that's willfull ignorance for ya. We even went through them in the thread twice, on seperate occasions and answered them with at least a high school understanding of science.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 04:14
|
|
|
TinTower posted:Re the last one in that image: if I had a choice between someone who doesn't kill because it's a dick move, and someone who doesn't kill because a book written by desert nomads allegedly influenced by God, I'd trust the former. I don't see why it has to be a competition.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 08:41
|
|
|
RagnarokAngel posted:I don't see why it has to be a competition. To be fair I find that when the justification for the statement "killing is wrong" is "because god said so" i feel that it raises the question "what if god changes his mind"
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 12:25
|
|
|
Fly posted:x1000 I'm not really sure I exactly understand what this "overaccepting" thing is. I agree that calling these creationists stupid is not going to win them over, but the science is what it is. We shouldn't entertain pseudoscience and anti-science beyond politely and patiently answering their questions and explaining what the actual science is. The problem is that creationism is an article of faith for these people. If their religions and holy books are wrong about something as important and fundamental as how life came to be as it is, then it opens up all sorts of problems and anxiety for them. So, it's just simpler for them to ignore science than for them to ignore large sections of a holy book they consider to be infallible. Also, science isn't necessarily a panacea for preventing/eliminating irrational thought. Plenty of incredibly intelligent scientists like Newton were very religious and believed in crazy poo poo like using alchemy to transmute lead into gold. There's still something there in human psychology that causes us to ignore evidence, logic, and rationality when it serves us and when it is cognitively easier.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 15:05
|
|
|
andrew smash posted:To be fair I find that when the justification for the statement "killing is wrong" is "because god said so" i feel that it raises the question "what if god changes his mind" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frailty 
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 15:15
|
|
|
andrew smash posted:To be fair I find that when the justification for the statement "killing is wrong" is "because god said so" i feel that it raises the question "what if god changes his mind"
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 15:27
|
|
|
kuddles posted:It actually makes me incredibly nervous. It's already been pretty clear that a lot of fundamentalist Christians are agressively homophobic because they have homosexual feelings and since they also believe it's a choice that every other man on the planet must have the exact same urges. It makes you wonder if a lot of these people claiming that Atheists have no morality actually do think about raping and killing all the time and choose not to do it just because they are afraid of Hell and not because they think it is a bad thing to do. Overall, it's probably six of that, and a half-dozen of assuming others are just "weaker" and more impressionable than oneself.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 15:56
|
|
|
Pesky Splinter posted:They're all points that have been refuted a thousand times over, you'd thought they'd learn by now. But hey, that's willfull ignorance for ya. This is what I don't get. The answers are out there, and surely the people who read/write these things have been confronted at least once with answers to these questions, especially if they actually bother to ask someone who knows something. How does this persist?
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 22:33
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:This is what I don't get. The answers are out there, and surely the people who read/write these things have been confronted at least once with answers to these questions, especially if they actually bother to ask someone who knows something. How does this persist? Willful Ignorance. Humans have the ability to delude themselves into believing almost anything. These people aren't even the pseudo-mainstream ID people who are continuously forced to deal with evidence contrary to their model, and try to explain it away using scientific reasoning (Which is next to impossible, which is why a lot of them have given up). These fringe people can simply ignore any data contrary to their claims, treating it as propaganda. And this is assuming that they have the wherewithal to find this data, or the comprehension to understand it, which based on the questions doesn't seem likely. Just pure scientific illiteracy can explain why they don't respond to refutations of their questions. You can't play Chess against someone who doesn't know the rules. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Apr 17, 2012 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 22:43
|
|
|
kuddles posted:It makes you wonder if a lot of these people claiming that Atheists have no morality actually do think about raping and killing all the time and choose not to do it just because they are afraid of Hell and not because they think it is a bad thing to do. They probably don't do (or want to do) those things because humans just don't tend to do that normally and attribute this to their faith.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 22:49
|
|
|
colonelslime posted:You can't play Chess against someone who doesn't know the rules. Rather, there's no point playing chess against someone who triumphantly screams "KING ME!" every turn,* and knocks the board over in a rage when you fail to do so. *Also known as the BernieLomax stratagem. Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Apr 17, 2012 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 23:03
|
|
|
HappyHippo posted:They probably don't do (or want to do) those things because humans just don't tend to do that normally and attribute this to their faith. quote:Of course it is always wrong to murder, and most people know that without being told. Even without the Ten Commandments or a different moral code with a similar proscription, the Bible tells us that the Law is written on our hearts (Romans 2:15). But why should we expect people who have rejected God to follow the Law that He has placed in their hearts? The Bible affirms that the unrighteous suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18). However, the power of an ideology can cause people to ‘switch off’ that inbuilt moral or ethical button. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime promoted one such ideology that caused ordinary men and women to become murderers of innocent millions, because they were convinced that those they were killing were ‘less than human’.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 23:13
|
|
|
It's pretty much the exact opposite, though. The trust and faith the Nazis had in their leaders is what allowed them to overcome the natural aversion to killing. Faith in religion has been exploited to do the same thing for all of recorded history.
|
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 23:32
|
|
|
Small Frozen Thing posted:It's pretty much the exact opposite, though. The trust and faith the Nazis had in their leaders is what allowed them to overcome the natural aversion to killing. Faith in religion has been exploited to do the same thing for all of recorded history. Sort of. I mean, if we're going to get right down to it, religion was just a socialization and normalization system that evolved with society. The fact that a lot of people have the same ethics is due to the fact that a society needs a system like this in order to function. We have natural empathy for people because we grow up socialized with people. If you look at kids who have grown up in warzones, or who suffered abuse and neglect, depending on the case, they can display a distinct lack of empathy, because they were never socialized for it. It can take years of rehabilitation to help them out of it. The only problem with socialization is it gets mixed up with all the hangups of the people in power, or is used to direct the mob towards a goal the people in power want. Every time something like that happens, stupid moronic things get hardcoded into the social contract that people base their lives on, and you end up with poo poo like the crusades. And then, people eventually get fed up with the old system, and make their own, and you get poo poo like the Protestant Reformation. It's why conservatives parrot stupid poo poo about the free market without understanding it either. There just as much uncritical acceptance of "the invisible hand" being uniformly good as there is of Jesus Christ, and it's because these memes are pervasive and really good at spreading. I can't blame religion, because there are plenty of examples of priests and ministers being the ones to call society on its horrible acts, like Bartolomé de las Casas, who was advocating for the rights of South American Aboriginal Peoples in 1550, desperatly writing the King of Spain to tell him to please send someone to stop the conquistadors from raping everything in sight. Christianity has a lot of the same ethics as modern western society because a lot of our ethics evolved out of it. But it's really easy to take any on piece of Christian mythos, take it out of context, or forget that some of it is 3000 years old and has probably lost relevance (or was crazy to begin with), and uncritically use it to justify whatever nutso evil thing you want it too. Just like free market economics. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Apr 17, 2012 |
|
#
?
Apr 17, 2012 23:46
|
|
|
colonelslime posted:Sort of. I mean, if we're going to get right down to it, religion was just a socialization and normalization system that evolved with society. The fact that a lot of people have the same ethics is due to the fact that a society needs a system like this in order to function. We have natural empathy for people because we grow up socialized with people. If you look at kids who have grown up in warzones, or who suffered abuse and neglect, depending on the case, they can display a distinct lack of empathy, because they were never socialized for it. It can take years of rehabilitation to help them out of it. There are still innate structures in the brain that predispose people towards certain ethical judgements, but obviously abnormal upbringing can let these areas fall into disuse and die. To say ethics are purely due to upbringing would be wrong.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2012 00:20
|
|
|
Lord of the Llamas posted:There are still innate structures in the brain that predispose people towards certain ethical judgements, but obviously abnormal upbringing can let these areas fall into disuse and die. To say ethics are purely due to upbringing would be wrong. That is true. I wasn't trying to argue for a pure "nurture" explanation for behaviour or anything. It's incorrect to assume, however, that someone without socialization will innately consider something like killing wrong unequivocally. I was just pointing out that it's not religion that necessarily drove the various massacres throughout history. Religion did play a big role in socializing people towards norms and standards. These weren't always good, and many certainly shouldn't apply now, but myths and imagery present in Christianity constitute a big part of the western cultural lexicon, and a lot of what people consider explicitly secular values, like liberal tolerance, evolved from a Christian viewpoint. I just dislike the Dawkins "religion is the source of all the world's problems" explanation as much as I hate the fundies think secular society is. VVVVV I pretty much agree, especially since the religious instinct seems to really be an instinct pushing you towards concluding that maybe life is more than just nihilistic consumption. I find it funny that New Atheists seem totally certain that without religion, everyone would get along, when a lot of them (Dawkins included) explicitly talk in terms of selfishness and profit-maximization. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Apr 18, 2012 |
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2012 00:54
|
|
|
colonelslime posted:I just dislike the Dawkins "religion is the source of all the world's problems" explanation as much as I hate the fundies think secular society is. I tend to think the New Atheists' total condemnation of religion is not wholly unlike fundies' screamy squeamishness towards sex. Personally, I think the "religious instinct" (which is really more of a mixed bag of instincts and inclinations) is as ingrained in human beings as a species as the sex drive. You're much better off trying to channel it than trying to squelch it, in my estimation.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2012 06:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 06:44 |
|
|
There's an argument that Dawkins et al are deliberately emulating the early feminist and LGBT rights movements by making all these overtures that make people uncomfortable but at the same time make people think (c.f. Valerie Solanas and the Scum Manifesto). Dawkins pretty much admits as much in the God Delusion, when bringing up concepts such as consciousness raising. That said, I do think that over the next fifteen to twenty-five years atheist thought will be going into the mainstream as much as feminist thought and pro-LGBT thought is doing so.
|
|
#
?
Apr 18, 2012 11:06
|
|