A Riposte to Dawkins part 2

The conversation continued:

Atheism is relatively harmless.

Militant Islam: Shoots little girls in the head, flies planes into buildings
Militant Christianity: Blows up abortion clinics
Militant Atheism: Flame wars on Facebook

The communists were militant and atheist, and they were responsible for the deaths of a hundred million. I’m going to say time and again – the issue is not religion. The issue is that people out there have the desire to do evil, and plausible reasons to do it. Militant atheists are only responsible for trolling on the internet??!! And don’t give me that crap about “communists are not really atheists”. If you want to call Osama Bin Laden a real Muslim that is what you have to be prepared to put up with.

Marx said that "religion is the opiate of the masses". Communism definitely has an atheist component to it, that is indisputable, a very clear part of their doctrine: the church is a competing ideology that has to be eliminated. If you want to be sec gen of a major communist party you probably have to be atheist. And think about the double standards: "communism is a political movement that happens to have an atheist component -> atheism doesn't have to do with communism" vs "Al Qaeda is a terrorist organisation that happens to have a Muslim component -> Islam has everything to do with terror". Double standards.

In a more general sense, the communists were like the atheists today. They are idealistic people trying to change the world without really understanding it. They had very little insight into how human societies really worked. Not surprisingly, it turned out badly. Humanism will be something special - not even Islam or Mormonism were stupid enough to ignore the bible, since the borrowed so much from it.

They've no common objective, no axe to grind, no message to spread
If you're an non-believer who recognises the good that religious communities do, you'd just shut up and not portray yourself as an opposer - NGOs want to get along with other NGOs. If you think that a moral sense is more important than scientific knowledge (news for atheists - it is) you wouldn't call yourself an atheist, you'd call yourself a freethinker. I'm not going to call atheists amoral, but I'd definitely say that Penn and Teller are amoral. The time and effort wasted for being an atheist is the time and effort spent into denouncing religion, as opposed to the live and let live mentality of a freethinker. Praying is not a waste of time and effort because it does help you to think about your own life. But needless to say an excess of anything is a waste of time and effort.

The biggest philosophical problem with atheism is defining an exemplar, a positive exemplar of an atheist. It's not easy because atheism is normally defined negatively. In the unlikely event that the atheist movement gets its act together to found a large enough humanist movement, they will have something that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck - in other words an ipso facto new religion.

Atheism is perceived as amoral because of what it has yet to achieve. When talking about human behaviour the three words I distrust the most are "that could change". It is as bad as going into the stock markets and saying "this time it's different". Human behaviour does not change. That is why anything in the Bible not related to outdated scientific knowledge is still relevant today.

"no common objective, no axe to grind, no message to spread", that to me is tragic and nothing to be proud of. I would prefer people try to make the world a better place and get it wrong. (ergo, it's better to be a communist than an atheist) because the only people who make the world better are those actively trying to do so. People who aren't trying to make the world a better place shouldn't be criticising people who are. Humanism doesn't look all that bad, but if you don't have clear objectives, you won't amount to anything as a movement. It doesn't matter how virtuous the individuals. Atheism to me is just religious discrimination without the religion.

Religion is not the only source of virtue, but if you want to be a virtuous person you have to know what your values are, they have to be quite clear, and articulated in advance. It is extremely difficult to be a good person if you don't know what you stand for. You cannot throw that all away.

The problem for the godless communists is not that religion is the sole source of wisdom. It is that they rejected a lot of plausible moral compasses.

What's the time and effort wasted when you don't believe? compared to having 'faith'?
The time and effort wasted for being an atheist is the time and effort spent into denouncing religion, as opposed to the live and let live mentality of a freethinker. Praying is not a waste of time and effort because it does help you to think about your own life. But needless to say an excess of anything is a waste of time and effort.

Atheism will not achieve anything because the only organisations which achieve great things are large organisations, and atheists are inherently suspicious of large organisations (or if in the case of communists they wrest control of large organisations, they run them badly). In another sense the time and effort wasted for Atheism is the opportunity cost of doing nothing.

Religion doesn’t really promote morality.
"Fifty-two percent of people belong to no church, yet live clean lives and supply less than 1% of the total criminal population. So much for religious indoctrination."

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/atheism-rare-among-prison-population

"Atheists, non-believers, secular humanists, skeptics—the whole gamut of the godless have emerged in recent years as inarguably the most generous benefactors on the globe."

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pellissier20111125

Sooner or later somebody was going to bring up the "atheism is rare among prison population". Such a study would be a classic example of bad science. Consider: 1. People without walking sticks tend to be more mobile. 2. People with walking sticks tend to be less mobile. Therefore: 3. Walking sticks detract from, rather than enhancing mobility. That is extremely stupid, but the same kind of argument as the "atheism is rare among prison population" argument which confuses cause and effect. Religion attracts people of a certain type, the type who may be less intelligent, less scientific. Never heard of the Nietzschean superman? You cannot compare 2 different populations. You can compare the same person, with or without religion. I would say that if you did a study between religious persons and non-religious people and you found no differences in level of morality, then religion has done its job. I don't know if Dawkins cited that study, but if he did, I have much less respect for him as a scientist. I am still a fan of Daniel Dennett's writings on consciousness but he said something similar and that made me facepalm.

A lot of religious saints were anything but.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_21XD74JKHw

I watched the film about Mother Theresa. It's a very shoddy piece of moral philosophy. Here is a person who has done charity work under the most dangerous and abject of conditions, worked on the front line, set up many missionaries. But then gets criticised for attracting and accepting too much recognition, getting associated with crooks (who the hell goes to a Calcutta slum and not have to cut a deal with a crook).

You could raise the bar for sainthood so high that no human would ever reach it, and then say Mother Theresa falls short of this ideal. It's the easiest thing in the world and is therefore a completely meaningless comment. Mother Theresa is full of bullshit, yes. But everybody is full of bullshit too. Or maybe in the Christian retelling, "everybody is a sinner". I discern a very warped set of morals at play here.

Scientific ideas cannot be perverted into evil political ends
Some people took issue with me saying that evolution was used to justify mass murder, when I tried to make the point that in science, just as in religion, you could also use ideas to justify horrific deeds.

As for evolution as a weapon for mass murder? What we call evolution is no more than the documented understanding of an established biological process. A process which has been happening here on Earth for ~3.5 billion years. It is the written account of how life adapts and mutates according to selection pressures. It is not an invention and it certainly is not a weapon. It is simply knowledge - and like all knowledge, it can be applied in constructive or destructive ways. When we talk about gun crime, you'll often hear the phrase: "guns don't kill people, people do." The same can be said about knowledge.

It's not "guns don't kill people, people do". It's "people don't kill people. People with guns kill people". I don't like it at all that they're not cognizant about the message they're sending out. When a scientific theory is out there, it can be twisted to some evil purpose. It is a very short distance between "survival of the fittest" and "let's kill all the unfit people out there". And when it seems that the message is sanctioned by science, it becomes even more of a weapon, a pretty explosive combination.

Broadly, we all agree that evolution (and probably evolution alone) gave rise to life on earth, although people think that maybe a few viruses could have arrived via meteors. But what is that nature of evolution? Is it more competitive or is it more co-operative? The term "fittest" is incredibly vague. Dawkins (and the Nazis) argues for the selfish interpretation. Lynn Margulis argues for the co-operative interpretation. Which one is correct? How can evolution be about killing competitors when I've reached the age of 36 without murdering a fellow human? You have to think very hard about what values it tries to promote. I know that scientists don't like to think about value systems, they don't think too hard about the impact that their work has on human society but that's pretty irresponsible to me, since science and technology has a far greater impact on our lives than religion. Economic theories have a great impact on peoples' behaviour. If the dog eat dog idea is popular, then it will encourage bad behaviour. Just because the science is indisputable, just because it is objective, it means that it's not a weapon?

Evolution does not attempt to promote values. But it can't help but promote values. I'm not even one of those people who think that it should be taught alongside creationism or intelligent design. But I think that there should be some discussion on what it means morally. The theory is sound. The implications are not. It is not even clear what the implications are, but anybody can say what they want."I only invented dynamite to help miners blast rocks. I didn't know it could kill people!" tsk tsk.

It's not "guns don't kill people, people do". It's "people don't kill people. People with guns kill people". I don't like it at all that they're not cognizant about the message they're sending out. When a scientific theory is out there, it can be twisted to some evil purpose. It is a very short distance between "survival of the fittest" and "let's kill all the unfit people out there". And when it seems that the message is sanctioned by science, it becomes even more of a weapon, a pretty explosive combination.

If you don’t believe that there is a physical entity called God, it means that you are an atheist
When you properly understand God, it is a mental phenomenon. This is the way that God was meant to be understood. When "God" in the bible is understood to be an idea or a mental state, then everything falls into place. You can see why he's untouchable, unseeable, completely mysterious, everywhere at the same time, etc etc. People who don't grasp that do not know the first thing about religion. And people who don't know the first thing about religion should not be spokesmen for religion.

People who posit that God is not an idea get confused. They say that the idea of God is not God. Put it this way: cash is an idea. It is the idea of cash that gives it value. The idea of cash is the only thing that separates cash from worthless pieces of paper and plastic. That is a subtle idea, and probably one of the most important things I learnt from Snowy Hill.