I am not familiar with the individuals from this discussion, but it provides some very interesting perspectives.

With the occasional heaping side-order of evil.

Religious claims are false.

Children are scared by lies. People are given false hopes. Some teachings lead to various bad things like tying people to poles and lighting them on fire, or crashing planes into buildings.

Worst of all, religion supports an authoritarian world view and this is known to cause republicans.

are not scared by lies. It is my tribal ancestral custom to raise children by lying them a lot, and I was told most extravagant and embarrassing lies by my mother when I was a children. E.g. I believed for a long time that macaroni grows in macaroni-trees, and that cinnamon is grounded camel hair...

It's important to learn that people don't allways mean exactly what they say, there many kinds of linguistic registers and much playfullness - and worse - in how people speak. And where I come from, it's important to learn that from early on, and that you shouldn't trust even your parents... too much. That's how we children learn not to trust authorities, when our parents and first authorities teach that lesson the "hard way"...

Not all religion supports an authoritarian world view and scientific world views can be as authoritarian and even worse (e.g. scientific rasism, craniology, eugenics etc.), and authoritarian and dogmatic materialism (especially when in disguise of atheism and skepticism) is no better than authoritarian and dogmatic religions.

a person in Hell was literally falling in darkness, bobbing in "The Lake of Fire". The bobbing was in liquid flaming sulpher, and when you opened your mouth to scream, molten sulpher would pour down your throat. So you were burning on the outside, burning on the inside, falling and screaming forever and ever.

I'm NOT kidding. This was a KJV only fundamentalist Baptist church, and that's what they taught about Hell. They even made a song, to the tune of "Amazing grace":

When we've been there 10 million years,
Burning body, limb, and tongue,
We'll have no less years to scream in tears
Than when we first begun.

This did scare me, and it made me cry alot well into adolescence. It made me wish God had not created anyone so nobody would have to go to hell. It made me think abortions were lucky, because they had 0% chance of going to hell.

I know some people with background in evangelical sects, leaving that community and healing from the demons of fear that it has left is some tough shit. At least one such person I know has also severe case of what we call "shaman disease", and I can't help thinking that it's related to the family background and childhood experiences. And what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, and facing death and all the hells even more so...

> When I was a child, we were taught that HELL had LITERAL flames and
> a person in Hell was literally falling in darkness, bobbing in "The Lake of Fire".
> The bobbing was in liquid flaming sulpher, and when you opened your mouth
> to scream, molten sulpher would pour down your throat. So you were
> burning on the outside, burning on the inside, falling and screaming
> forever and ever.



Why does that sort of thing make me think that some of the more gross
"horror" movies & books - the ones that substitute sadistic voyeurism
for plot or drama - are written & directed by people with hangups like that?

the most horrific horror movies. I don't know if they are still preaching it because I left the church when I was 18.

So obviously a far greater percentage of Christians do.

describes this article as well.

My BS meter has just gone to 11.

No-one has been saying it is "unreasonable and “dramatically peculiar” to argue that religion is not altogether evil" (in public, anyway - and emails sent by individuals contain all kinds of crap, which cannot be attributed to groups). What people were saying about de Botton ("dramatically peculiar" is his phrase ) is that it's not worth taking ceremonies, hymns, sacred buildings and so on from religion, as he claims. That is not arguing that he should have called them 'altogether evil'.

The PZ Myers quote came when he thought de Botton was making it all about him (and, given the media coverage he's got himself for his new book, it seems to have been self-centred) :

Appleyard is full of shit. He praises the hopelessly wrong (in philosophy and science) Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini book "What Darwin Got Wrong". Appleyard is an opinionated fool, who has written numerous pieces of crap in the past few years. It doesn't surprise me to see him jumping on the anti-atheist bandwagon.

and it's a little embarrassing that it would get posted here. In this article, we have attacks on secularism and appeals to anti-secularist activists, attacks on Darwinian evolution, the accusation that those who disagree with the author are all "cultists," the repeat of the false claim that Dawkins was not able to accurately repeat the subtitle of The Origin of Species (I read the transcript, he actually got it exactly right) and takes seriously the embarrassing notion that uttering a colloquial "Oh God" is an actual spiritual and metaphysical appeal to the Almighty. After this we are treated to a bizarre, amateur, pop-psych pseudo-analysis of why Dawkins holds the positions he does, an embrace of the intellectually lazy and cowardly notion that science and religion occupy two different "magisteria," and the outrageous claim the Galileo was "anti-religion." (He was pro-truth, although I understand why the author might get the two confused.)

Following this we are met with more attacks on Darwinian evolution in particular and science in general, and a characterization of the badly unscientific What Darwin Got Wrong as an actual refutation of natural selection, and the unfortunate accusation that PZ Myers is guilty of "intellectual tyranny." (This is the point at which the article became laugh-out-loud funny.)

Then we are treated with an attack on the very notion that religion can be studied empirically. This is so deeply troubling that it needs to be discussed in depth. The offending two paragraphs:

Starting out, I must point out that, though I am no expert, I am deeply wary of the field of evolutionary psychology - it seems to be mostly concerned with confirming stereotype and prejudice (asking questions like, "Why can't women do math?" or "Why can't black people swim?" and then trying to cobble together some pseudo-Darwinian narrative involving our hunter-gatherer past on the African savannah.) This cannot be expanded to condemn all of evolutionary biology, however; the Darwinian idea of evolution by natural selection has broad explanatory power, and we should not reject it on the basis that there are some sloppy scientists out there.

Fodor attacks the evolutionary histories constructed by modern biologists as "fabricated stories," but they have a compelling amount of explanatory power and they are at base founded on empirical evidence. He then makes a bizarre attempt to attack Darwinian evolution by saying that it could not explain "something with two heads and a horn in the middle." I will skip over whether or not the claim that modern biology could not explain such a thing is true or false (because it's totally frivolous.) The problem here is that he has invented something that the theory of evolution by natural selection in theory could not explain, when the only thing that matters is it's ability to explain actual facts. Not to belabor the point, but Darwinian evolution does this quite well.

Then we have an even more bizarre attack on science that operates on the assumption that religious claims are false. It is necessary for science to operate this way for a very important reason. "Religion," broadly defined, encompasses claims of very diverse natures, including empirical historical/scientific, metaphysical/supernatural, moral/ethical/normative, and behavioral mandates and proscriptions. In single particular, there are competing, contradictory claims made by differing religious traditions. Basic logic dictates that these claims cannot all be true. Some (most) must be false. It logically cannot be otherwise. So immediately we see that the explanation "these religious beliefs/traditions persist because they are true" is not adequate. We must look to other explanations for the great majority of them, and the inquiry must begin with the assumption "Most (if not all) religious claims are not true, yet persist for other reasons."

This is followed by the inexplicable assertion by de Botton that the scientific study of religion is "bizarre" and deepest folly. He seems to regard religion as being of supernatural origin, and totally outside human inquiry. This seems to follow the curiously common notion that religious opinions are somehow different from all other opinions and should not be subjected to the same criticism as all other ideas. But why should we not at least consider the possibility that religious belief has a natural origin like all other observed phenomena?

We are met afterwards by the just as common and just as silly claim that science cannot explain the existence of love. I do not know whether he wants a biochemical or evolutionary explanation, but rest assured that it has not escaped the notice of science as a subject of study.

Anna Karenina is a work of fiction by Tolstoy. Its existence does not require a novel empirical explanation because we do already know the answer to that question. I do not know how it is analogous to religious belief.

This is followed by some off-topic smears of Christopher Hitchens, and general apologia for religion an further attacks on science. We're treated to the proposition that since not all of the world's ills are caused by religion, then it's automatically a good thing. At least we are treated to one final knee-slapper, the characterization of Communisim as a "catastrophic failed atheist project.

In total, this article has to be one of the worst steaming piles I have ever read. The sheer mean-spirited idiocy is awe-inspiring. I submit that such a collection of weak-tea apologia, petty namecalling, and anti-science evolution denial has never before been posted on DU.

How many Religion threads have you read?

I don't know if you're going to try to claim other people are also petty and mean-spirited, but that doesn't constitute a defense of the article.

The article does not require a defense from me.

Go for it.

So you agree with it?

Your passive-aggressive tact of posting drivel against atheists that contains hopelessly anti-progressive takes and then just saying "well, it's the publication" is old and transparent to those that know your posting history. Why not just come out and say it?

Not all critiques of atheism are drivel.

Unless you go for anti-secular, anti-evolutionary stuff. Then, I guess, go nuts with this one.

You are behind anti-secular stances and anti-evolutionary. Gotcha.

Go ahead, more passive-aggressive responses from you about not really saying that.

Thanks for the help but I think I'll return your words to you.

as to not warrant a defense, then posting it here was a waste of everyone's time. If you don't feel that the number of threads I have read in this forum is relevant to this article, you are wasting my time. Please stop wasting my time.

Having, apparently, plenty of his own time to spend flinging everything he can find and hoping something sticks. And if it's run to the ground, he can always claim that HE didn't write it and that we should be criticizing the author. But IMO, if you post somebody else's bullshit, it becomes YOUR bullshit too.

I put a lot of work into my critique of that article, and the way I see it, one should either attempt to rebut or argue, agree, or not say anything. I thought I would get either, "Gee, you've got a point" or "I don't see it that way," but these repeated one-sentence irrelevancies go nowhere fast. It's infuriating.

That they still feel the need to respond with such inadequacy (as even they probably realize that it is) over and over and over, is pretty sad, when you think about it.

And these are the best and brightest minds among the apologist/anti-atheist crowd here.

people here thought it was SUCH an excellent read! How can we square that with all of your extremely well-made points?

And thank you, btw...you saved me the trouble of dismantling this POS line by line...don't think I could do better than you have.

Is it just a coincidence that so many attacks on atheism and anti-theism (most of the attackers can't even make the distinction) are both incredibly pompous and condescending, and intellectually bankrupt? Does the anti-atheism cadre out there have anyone with real intellectual chops? It doesn't seem to in here.

I'm glad somebody appreciated it, and I'm glad you were impressed. I was going to just let it pass, but when I got to the part that tried to discount evolution, I was just so incredulous that I couldn't let it stand. I'm still a little perplexed that attacks on evolution are seriously being posting on DU, but there it is.

The piece is mostly petty namecalling and sneering condescension, which is fine, I guess, so long as there's some actual argument to back it all up; unfortunately, the only thing approaching an argument that we have is the anti-Darwinian pablum. I think I'd be perfectly willing to listen to accommodationist arguments in theory, so long as they are not from creationists such as Appleyard and Fodor. Unfortunately, they seem to overwhelmingly come from the intellectually bankrupt, as you say. Then we have the unfortunate creature known as Alain de Botton. So far as I can tell, his whole shtick is that he heard someone say, "Atheism is just another religion!" and went "Of course it isn't... but it should be!"

But from past encounters, I knew what you were going to get from rug. I should have warned you.

Dawkins wasn't asked to provide the subtitle of the book, he was asked for the full title, so your claim about the subtitle is not relevant:

And the article makes the correct note about the full title:



I don't know what transcript you read, but here's the actual audio of him being asked. The actual name of the book is On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As stated in the article, Dawkins was unable to successfully give the full title. Of course, the whole point of asking about the name of the book is not that this tells us anything about his knowledge of evolution, but rather that these type of gotcha question don't really tell us anything - not even when Dawkins finds them useful.

As to the rest, the article is neither anti-science, anti-evolution, nor anti-secularism.

He got the subtitle right in its entirety, but I suppose that it is true that he left out the phrase "by Means of Natural Selection" from the main title.

As for not being anti-secularism, anti-science, and anti-evolution, you clearly didn't read the same article I did. I detailed at length the ways in which it is, and you can't convincingly go, "no, it's not." Argument is not just contradiction.

As for: I suppose that it is true that he left out the phrase "by Means of Natural Selection" from the main title. You suppose?

As for your claim: I detailed at length the ways in which it is - you stated your opinion, you did not offer anything to back up your opinion but more opinion. One checkable fact was your claim about article making a false claim about Dawkins getting the title wrong. Your claim is documentably wrong. Other claims that you made are also documentably wrong. For example:

Look at this claim: He then makes a bizarre attempt to attack Darwinian evolution by saying that it could not explain "something with two heads and a horn in the middle." Actually, Fodor makes the exact opposite claim:



Once again, you're just wrong on the facts.

The claims that I can check don't seem to justify a serious discussion of your opinions. So, no, I didn't spend a lot of time refuting your claims.

is not a real word

Last edited Tue Mar 6, 2012, 07:04 AM - Edit history (1)

documentable - (dky-mnt-bl)
adj.
Being such that documenting is possible

-ably - a suffix combining -able and -ly that forms adverbs corresponding to adjectives ending in -able: commendably; dependably; tolerably

Misspell it as documentibly and google will offer documentably as a correction.