Did anybody catch him on Q&A?

It's on Youtube in case you guys missed it.

Dawkins is great, which makes the fact that he has such an enormously mondoqueer fanbase all the more disappointing.

think like "mega gay"

They're mostly just gigantic twats.

I liked Dawkins' example of a God who is so brutal that he needed to come down to earth and be tortured by humans in order to redeem them.

Christians, of course, see this as evidence of God's mercy.

Dawkins got a free ride on Q&A. It would have been good to team him up with a smart believer. Stephen Fielding looked totally lost.

I think Dawkins is smart, but he's not wise. His critique of all religion/spirituality is a negative. His solution is a return to classical empiricism. It's interesting that the Enlightenment really began as a critique of religion, so Dawkins is returning to the roots of hard science. Anything that you can't see, hear, smell, taste or touch does not exist.

Dawkins claims that many of the social sciences are false too.

I'm interested in a lot of what Dawkins says. But I take a lot of his stuff with a grain of salt. He hasn't come to terms with relativistic streams of thought like post-structuralism. He's got a very cut and dried mind. Things for Dawkins are either true or false.

I think he comes dangerously close to a new form of fundamentalism: scientific fundamentalism. He's right to ask questions of quack - and often completely accepted - treatments like Homeopathy. Dawkins has made me question practices like acupuncture, for example. It's good to hold these old treatments up to the light of day and test their claims - I now think this is essential.

But there are risks here too. The scientific method is not perfect. This is why philosophers like Kant divided thought up the subjective and objective.

Science - with its look at the surface of things - cannot always come up with reasons. Dawkins is pretty hopeless when it comes to questions of mental health, happiness, etc. Often, his critique of religion is based on the most simplistic understanding - religion is bad because the Christians started so many wars.

Dawkins has waded into the clash of civilizations, which is why his ideas resonate now. I think Dawkins will be seen as a bit of a fad in a few years time.

Which is a blessing and a curse. With the rise of the internet, quack techniques, conspiracy theories and supersticious mumbo jumbo are rising. With the reaction against medicine and psychiatry, people are turning to hackneyed remedies. Mind you, you'll do anything if you're sick. People have always done this.

On the blessing side, we need the freedom to be able to invest our minds into non-materialist objects. We need to be able to experiment with the subjective realm, and Dawkins' black and white stance discourages this.

Things are either true or false with Dawkins. He's almost Aspergers-like in his thinking. He's smart, but he's not flexible. I don't think he's a very good listener either.

Mind you, I'd have him to dinner anytime.

NorthOfNorth wrote on Mar 11^th, 2010 at 2:45pm:


Good points.

St Paul started the cult around Jesus Christ. Before then, there was no "Christianity." There's certainly no indication in the gospels that Jesus wanted a religion either.

The blood sacrafice, the atoning, etc, is perfect paganism. What St Paul did was create a deity out of Jesus that Romans could worship.

Jesus doesn't say anything in the gospels about wanting to be worshiped, or about being God Himself. This was all added later and crystalised in the Nicean Creed.

The blood sacrifice would have appealed to Romans - it's funny, however, that the story resonates today. I'm not sure if it does. I think modern Christians are attracted to Christianity for other reasons - among them the belief that Christianity is the only form of truth.

In Rome, there were a range of deities to choose from. And why not choose the god of the underclass?

I've been banned from Richard Dawkins' webpage about four times now (I quit trying to go back there). His followers really are a terrible bunch of people. There was a massive controversy there once regarding a Japanese individual who used to argue about the validity of race and its purported links to psychological attributes in an enormous thread which he did not even create. It was eventually decided by the moderators on Dawkins site to "shut him up" (he had basically deflected most of the contentions made against his case and had the entire forum on sort of an argumentative retreat where they were still grappling onto tired old platitudes, "zombie arguments" and so on) and he was banned permanently from the site shortly after. I could understand if Dawkins himself didn't want this discussion going on his board -- Dawkins is a shrewd operator, and it would be bad both for his career and his wallet to have people running about on his board posting things like that. But as far as I know, Dawkins wasn't even involved at all in this fellow's termination -- it was entirely decided by his politically correct devotees who make a habit of masquerading as foremostly dedicated to scientific and rational principles.

I'm not even saying that the chance is indisputable that this guy was 100% correct -- I'm just amazed at the effrontery of these people that they can style themselves as paragons of rationality but get rid of a guy with obviously a lot of intelligent things to say (that had the lot of them in sort of a slow, steady rout) and condemn his views as so absolutely abhorrent and so absolutely wrong, without actually being able to explain why. It's very easy to characterise their group as TWGLO -- Theists With God Left Out. They subscribe to a litany of non-theistic religious causes, compartmentalize just as those who are religious do, and behave with incredible, hurtful animosity to anybody who deviates from their secular-humanist, progressive (and sometimes even claptrap Marxist) world views. People are a lot more respectful on this forum, and just posting here makes me feel a great deal of gratitude and respect to Freediver for allowing such a diversity of opinion, even regarding some particularly touchy or taboo subjects.

It's sad these twats glommed onto Dawkins like this, who does actually seem like a fair-minded scientist. I have a lot of respect for his greatly successful efforts to popularize contemporary biological research, whether it be through his writings or his interesting documentaries. I don't care at all about his Atheism, but that's another matter.

Dirty Paki Khunt wrote on Mar 11^th, 2010 at 3:02pm:

True. This has been discussed here before. There's no doubt that Paul was competing with the various deity myths and belief systems of his potential converts throughout the Roman Empire, not least of them would have been those among the Jewish Diaspora who had taken to non-Jewish beliefs. He also was convinced the world was coming to an end, so he likely believed there was no time to convert non-Jews to Judaism-proper before the end. Tough call for him I guess, but then he was charismatic visionary, a gifted orator and well-educated for his time so he had all the right stuff to get the job done (somewhat similar to Muhammad at least in charisma and vision). Being associated with the Imperial Roman families would have helped as well, at least for a while, until he fell foul of Nero... but then again so did Seneca. There's just no pleasing some people.