Right. You don't see a difference. If anything, he presented his point in appropriately complex terms. And whatever difference there was, people should've just taken it as a mental exercise.

I'd suggest 'mental exercise' is stretching it. It wasn't exactly some complex riddle

Dawkins Dawkins Dawkins Dawkins

Why is everyone acting like Islamophobia is such a bad thing? I guess it depends on how you define it, though. I personally find nothing at all wrong with any of Dawkin's tweets. The only real negative aspect of criticizing Islam, is that it often times incites even more violence from muslims.

Please stop it with the compadre nonsense. I don't have "peer atheists". It's not a club, and if it is - I am not a member.

As for your final statement... if you can't describe a trend, then obviously any cultural phenomena of sufficient size will always be justified merely because it is beyond criticism... so that argument is very bad: Criticizing Islam for a trend of sponsoring or supporting academic censorship is ofcourse not criticism of 1.6 billion humans. This shouldn't really be necessary to explain to people, but yet this simple point seems to be completely impossible to grasp for many people.

Islamic-sponsored censorship of academia and education happens, and it happens a lot and it happens in many places. No amount of debate or arguments can sweep this under a rug. If this can't be pointed out without being named an "Islamophobe", then I think the wrong people might be branded with phobia.

Don't you think that there's a certain amount of irony here given that Dawkins is being accused of using a broad brush?

Sorry. Won't happen again.

As for the rest, it seems more and more that you indeed haven't read the three articles I linked. None of them argues that it's impossible or non-PC or to criticize a belief system on the contents of their beliefs. Or to point out where, and how religious beliefs result in specific critique-worthy societal tendencies. That, however, is not what RD is doing. Not by a long shot.

ETA: Eh, how the hell did I end up in a discussion about the degrees of RDs trollishness. This needs to stop. Now.

/fret

I'm starting to think that you have a tendency to assume that when people use terms like 'religion' or 'religions', or 'Islam', that they are referring to each and every individual within those groups. You do it with me all the time, now you're doing it with Dawkins.

AIF has me convinced that there's design in the universe

Me too. I'm a sucker for pretty words.

You're all swines.

****

Like the OP, I gradually realized I was an atheist over a long period of time and don't attribute any particular writer/debater/philosopher, etc.

By the time I read any Hitchens (honestly can't remember if I read anything of Dawkins more then an excerpt here or there, possibly on this forum) I was already comfortable that I was probably an atheist. (I say probably because I wasn't always exploring it that much and didn't think about it that much.)

From my exposure to a lot of apologists, a lot of it here, I actually think it really strengthened by atheism.

As Hopey wrote:
Though I wouldn't have listed Jibninjas and frankly don't remember who Sharky is... the majority of attempts by believers on this forum trying to prove their case as well as the counter posts by a number of atheists on this forum really strengthened my position.

Who is AIF?

Who indeed? Who are any of us, really?

Ah.... Haha.

You're right, Jibninjas shouldn't have been included. He was pretty terrible when he first joined the forum, but unlike the rest of the posters in the list, he improved over time. Replace his name with BigErf.

Sharky trolled these forums about 7 years ago. He also posted as skidoo for awhile. He made hundreds of posts arguing for Intelligent Design.

How?

Hearing a lot of bad arguments for a position can accumulate into a perceived argument against the proposition. Freteloo will recall that this is pretty much the same thing that study (that I couldn't track down again) said, but it can certainly be true for some people anecdotally e.g. me, Hopey and Kurto.

Richard Carrier sums up this position like this:

This position is definitely a fallacy if it were presented as a deductive argument, but I think it is reasonable as a form of inductive argument. As a side note, I think that the only arguments for the existence of God that I feel are justified as arguments from personal experience. Those arguments are not persuasive, but I can accept that a) the person really believes they had whatever experience, and b) that counts as empirical evidence from their perspective. But when someone defends obviously flawed logical/philosophical/deductive arguments for God then I immediately dismiss them as irrational by definition.

I wonder how you would defend the bolded. What is it you mean by rational in this context? The reason I ask is that while I also think these arguments are flawed, I don't think those who defend their theism by using them are automatically irrational, especially not by definition.

I'm also just a lot more skeptical than most atheists on this forum seem to be about the justification that personal experience provides for theism. I don't think that more than a handful of people have had personal experiences that are actually relevant to the question of whether God exists. Obviously, lots of religious people claim to have had these experiences, but on examination their claims are often based on superstition, faulty interpretation of coincidence, ignorance, wishful thinking, and social expectations. Furthermore, in my experience the strength of these experiences isn't strongly correlated with actual certainty of belief.

Thanks. This doesn't hold for me though which is probably why I couldn't understand how it would have that effect for Hopey, I can believe something whilst finding various arguments for it to be ridiculous. For example, you don't believe that god exists but is it because theists are stupid or brainwashed? Or because someone challenged god to strike them dead and it didn't happen? Or because science hasn't found god yet? They're all ridiculous arguments that I doubt have influenced your lack of belief?

Perhaps it has more effect on the undecided but with so many bad arguments both for an against the existence of god I wonder if random exposure isn't more of a factor. But then I haven't read the study.

FWIW I give these arguments no weight at all. Our perceptions simply cannot be trusted and I would no more attempt to prove that god doesn't exist simply because I haven't had any personal experience of him than I would accept the opposite as proof. That so many theists base their belief on personal experience just makes even less likely the possibility of god existing IMO.

Yup, this.

Also, to clarify -- I was a weak atheist when I started following this forum. The posters I listed 'converted' me to a strong atheist.

If I presented a bunch of ridiculous arguments to support atheism, would it shift you back?

Obviously not because there a) there are essentially NO good arguments for theism and b) there are many good reasons for atheism (besides the ridiculous arguments you present).

But yes, as I've said before, I think your constant stream of poor arguments for atheism is damaging in terms of engaging with theists here.

I'm very open to having my views or definitions changed on this, but the dictionary definition of irrational is "Not logical or reasonable." Therefore basing belief in a proposition on a faulty logical argument seems - to me- to be irrational by definition. I'm genuinely interested in your take on this, if you don't mind giving it.

The bolded is an empirical matter that I don't know the answer to. My point is that - as an empiricist - I think that first hand personal experience, however problematic it may be, is at least the sort of thing that could provide justification for a false belief. A failed logical argument is not the sort of thing that can.

The bolded is ignoring the distinction I made between justification and persuasion. To take an extreme example, imagine that a mad scientist removes some guys brain, puts it in a jar and feeds it false memories of being Napoleon. Is that guy irrational to believe that he is Napoleon? I would say not, even though his belief is false and we would not believe him (as we know he is a brain in a jar) and I would go as far as to say that he is actually (empirically) justified in believing he is Napoleon.