I don't see what could be monocausal about the Kissinger example. The argument has never been that atheism causes this or that, but that rationalist's resistance to wickedness is overrated and has no identifiable advantage over theism in and of itself.

What? Rationalism is value neutral. If what you want is power, then ruthlessness is rational.

I'd say never. How does this show atheism/rationalism's superiority in avoiding organized violence?

This is off track. Both the eists in question can arrive at either a homophobic or inclusive position. (I imagine I'm about to get challenged for a rational form of homophobia. Two hypotheticals: 1. I want to get elected, the yokels in my district are gay-baiters, so I will be too. 2. For unknown reasons, my psyche reacts negatively to gays. I want them out of sight.)

That doesn't follow. Religious beliefs lead to all sorts of mischief, but can also lead to good things. I don't see how theism by itself has a negative impact.

Now if you want to make a social argument -- organized religion as presently constituted routinely supports aggression while the atheists see through it more often -- you'd be right. But I think that is contingent on history. Rewind, throw in a few more Quakers on one side and Pol Pots on the other, and you get religion as the strongest opponent of rampant totalitarianism.

I'll grant you the aesthetic argument. Atheism is a diamond lattice, theism is charcoal. But why is it better to oppose our militarization of Africa as an atheist rather than an Episcopalian? What desirable impact on society do you get from atheism that you cannot get from acting as a believer? Why make a campaign of attacking theism itself, rather than going after particular violent beliefs of theists?

Your militant monocausal crap was the unending petro empire stuff littered throughout this thread. Presumably kissinger is consistent with that.

wat. rationalism is an epistemology not a moral system. Perhaps this is your confusion. When I say "rationalism is superior" I mean that it is a better epistemology at arriving at the truth than blindly believing things in a 2000 year old book.


Superior in determining the truth. I don't know why you are talking about organized violence. Rationalism is superior as an epistemology.

Okay? The point was that religious beliefs HAVE consequences, for instance the widespread homophobia justified, they think, by the bible. Noting that other people may also be homophobic for weird reasons seems to completely miss the point.

Empires are immensely complex, nothing mono about them.

I don't disagree with that. I dispute that the rigorously rational make better moral choices. Organized violence is the test I've been using all thread because it's important to me. It shows how misguided it is to fixate on theism as the problem.

Sure, if you limit your scope to Biblical literalists, it's ducks in a barrel, rationalism wins. But people are a combination of rational and mystical. Simply believing in an anthropomorphic creator of the universe does not mean a person rejects evolution and thinks God wanted Bush to go to war.

When Howard Zinn and Rev. William Sloane Coffin (of the liberal Riverside Church in NY) lead a march against the Vietnam War, what makes Zinn more admirable or effective as a dissident on any level but personal aesthetics?

The record of the intellectual class in using rationalism to service power is dismal. By constraining discussion, hiding crucial things, it makes it difficult for people to think past power. They use their superior epistemology to bad result. Atheists are in no position to feel superior.

Religions are immensely complex, nothing mono about them. Look, you are myopically repeating ad nauseum this one factor that you want to talk about (and this last post is just another example with more vietnam talk) which is exactly what you are accusing the atheists of doing.

I don't think there is anybody in this thread claiming that no atheist has ever done anything bad or thought stupid things. Or that no religious person can think a good thing. The point is to dismiss the things that are clearly false and stupid and dangerous. My criticism - and indeed that of hitchens and harris - of religion is not negated by giving an example of a bad atheist like hissenger or a good christian like coffin. People's views on other issues stand or fall on their own merits.

What seems to be tripping you up here is that there is a distinct assymetry. Being an atheist does not directly imply anything else...it doesn't mean you have a stance on empire or war or whatever. You come up with those views for other reasons and can be judged on them. However with religion, there a long list of positions that are frequently deduced from the religious book. For example, bigotry towards homosexuals. It is not categorical, just often the case.

What is the phenomenon I ascribe to one cause, and what is the single cause?

I have no idea, but you seem to have this incessant desire to drone on and on with a chomsky-esque anti-imperalism in a thread that has no relation to it, while at the same time trying to downplay the effects of religion as nothing more consequential than a bar conversation.

You are not engaging the issue. Either Hitchens was too stupid to know what the word "everything" means, he was lying about his position to sell books and didn't really believe it poisoned everything (most likely), or was taking a completely indefensible position. There is no other option.

Your post contains assertions and no reasoning. You aren't articulating how falsely believing in God POISONS (not simply is a downside, but POISONS) kicking the bottle. I suspect that any recovering alcoholic would call your position absurd.

And BTW, there are plenty of nonbelievers in the addiction and recovery field who say that 12 step programs are extremely effective for many people. It's quite possible that the faith component makes the programs more effective.

Again, though, he holds religion to one standard (any stupid idea advanced by religious people is religion's fault) and secularism to another (any stupid idea advanced by atheists or nonbelievers is not in any way the responsibility of those philosophies).

That's stacking the deck.

After a cursory search it seems that the efficacy of 12-step programs isn't any greater than that of secular programs, so it doesn't look like the faith component has as much of an effect as you're leading on.

Not in the categorical absolutist ways that you phrase it. But there IS certainly an assymetry between the two that is meaningful. Namely, that after accepting atheist views this doesn't intellectually lead to something else, all the something elses stand or fail on their merits. For example, atheism is just as consistent with a belief for gay marriage as against it. However, for religion, specific religions DO have consequences on other issues which are common (not absolute) amongst its members such as the common belief that gay marriage is inconsistent with Christianity and should be banned.

So yes, it is true that stupid ideas from atheists don't seem for the most part tied to their atheism while there are a set of common stupid ideas from religion that IS tied to their religion.

I am merely telling you Hitchens' position so you stop misrepresenting it as you have consistently done. And as you are still doing here where you just see the OMFG POISONS HE SAID POISONS HOW IS IT POISONING!!!!!!!!! He elaborates in depth precisely what he means by this, as I have sketched for you, and if you are still confused you can look it up yourself. This is not my position and I don't support it, but I want you to at least get it right.

this corroborates my impression when I have looked it up in the past but I didn't want to say it definitively. Not that it matter for the purposes of this discussion, I am willing to posits for the sake of discussion that it is vastly superior. So what, it doesn't detract firm Hitchens' point.

But for a particular individual, one approach is better than another. Atheists will gravitate to the secular programs, theists to AA.

Read beyond the headlines:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/health/25drin.html

Support programs are not drugs, and even drugs have a placebo/nocebo effect. If you're randomly shoved into a social support program, you're probably not as likely to stick with it and go through the process.

If you take a strong atheist and tell him that he needs to find his strength in a higher power, I don't think you have a reasonable expectation that he's going to go with it.

Edit: Because of the explicit "spiritual nature" of the program (not sure what other words to use there), I would also think that the effects of personal perspective would magnify both the positive and negative effects of 12-step programs.

That's not the proper way to look at it. The key insight is some addicts respond better to 12 steps who don't respond to other courses of treatment.

This is based on big assumptions that you actually have little evidence for. For instance, that Soviet Communist leaders' disdain for the notion of a God in no way influenced their behavior, whereas suicide bombers would never have done what they did absent their exposure to Islam.

None of this is really conclusively knowable, but it certainly seems like complete wishful thinking to posit that rejection of a theistic God could NEVER affect a person's ethical calculations.

You seem to argue that Hichens can use any defamatory description of religion he wants as long as he explains it. That's not true.

That's like saying I can write a book called "blacks are inferior" and it wouldn't be racist so long as I explain I don't really mean it.

I just said that the categorical absolutist statements were not the issue so I am not trying to suggest anything could OMFG CAPITALS NEVER!!!!! happen. I am noting that a significant asymmetry exists. Accepting a view like christianity has influence on a range of other beliefs that people commonly also have, accepting a view like rationalism does not have this in anywhere close to the same way. The soviet union example helps me case here: being atheist means you could be a stalinist or it could mean you are a humanist pacifist. The atheism doesn`t imply either of these things.

I have not argued anything remotely close to that. As i said before, you can argue in one of two ways. You can either argue that his actual point and what he actually means is wrong. Or you can argue that the intentionally inflamatory three word byline is not appropriately connected to what he actually means. However, we have yet to get you to actually acknowledge what he is even saying. You just see the poisons line and seem to stop right there.

Take this chomsky clip where he explains the issue of concision. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlL2Jj-kCNU

Now he is talking about concision in the media where one only gets 2 minutes between comercial breaks to have a dialogue. But a byline is an even more extreme example and it is quite acceptable to say any number of superficially alarming statements but people will quite reasonably want to know what you mean by them. Except for those that tune out at the gate. Now I care little for some literalist translation of the three word byline. I want to know what he ACTUALLY MEANS by it and will judge him on that.

Maybe the right way to say this is that this program, as with basically every other social support program, requires "volitional submission" to the program itself. Random assignment into groups negates this element of the therapy.

What we really need to settle the AA question is some data on religious people who go to secular programs vs religious people who go to AA. And secular people who go to secular programs vs secular people who go to AA. I am sure there are lots of people in all of these categories because surely secular programs don't only take atheists, it is just that religion is not a factor. Right now all we can say is that AA doesn't appear to be better than secular programs when we blind out their religiosity, but the question of whether AA is better for religious people but not for atheists remain an open problem.

Anyways, much like charity, I am sure that AA is a successful program because it has spread so much so far, but it will be quite hard to disentangle without significant evidence how much of that success is because of the spirtual mumbo jumbo or because of, say, the efficacy of having a steps based program with badges for different accomplishments and the like. Nonetheless, this is all besides Hitchens' point.

For the record, here's the summary of the findings from the study cited in the NYTimes article I linked:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...2/pdf/abstract

Edit: Never mind -- I think I read the intent of Uke's words wrong.

Edit x2: Or not. I'll rewrite my thought.

I don't think it's fair to say that "religiosity" (of the individual) has been blinded out. I think it's more correct to say that it has not been studied. The religiosity of the *PROGRAM* has been examined.

I suspect so, since I agree with the bolded.