Reading through this thread reminds me how much i hate the usage of the "you created a strawman rebuttal."

Yeah, the lump a religion is done quite a lot on here then they have the audacity to ask a Christian why they don't believe in Allah.

The truth is a lot of atheists have inspected other religions less than some theists. I read Unveiling Islam many years ago so I can hardly recall the details of it now but it doesn't mean I didn't do a comparison of sorts.

They could read some of Ergun Mehmet Caner's essays on why he converted to Christianity but they don't. If they did they would see there are very pertinent details for which religions people claim.

Instead atheists level outsider questions like they are compelling without doing full inspections of the religions they claim are viable claimants to the throne of being the true religion.

Dawkins who "hates priests language" I'm sure has never made the indepth comparisons necessary.

Is Dawkins literate in Arabic? Most likely not and since he isn't Islam's de facto claim is that he can't possibly understand the Qur'an.

Therefore Dawkins is making his claims about religion as an outsider. He's never fully inspected the religious claims he is saying might be right but he goes on to say science can be in charge on this question. You don't need science though to compare religious claims as Caner shows in his essay "Why I Am No Longer A Muslim."

False.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/reli...uiz-finds.html

Examples?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer

Original Position and Maleficious make two particularly strong responses, both claiming that the New Atheists are nuanced and not just paying just lip service to complexity. Malef says it is impossible to have a conversation without simplifying. Orig. says the NA appreciate the multiple causes, they just choose to inject some balance into discussion by focusing on religion.

Restoring balance by singling out a weakness in discourse is good, and it's exactly what I was trying to do with a purposefully overheated opening post. The NA's laser focus on religion needs to be balanced with the institutional sources of group violence. Nation states are able to turn both religious and secular ideologies toward war. What good does it do to persuade an 18-year-old to fear the dangerous irrationality of Islam if it just turns him into a fighter for Washington's petro-military empire? Challenging violence does not work at all unless you also address the power that perverts both religion and rationalism. I see no evidence the religious are more prone to entrancement than the secular, considering the crimes of Stalinists.

I think the nuance of the NA is overstated. Most don't just say religion is "a" factor, they see it as the primary source of violence. It just isn't. And the public face of the movement is even less sophisticated.

A major problem is the militant atheists' pervasive arrogance and contempt. This is even more apparent in the videos than in the prose. Using contempt as a rhetorical device drowns out any alleged nuance. People come away from their talks thinking it is all rather simple, the primitives need to stop their magical thinking.

If there is any chance of challenging state-inspired violence, the pacifist and anti-militarist religious traditions are needed. Someone once said, if you are starving, who are you more happy to see, Christopher Hitchens or Mother Teresa? I'd add to that, if you are a military deserter, where do you go, a church basement or Sam Harris's university class?

[One other thing, could we not respond to she-who-must-miss-the-point?]

A quiz proves this?

How do you know the quiz asked the right questions?

I bet that quiz addresses none of the facts that Caner does in his essay.

Do you think you might have just fallen for some propaganda? A lot of people don't trust the media today though a lot of people are still paying attention to it.

The media can mix the lies in with the truth and create all kinds of false illusions that seem accurate depending on the aims of the people they are trying to satisfy.

CNN Fake Newscast Best Quality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTWY14eyMFg


I have to stop posting itt now. I don't want to bother Bill Haywood. He prefers not exchanging posts with me.

Yes.

Quiz > the evidence(or lack thereof) Splendour provided

howeva the tide could change with anything to support your stance......................

Not to mention the lovely "athie-nazis".

I love the juxtaposition of you blasting the militant atheists (or is it new age atheists? you seem to be confused here) for their monocausal crap and lack of an ability to see nuance yet a casual reading of your very own posts makes it appear as if you have identified (or more probably, had Chomsky tell you) what the great big super evil of the world actually is and GASP it is different than the great big super evil that these other people suggest. You have identified your biggest factor in society and it is the only one you are criticizing. Of course, I am sure you will pushback and try to firmly tell me how balanced and objective and nuanced you really are, but from where I am sitting you look exactly the same and are probably whining about this not because you independently find their alleged lack of nuance troubling, but because it is contradicts your particular myopic world view.

btw, do you have explicit examples of Krauss making such monocausal statements about islam? You keep lumping him in, but I have never seen this from him. I might just be unaware of it.

Beat ya to it, see paragraph 2 #31 above.

NA = New Atheists

My reaction to Krauss is based on several cracks he made in online lectures about physics. They are throwaway lines exhibiting the contempt I see so much of. I don't recall them being specific to Islam, just the stupidity of religion.

I'm sorry I said you are an athei-nazi.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. But atheism is not an ideology. Are you saying that militant atheism is ideology? Hmm. I'm honestly not sure. What makes one a militant? Differing views do not. Vehement disagreement does not. Off hand, I'd say it takes action that causes physical harm to make one militant (I could be wrong. I have not looked up the definition of militant yet).

In the meantime, what physical harmful action do militant atheists take that concern you? And please don't drag out that tiresome comparison to communists. You were right when you said it's "ideology" that makes good people do harm. Atheism to the best of my knowledge is NOT an ideology. If you think militant atheism is, please state your case. Thanks.

There is no such thing as an "atheist world view" other than the commonality of not believing in gods. An atheist can be conservative, liberal, anti-abortion, pro-abortion and the entire rainbow of colors in between. Atheism does not equal Stalinism just as non-belief in astrology, unicorns, or fairies does not.

Agreed.

I don't think this particular survey shows it. General knowledge of religion is not that close to "inspecting" religions.

http://www.pewforum.org/U-S-Religiou...ge-Survey.aspx

If you care about the actual wording of the questions:

http://www.pewforum.org/uploadedFile...ge-topline.pdf

That may be true, but it's hard to imagine how one would successfully "inspect" religions without picking up the related general knowledge. I don't think even you would want to be arguing that atheists have greater superficial knowledge of comparative religion but theists have greater theological knowledge of comparative religion.

"Militant atheist" is often code for "Has the audacity to publically disagree with my dogma."

Ah damn, I could have included "petro-military empire" in your list of chomsky-esque rhetoric.

Eitherway, for this conversation to progress, I think you are going to need to give some explicit sources, obviously the one in OP doesn't work. And the fact that your examples of Krauss were some unknown flippant remarks he made seem grossly insufficient.

Physical? None that I know of. I was using "militant" just to mean forcefully outspoken and uncompromising. And I would not call the simple denial of God an ideology.

The harms are first, an opportunity cost. If atheist opponents of violence do not continue their critique to include the institutional interests at play, then states will just use secular ideologies (like the empire of progress or liberty) to support wars. Second, politics requires allies and we cannot afford to alienate all the theists who oppose empire and war.

This is cheating. If you say communism is a religion, then a theist can just as easily say that Islamicists and Christian dominionists are not real religions, therefore religion is never a source of violence. This is winning the argument by definition, it is word play, not analysis.

I think the belief systems should be taken at face value in this situation. If a supernatural authority is not worshiped, it's not a religion. Neocons and Stalinists are secular supporters of militarism, not co-religionists.

Once you remove the supernatural as a definition of religion, is there anything that is not religion?

true atheism, should be no ideology right? democracy is an ideolgy tho, so is time. Most are pseudo atheists

the commonality is bigger than that but its only one.

I'm under the impression religion is one of the root causes of evil.

This is what Bruce Lee talked about but using martial art instead of religion.

When I look at the survey questions, there are several that are the sorts of things you would not discover upon an "inspection" of a religion. For example, you can know plenty about Christianity without knowing about the First Awakening or learn about Judaism without knowing who Maimonides is.

I think that atheists in general tend to be better educated, and that educated people tended to get more answers right on tests of this type.

I feel like the implications of this quiz are pretty much like the implications of the IQ/religiosity correlation graph*. It doesn't really say what you're trying to make it say.

(* I should note that I don't mean that *you* have drawn conclusions from the IQ/religiosity graph. Most people see that and try to say that religion has a negative influence on intelligence.)

Could I call you a militant anti-imperialist given your ridiculous rhetoric ITT?

I agree with your last sentence, but I don't think it rebuts the overall point. This isn't the only survey that shows self-identifying theists to have poor knowledge of their own religion (cf. RDF's survey on UK Christians). I brought up that survey because Splendour likes to pretend to herself that the atheists in this forum are simply ignorant of religious teaching which is very far from the case for myself and the many others who have deconverted.

While I think one could make a (weak) case that religion has a causal relationship with low intelligence - e.g. teaching to avoid questioning - I think it's more likely to be the case that education has tends to have a corrosive effect on religiosity.

Nazism is certainly a religion in the Weinberg sense...

World views exist and some of them are atheist. Some are even atheist and evil (ie Stalinism)

I think the reason they focus on this single issue is pretty simple. To them, it's the most visible, changeable factor in these sorts of situations. Religious institutions are a means to control a mass of people, and it's considerably easier than alternatives. Religion for the leaders make be a fake excuse, but using it to control the subordinates and make them do things they would otherwise never do works.

Can you name anything as pervasive and influential as religious beliefs that can change so many, so quickly? It is an important part of the equation, if you believe you're doing good anyone can do evil. We can't change human gullibility, and all the other factors that factors that lead to war, there's little we can change with words with regards to that. But religion can be changed, it's not easy, but it's the easiest factor that inspires people to do these things that we can change.

I think everyone in the world can agree that if more people were religious, or just more religious people were strongly religious there would be more terrorist attacks. Terrorism isn't a big deal in the scope of the world, at all, but it's just something I consider a fact that's worth noting. I would also argue that there would be more wars, less unity and cohesion between countries, and several other things, but I don't think everyone would agree on those points.