1. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams criticizes popular atheist writers

Comment #78923 by silent_brook on October 15, 2007 at 12:09 pm

"The believer who worships assumes absolutely that God is there and worth attending to..."

I wish to prove God exists.

Premise 1: God exists.
---------------------
Therefore: God exists. QED.

:)

2. Logical Path from Religious Beliefs to Evil Deeds

Comment #75420 by silent_brook on October 2, 2007 at 3:08 pm

Christianity, defined as rigorously following Christ's teachings, will not result in harming others.

This is not true. The problem comes with interpretation. Since we can't ask Jesus what he meant, the best we can do is guess. Usually, as in most things that require specialized learning or intense thought, we leave the 'guessing' up to the 'experts'.

The inevitable conclusion is that either the 'experts' get to decide for most Christians what it means to follow Christ's teachings, or people get to make Jesus into whatever they want.

It's not hard to do when he throws around statements like 'If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.' (KJV Lk 14.26).

3. Logical Path from Religious Beliefs to Evil Deeds

Comment #75279 by silent_brook on October 2, 2007 at 8:19 am

Pete,

There is no logical path between Atheism and "good deeds". Atheism is nothing more or less than a statement of position. One is not good because one is an atheist any more than one is bad because one is religious. Here, I believe, Dawkins is merely pointing out that religious people are already in a mindset to believe fantastical things, and can be led to do "evil things" based on their mistaken belief that they are "good."

Atheism doesn't provide any form of ethics. It is merely the position that there is no god. Therefore, our ethics must come from ourselves. Since we have well developed systems of ethics that don't rely upon fantastical claims, this is not a problem, but those ethical systems do not follow directly from Atheism.

4. CNN Debate on Koran in Toilet

Comment #60287 by silent_brook on August 1, 2007 at 1:32 pm

Right at the end, Mr. Hooper, suggests that the first amendment prohibits a citizen from criticizing religion. Which, of course, is not what it says at all. The first amendment protects a citizen's right to free speech, and prohibits the Government from favoring or criticizing a religion. The first amendment prohibits the government from defending a religion against criticism. Hitch tries to point this out to him, "You have neither read nor understood the first amendment." I worry the "average viewer" won't pick up on it; mostly because not enough attention was given to this huge misunderstanding on the part of Mr. Hooper.

5. The Stupidity of Fox News is Truly Beyond Belief

Comment #52236 by silent_brook on June 26, 2007 at 2:36 pm

That was five minutes I'll never get back...

You knew that nothing was going to be gained by listening to him when he made the statement, "[Atheists] suffer their atheism, I would say, they suffer the fact that they don't believe, because they know the world makes a whole lot more sense if God does exist."

If that wasn't bad enough, he continued to rattle off all of the trite, easily disproved arguments for faith (except the geological reality thing which I should think opposes his position).

The only other thing I want to say is that the woman's question made me laugh: "Why is it that there is this sort of posturing in the media of atheists as the intellectuals?" Answer: because they are.

Oh, and I've known a few pregnant women, and I know they don't see pregnancy as a miracle.

6. Does God Exist? The Nightline Face-Off (more info)

Comment #41082 by silent_brook on May 15, 2007 at 1:25 pm

3. Comment #40716 by cmacblue42 on May 14, 2007 at 7:08 pm

If only they would broadcast Dr. Dawkin's book reading in Lynchburg on networks like abc (not that any actual americans would watch it...


Now, now... not all (I'll concede most) Americans are completely deluded. We just suffer from some very loud idiots.

7. The God Delusion

Comment #36477 by silent_brook on May 1, 2007 at 9:42 am

It may have been stated in another comment, but this statement:

"If compassion is universal, how do we explain the hideous violence of primitive societies? And if our moral sense has been constantly progressing, how do we explain the regressions to barbarity witnessed during the twentieth century? Or the fact that many places, such as Saudi Arabia, seem not to be progressing morally at all?"

Is expressly dealt with in the book. Dawkin's use of the saw blade, with its peaks and valleys, as a metaphor for the progression of morality, directly deals with this idea that there is some--very much inevitable--regression in the progress of morality.

8. Lewis Wolpert and William Lane Craig on Religion

Comment #36154 by silent_brook on April 30, 2007 at 10:23 am

His whole argument is right out of a first year philosophy student's intro class. How can he seriously be advancing the 'Brain in a Vat' argument as proof (or even the reasonable suggestion) that God(s) exist?

His argument for God presupposes that our ability to see reality is fundamentally flawed, and so nothing that we see or hear can have any meaning... why is this a good thing? Proof positive, a little learning (especially at little philosophic learning) is a dangerous thing.

9. Pope says science too narrow to explain creation

Comment #33125 by silent_brook on April 19, 2007 at 11:17 am

"The Pope also says the Darwinist theory of evolution is not completely provable because mutations over hundreds of thousands of years cannot be reproduced in a laboratory."

Neither can God.

"That is a philosophical or ideological conclusion not supported by facts, they say, because science cannot prove who or what originally created the universe and life in it."

...you don't say?

"It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment."--Galileo Galilei, The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies]