1. Clever Monkeys

Comment #282320 by Muetze on November 12, 2008 at 3:13 am

narrator: "Monkeys have been leaving the trees for millions of years, but we are the only ape to do so."

Uh ... Gorrilas? Chimpanzees? I hadn't realised that those were all tree-bound.

2. Barack Obama Exposes The Bible

Comment #274745 by Muetze on October 30, 2008 at 10:59 am

Oh, I get it! So when Jesus demanded of his followers to turn the other cheek to those who beat them, he wasn't really talking about their real enemies but just people who mildly annoyed them. Or maybe it's the "enemies of America" part that is the key to this; those are a lot worse than regular enemies after all.

3. Turek vs. Hitchens Debate: Does God Exist?

Comment #274161 by Muetze on October 29, 2008 at 4:56 pm

Oh please, not the second law of thermodynamics. This argument was used by Kend Hovind for God's sake! Somebody please explain to these people that the word entropy has nothing to do with painting your walls.

4. Dawkins on Darwin

Comment #200680 by Muetze on June 28, 2008 at 5:03 am

Thanks Paula, something to look foreward to. :-)

5. Dawkins on Darwin

Comment #200675 by Muetze on June 28, 2008 at 4:53 am

What is this programme that they are showing clips from, and when will it air?

6. The Science of Religion and the Religion of Science

Comment #200672 by Muetze on June 28, 2008 at 4:38 am

Is there a Pinker lecture avaliable too?

7. Common New Atheist Fallacies

Comment #200669 by Muetze on June 28, 2008 at 4:11 am

Holy crap the last bit about TGD is awesome. :-D He seems to be picking out what he rightly identifies as "introductory statements" (!) and then claims that they don't disprove God and therefore don't count as an argument.

What the fuck?!?

8. Common New Atheist Fallacies

Comment #200666 by Muetze on June 28, 2008 at 4:02 am

His argument seems to boil down to this: If we are able to explain *why* people believe certain things, it still doesn't say anything about the truth of the matter.

Uh... doesn't it? If all of Christian faith in God can be successfully traced to wishful thinking, can Koukl seriously say that this doesn't allow any kind of conclusion about the actual existence of that God?

I for one would be very alarmed if the only reason for any fellow Atheist's lack of belief was some kind of emotional motivation (for some it certainly is).

9. Award-winning comedian George Carlin dies

Comment #197958 by Muetze on June 23, 2008 at 1:57 am

@eXcommunicate, just ... give it a rest will you? Seriously.

10. Christianity 'could die out within a century'

Comment #197437 by Muetze on June 22, 2008 at 3:38 am

That would be beside the point, too. This is not going to become a more enlightened world by our "out-fucking" the fanatics (nice alliteration though). It has to be all about education and damage control. I like what Daniel Dennett said about the topic; that it's not about ridding the world of religious faith, which seems to be largely part of the human condition, but "disarm" the toxic elements in Cristianity (which is already quite benign) and Islam in order to make them compatible with a modern and free society. That seems to be a more attainable goal.

11. Christianity 'could die out within a century'

Comment #197430 by Muetze on June 22, 2008 at 3:23 am

I love statisticians.

If they added after every decades-long prediction the disclaimer "Everything we just determined depends on everything continuing linearly as it does right now, and the occurance of any little anomaly, which is extremely likely, will turn the whole process over; basically we don't have a clue what will happen", they would be out of their job in a heartbeat, but at least they would be honest.

Seriously, how can anybody be so conceited to claim that they have any knowledge good enough to predict how society will progess in the decades to come? I challenge any statistician in the 70s to extrapolate the current state of world politics from the 70s situation. It can't be done.

12. Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex

Comment #194616 by Muetze on June 17, 2008 at 4:31 am

"Gay brains structured like those of the opposite sex"

So homosexuality is a sex now, not a sexual orientation? I'm ready to assume that that was a typo. Pretty stupid mistake though.

13. Trailer for Religulous

Comment #190943 by Muetze on June 10, 2008 at 1:20 am

Yes, since Expelled, nobody has been taking religion seriously anymore. :-D

14. Blogger spreads the gospel of science

Comment #189345 by Muetze on June 6, 2008 at 4:44 am

Isn't there a Hannover in the US somewhere? It's bizarre!

15. Repulsive but right

Comment #184522 by Muetze on May 25, 2008 at 2:56 pm

This reminds me of a great act by German comedian Hagen Rether:

"I heard a great joke on the news. It was a one-liner: 'Gene Robinson from New Hampshire is the first gay bishop'. ... I was in stitches! The first gay biship in what, this quarter?"

16. Richard Dawkins lecture at ASU's Tempe Campus

Comment #183582 by Muetze on May 22, 2008 at 9:57 am

This reminded me that I have _got_ to read Unweaving the Rainbow. It seems like just the thing by Richard that I would enjoy most.

17. Richard Dawkins Responds to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Comment #183146 by Muetze on May 21, 2008 at 12:59 pm

Hitler ...? Danger ...? Anyone?

18. Richard Dawkins Responds to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Comment #182952 by Muetze on May 21, 2008 at 6:37 am

Why do you keep engaging him? He's clearly only out to get a rise out of us.

19. Richard Dawkins Responds to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Comment #182874 by Muetze on May 21, 2008 at 4:42 am

I think he insulted Mohammed, and not 1,500,000 muslims, which is a huge difference.

20. In God's Name

Comment #182871 by Muetze on May 21, 2008 at 4:39 am

The Way of the Master way of witnessing has really caught on then, has it?

21. Richard Dawkins Responds to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Comment #182422 by Muetze on May 20, 2008 at 4:36 am

Goldy, of course the issue is a more complex one. I was just pointing out that it could happen even in a modern, freethinking society.

22. Richard Dawkins Responds to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Comment #182319 by Muetze on May 19, 2008 at 4:55 pm

Huxley, I was not aiming to get Hitler or any other despot off the hook; I considered him just plain crazy for the sake of the argument I was trying to make. However it is true that I'm really not particularly fussed about bringing totalitarians and dictators to justice because it doesn't help solve the underlying problem, which is that they manage to get hold of entire nations in the first place. The police batallions that roamed Poland in 1942, before the extermination camps were up and running, and methodically shot hundreds of thousands of people, having been ordinary businessmen just a couple of months before, scare me far more than the diabolical workings of the minds that dreamt the whole plan up.

I did not call Hitler "plain crazy" to trivialise the matter, but to highlight the fact that people like him will again and again try to seize power and we have to know what to look for. I agree with you that a freethinking society is probably a good step on the way to immunise ourselves to tribalism and groupthink, but we should not think that there is any one thing we have to do to get it out of the way. 1920s/30s Germany was a free country, a liberal democracy, and a stronghold of European art and culture, and yet all it took was the collapse of the economy to get all of these intelligent and enlightened people to gather behind a madman and turn their backs on everyone that was different.

A great many of the people who were part of the Holocaust weren't even particularly desperate, or even all that anti-semitic. The crucial point is that they just quickly learned to become indifferent to killing and that is not something that you can get rid of with any number of layers of culture -- it's in our genes. 4 billion years of indifference to the deaths of strangers just don't come undone in a few millennia.

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Teratornis, thanks for your long reply. :-)

The thing that bothers me about the belt buckles etc. is when people bring them up as if this was a good answer to somebody making the point that Hitler was an atheist. One or two comments in this thread and also something about Richard's wording (who is, understandably, exasperated about the whole matter) rings with an air of something like "Hitler an Atheist? Don't make me laugh". It seems like something of a knee-jerk reaction on our part, as if all of their arguments were completely stupid. The issue is a complex one and looking at the whole historical picture, Hitler almost certainly did not hold any religious faith. The point of disagreement is what we are to make of this.

Some of our fellow atheists (I am certainly not including Richard here) seem to think that genocidal lunatics cannot have been real atheists, freethinkers, properly educated, etc. But the fact of the matter is that the regard for fellow human life is quite seperate from the capacity for critical thinking and practical intelligence. In street-terms: There are just as many assholes on our side as on theirs. Surely this is an important lesson to learn for any group of people.

[quote]I don't understand how those particular arguments hurt our cause. Obviously Hitler wasn't as motivated by theology as, say, Osama bin Laden, but it's still interesting to see how Hitler maintained and exploited the trappings of religion.[/quote] [edit: how do you do quotes in this markup code?]

I don't mean to offend you, but there is something shifty about the wording of this observation. My point was that Hitler wasn't just not as theologically motivated as bin Laden, but that he was specifically motivated by people who sought the greatest possible opposition to religion! The root of his world-view lies in heroes and teachers of his who were ferociously atheistic and I feel it's important to concede this point. The fact that he used religious methods of controlling people is a different matter altogether, and one worthy of discussion aswell.


I am this close to having my sleepy head crash on my keyboard, so I will shorten the rest of my reply.

I was very intrigued about the "telephone theory" you cited and I think there is a great deal of truth to it. Having a progressive, pluralistic society (see my reply to huxley_leopard) is one step on the way to immunise ourselves to totalitarianism, and the increase of free communication will certainly help greatly with that. But the matter doesn't end there.

Just consider for a moment the way politics work in our modern, western world, which, by historical comparison, surely is about as free and pluralistic as humanity has ever gotten. Everybody has access to almost all of the presently collected information, and yet, without having researched it properly, it is my guess that most people don't care about the actual information content. Politics is first of all a popularity circuit, and only on a very secondary level a matter of facts and truth. Most people will vote for candidates and parties that they can associate with emotionally and, just as you said, many won't even realise it. If any political points manage to sink in broadly, they do so either because they are presented by a skilled (read: likeable) politician, or because they infer a direct benefit for the population at large (tax cuts, ...).

My point is that having all the information avaliable doesn't keep charismatic people with horrible horrible messages from gathering a majority behind themselves. There are certain pitfalls they would have avoid today, overt racism being one of them, but I have the eerie suspicion that even today those people who [i]really[/i] understand the emotional needs of the masses will get them to go along with anything, internet or no internet.

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Roland, I agree with you that the matters of religiosity aggravating the tendency to groupthink and of the Vatican playing their part in the Third Reich are very important ones and have to be addressed. I was simply noting that some of the replies that Atheists tend to give to "Hitler was an Atheist!" are not based on rhetoric, not fact.

And I find it immensely important to point out that the real lesson to take from the Holocaust and similar historical examples of totalitarian horror has nothing to do with religiosity either way, but is an insight into the human mind. It is easy to lose sight of this larger truth in a heated debate of God vs. no God, so, being somewhat of a Holocaust buff (I hope that doesn't sound macabre), I am happy to keep pointing it out. I hope I'm not getting annoying. :-)

23. Richard Dawkins Responds to Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Comment #181903 by Muetze on May 18, 2008 at 5:00 pm

I am sorry but I really do think this has got to stop.

For very large parts of this, I am on "our" side. I think the religious are using the argument obscenely simplistically and are drawing idiotic conclusions from it. I was deeply offended by the things I heard about "Expelled", for example. Accusing what is really nothing more than a cosmological worldview of generally turning people bad or even genocidal is an appalling rhetorical tactic, and should be highlighted as such and opposed whenever it is encountered.

But I also think that the simple underlying factoid is true: Adolf Hitler was an atheist. Of course it didn't have much to do with evolution or natural selection (I would be surprised if he had ever read anything by Charles Darwin), but keeping referring to him as a "Roman Catholic" seems to be demonstrably false but for the mere technicality of it. If you study his biography, the work of his most important teachers, his own writings, and everything that was written about him, it becomes apparent that he most likely did not follow any of what we consider to be "traditional faiths". He might have had some semi-supernatural belief in Aryan "providence", but for better or worse, this still makes him an atheist.

And I don't see why it is such a big problem for (apparently) all of the "four horsemen" to admit this. In my view the proper reply would be: Yes! Hitler was an atheist, and so was Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all the other maniacs. So what? They were all horrible misanthropes, utterly deluded megalomaniacs and (in Hitler's case) lazy and unpleasant to boot. It is as Dawkins said about Stalin, they just happened to be atheists and it shouldn't hurt our cause at all to admit this. It's not like we are claiming that atheists have to be saints (I'm certainly not).

What DOES hurt our cause are some of the arguments that pop up on our side, like Hitler's never-renounced membership in the Catholic Church, or the "Gott mit uns" belt buckles. Also Christopher Hitchens' interpretation of Stalin's Soviet Union as something akin to a theocracy achieves nothing but an irritated debate opponent (which, knowing Hitchens, might be what he is going for). It is as Hitchens rightly points out: all of these dictators have used religious metaphors, symbols and concepts as means of propaganda. The peoples they were trying to get to commit genocide for them were already established as being more easily controlled with the help of religious indoctrination, so they tapped that pool of manipulation. Even the most atheistic dictator you can imagine will very happily accept the support of Europe's biggest church if it helps him win the favour of the people and all he has to do is not tear up his own membership card. The same thing goes for the belts and other religious connotations. These don't make Hitler a believing Christian �quot; they make him an opportunist! And why shouldn't he be?


To me, the real problem about the whole issue (other than the fact that it stalls and dumbs down the discussion) is that it dangerously oversimplifies the causes of the Holocaust. The motivation of Hitler's world view isn't the real lesson we have to learn from this very dark chapter in our recent history (in case you care, I'm German, which explains the many superfluous commas in my writing). For the sake of this argument, he was simply crazy, and, at the same time, an immensely talented demagogue. This perilous combination has occurred before in history, and we should be very aware that it will inevitably occur again! The thing we really have to investigate and had better properly absorb the lesson from is how Hitler got all his staff and thousands upon thousands of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, etc. to murder Millions of their neighbours, colleagues and friends. It is not some trivial issue concerning the inner workings of the mind of a madman that we should be worrying about in our future, but these very frightening tendencies for xenophobia, tribalism, subordination and credulity that seem to be inexorably part of the human condition.