1. Beyond Belief 2006 Videos

Comment #15705 by Cassandra on January 2, 2007 at 6:53 am

Lionel A

No, I'm afraid technology got the better of me. I imagined the error messages I was recieving meant that my posts were being lost in digital oblivion.

Sadly I was wrong and I hope the moderators will delete all of the copies. The last post of the duplicates is the "correct" one.

I offer my apologies for being blindsided by the "magic" of the web. I even pressed "spam" on one of them myself to show good faith (whoops)!!!

Sorry :(

2. Beyond Belief 2006 Videos

Comment #15700 by Cassandra on January 2, 2007 at 6:06 am

My profound apologies for the multiple entries of my post. I had considerable problems with my PC and connection. and I did not realize that they were going up.

Please could the moderators delete the duplicates.

Thank you.

3. Beyond Belief 2006 Videos

Comment #15692 by Cassandra on January 2, 2007 at 5:33 am

Re: Comment 74 by John Dore

JD: "I saw this session too, but came away with a very different impression of who was scoring the points."

Well that's hardly surprizing, after all we are standing here in the cloisters of the "Church of Dawkinism" and I am comitting the sin of heresy, so to speak. One would expect his acolytes to attack my remarks. As a matter of fact I was very concerned that what I had written might have been taken down immediately so I wrote off with copies to Dr Konner, whom I did not know at the time but now know him to be a perfect gentleman.

So John Dore and I have different impressions. Well that's splendid. Argument is the hot fat that lubricates the wheels of progress. But let's not jump out of the pan.

On my statement: "If you are going to hypothesize that "Religion is bad and we must get rid of it", then you ought to have some evidence for that.",

JD says: This statement beggars belief.

Evidenly JD's belief is easily beggared. May I remind him that Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a history of the 30 years war, or even the Inquisition were simply history moving for the reasons history moves, which has often been power struggles, some people wanting what others have (Germany wanting an empire springs to mind in the Great War) or, in the case of the Inquisition simply the Church husbanding its power. The 30 years war included elements of French versus Hapdburg power. Nor were the results neccessarily bad. Would you like history to be static, to be a Roman legionary today?

To misuse history as empirical evidence for the very new hypothesis that religion is bad and should be gotten rid of simply betrays a staggering lack up understanding of human nature and, BTW, is not science. The decline and fall of the Roman empire may be empirical evidence for something but not the hypothesis at hand.

JD then says: As for the relative good done by religion, you seem to be missing the point: if the supernatural does not exist, then any psychological good done by religion could only come about through a placebo effect which, in all likelihood, could be replicated by other, non-supernatural means.

You'll note how JD efforlessly attempts to arrange things so that supernatural becomes a synonym for religion. It isn't. The supernatural does not exist by definition, nothing can be "super" natural. Religion, on the other hand does exist, is not supernatural and is a wholly different. A nun acting as a nurse is religious and, as she administers to sick people, is evidently doing good irrespective of what her beliefs are concerning the supernatural. She is motivated by religion though. I'm sure you can think of many more examples religion doing good. Therefore religion must have powers for good as well as bad. Big rough tough heavily armed soldiers on the eve of battle seek out the religious chaplain. Why? For a placebo effect? There seems to be a serious lack of knowledge of human nature yet again. Common knowledge, whatever that is, leads us to believe, entirely unscientifically, that the Islamic bombers do it for the 72 virgins. Scott Atran poured derision on that oversimplification and, again, a very poor understanding of human nature.

So, I'll claim more solidly that the childishly simple hypothesis that "all religion is bad and should be stopped" is not born out by scientific examination at all, there hardly is any for one thing, and even common sense shows that it is rather silly even to claim. It seems to me that both Richard and Scott have written polemics and, in Richard's case at least, has lent his formidable reputation to this and called it science. It isn't, not as most of us understand science. Furthermore, I don't think his reputation will neccessarily do well out of it. His book sales might but that's quite a different thing.

JD says about the "Catholic Child"": Really? Then in that case, as Dawkins pointed out in his talk, a "Monetarist Child" must mean a child brought up by monetarist parents and in monetarist traditions.

I suggest that JD is getting a little frantic. We don't have monetarist families with long cultural traditions of monetarism. We do have Catholic families with centuries long traditions of Catholicism. I would suggest that there is a fundamental difference between monetarism and Catholicism. Monetarism is a utilitarian subject involving trade. Catholicism is different, it is a religion and religions are concerned with questions that really do cause us great difficulty. For instance, they deal with questions of consciousness, sentience, death, and life's purpose.

Getting rid of religion, I anticipate, will imply disabusing the religious of their satisfying (to them) beliefs. It will imply science offering all religious people what we have accepted, that at brain death we re-enter the oblivion whence we came. How many people will accept that? What science has been done to attempt to find out?

If a person is dying and tells you it doesn't matter because he is going to heaven, how many people here would tell him that he is not and that he is going to oblivion instead? I suspect very few (Richard amongst them since he said something like that when Dr Konner asked him the night before his talk). Why is that? Where is your intellectual honesty?

JD says: "Another assumption that is smuggled in with your statement: people who have a vested interest in passing on their religion to their children view children not as free individuals for which they have a responsibility of care, but as their *property*, to be protected from exposure to critical thinking that might undermine their beliefs, and thus their continued membership of the group (the openly expressed competition between religious communities to "out-breed" each other is another aspect of this idea, since it clearly assumes that the children of each community "belong" to that community). Every time you describe a child as a "Catholic child" you are, whether wittingly or not, reinforcing and legitimizing that way of thinking."

I'm not a smuggler, I'm a straight speaker. Richard himself explains the Darwinian advantage of children being totally gullible open books upon which we, the parents (should it be anyone else?), are obliged to write. Presumably, as Dawkinian Atheists, many of the people here will have told their children something along the lines of "You are here to enjoy your lives as best you can, helping to steward the world where possible along the way for your children after you and then you will die and enter an everlasting oblivion whence you came" or something like that, perhaps more positively perhaps less. Very good. How do you propose to tell religious people to do that? And when religious people refuse to believe it, how will you convince them otherwise? What scientific evidence will you present that there is no desirable afterlife (only achievable by blind faith of course)? Catholic parents tell their children to be good Catholics, I would suggest, not directly for the good of Catholicism, though it comes into it of course, but because they truly honestly do not want their kids to suffer the fires of hell. Well, what does science have that will extinguish those fires? I would suggest you CANNOT fight religion by reason simply because religion is not reasonable. It isn't susceptible to reason. No religion is. The children are but parents control their children. Who would take the children away to teach them otherwise? A very scary thought don't you think? That was one of the things Dr Konner was trying to point out IMHO.

I've left Scott Atran since what he has said is a subset of the scientific questions I have considered and I have mentioned him already. I hear a great deal of polemic, I hear very little scientific substance.

Why is that?

4. Beyond Belief 2006 Videos

Comment #15312 by Cassandra on December 30, 2006 at 9:44 am

I am an atheist. No buttery about that!

I watched most of the sometimes tedious 15 hours. I was impressed by some people. Tyson is great! Jim Woodward, Scott Atran and especially Mel Konner were unusual in that they wanted some evidence which is not unreasonable for science, is it?

Konner gave a couple of examples of peer reviewed work that showed religiosity was heritable and that it gave some protection against mental illness. Is that all there is? If you are going to hypothesize that "Religion is bad and we must get rid of it", then you ought to have some evidence for that. I mean, doesn't science work like that any more?

Konner's point, inter alia, was that Richard and people like him had done no work to show the relative good provided by religion compared to its harm. Nor do Sam or Richard's books examine what would happen if religion were abolished. It's a fair comment.

Then Konner made hilarious fun of Richard engaging a little girl, as he does in "Unveaving the Rainbow" in a conversation about statistics in order to disabuse her faith in Father Christmas (wherein he fails - and misses a big point too).

Anyway, Richard said very little in reply, he simply hid behind Sam Harris's bluster as he so often did only piping up to tell Konner that he was "pessimistic" and to pour scorn on a poetic aside originally attributable to Golda Meir. Hmmm. I would have said Konner was "realistic and scientific".

Only LATER, MUCH LATER possibly the next day, when Konner was safely long gone, did Richard say he was WOULD have asked for an apology from Konner for his remarks about the little girl. Sure, of course he would. Richard doesn't seem to do so well when he is surrounded by his peers and superiors when they don't agree with him. Konner made him look silly and Richard compounded it by drawing attention to that.

Did it really take so long for someone (Konner again) to point out that Richard's "consciousness raising" in saying that "calling a child a catholic child is child abuse" is an abuse of the word abuse. When we say "A Catholic Child" we mean a child brought up in a Catholic household of Catholic traditions, not that she is familiar with the catechism and transubstantiation and all that nonsense. Richard's "consciousness raising", well, it needs some work IMHO.

If Science had a problem with religion, I don't think Richard's and Sam's strident and unresearched polemic is neccessarily going to help much. If anything, it may even help those who would poison the minds of American children with creationism which would be counter productive to say the least. I'm sad about that.

5. Beyond Belief 2006 Videos

Comment #15311 by Cassandra on December 30, 2006 at 9:36 am

Lionel A said

"To challenge, Dawkins in particular, with 'You wouldn't like to get rid of all the bacteria in the human body..' as some kind of analogy with ridding the world of religion was foolish in the extreme."

Uh, it was Richard who originated the analogy by saying diseases are not all caused by viruses, some are caused by bacteria so I think your charge of "wooliness" is right, but directed at the wrong person.