451. In honour of Dan Dennett

Comment #76907 by mmurray on October 7, 2007 at 5:06 pm

I would encourage those of you who haven't read Gould to forget about punctuated equilibria and the argument with Dawkins over NOMA and go and read some of his essays or his books such as "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History".

You can find some of the essays on-line without too much trouble.

Michael

452. Hirsi Ali Returns to the Netherlands after Losing Body Guards

Comment #76499 by mmurray on October 6, 2007 at 2:17 am

You can believe whatever you want but i know this woman has been lying about a lot of things, and this is one of them.

Actually I would like to believe what is true. At the moment -- like many here -- I basically have her book to go on. You are saying that she lied about being genitally mutilated when she said it happened in her book. Do you really know this or are you just assuming she lied about this because she admitted to lying to get immigration status?

Michael

453. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #76464 by mmurray on October 6, 2007 at 12:26 am

1. Can you do as Sam suggests and still hold down a day job?
2. Can you just do it part time or is it full-time only?
3. The constant inner commentary that, if you're successful at meditation, you manage to stifle during the day. What happens to it at night?
4. Does it represent some kind of primal consciousness? If so, why is it so hard to attain? Has culture so mishaped us? If it's not in some way natural, is it just a clever trick, analogous to holding you breath and making yourself go dizzy? That is, something amusing for a few minutes on your ninth birthday but not something you'd want to do all day, every day for the rest of your life?
Please direct me to a website where it is all made clear.

(1) What do you think Sam is suggesting? Typically people meditate 30 minutes to an hour a day. It's no different to doing yoga or working out except in those cases you can see what is happening in terms of muscle stretching and muscle, aerobic etc fitness. For meditation you can watch what is happening in the brain but it is less obvious why it has benefits.

(2) See my answer to (1).

(3) I am not expert but I don't think you ever stifle the inner commentary except for deep meditation perhaps. You certainly aren't going to stop it while walking around during the day -- it is more about being able to cut it back to a dull roar.

(4) It is tempting to think you are dropping back to what it was like before we developed language and started to think verbally like we do now. I don't know enough about that to hazard a guess. It is also plausible that the kind of experience where the self disappears (sort of like runners high) is just the mental processes that create the feeling of having a self going briefly into suspension. I don't think we understand consciousness enough to decide on this either. I agree it could just be a party trick of no great significance. However many people find it beneficial so if it is a party trick that helps people why not. Practising meditation carries no metaphysical baggage in terms of things that you have to believe.

I don't have a web site I can point you to. Why not find somewhere that teaches meditation and try it or pick up one of any number of books and try them. I assume if you are posting here then like me you would prefer to avoid the ones that wrap it all up in religion or energy fields and rubbish. I would also avoid the ones that smell too much like guru's and cults but that is my preference.

If you are interested in more of Sam's thoughts on this kind if thing try

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sam_harris/2007/01/consciousness_without_faith_1.html

and for his take on Buddhism

http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2903&Itemid=244

Michael

PS: Is that Reginald Perrin on you avatar ?

454. Hirsi Ali Returns to the Netherlands after Losing Body Guards

Comment #76458 by mmurray on October 6, 2007 at 12:02 am

Besides that Hirsi Ali has not been genitally mutilated,

So you say she is lying in her book ?

Michael

455. Hirsi Ali Returns to the Netherlands after Losing Body Guards

Comment #76400 by mmurray on October 5, 2007 at 5:50 pm

So if 60,000 of us commit $100 a year ...

Michael

456. Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

Comment #76396 by mmurray on October 5, 2007 at 5:44 pm

As for Dr. John Lennox, as a graduate of Oxford, I fear for its future academic reputation when it employs academics spouting credulous, specious nonsense such as this shoddy excuse of a scientist.
They employ him as a mathematician. Or perhaps more correctly Green College employ him as a mathematician. I wasn't aware of him as a mathematician until this debate came up but checking the usual places he seems to have a very good publication record in group theory. It's not my area so I can't judge the detail but he publishes in the right kinds of places and with people I know so I would assume he perfectly capable of doing the job he is employed for. I don't see any reason to regard him as a `shoddy excuse of a scientist'.

Michael

457. Teachers 'fear evolution lessons'

Comment #76386 by mmurray on October 5, 2007 at 5:00 pm

Aren't their some crackpot `faith' schools you can send your kids to in the UK that teach intelligent design ?

Michael

458. Hirsi Ali Returns to the Netherlands after Losing Body Guards

Comment #76197 by mmurray on October 5, 2007 at 3:02 am

2 men for 8 hours in 3 shifts makes 6 men for 24 hours. 100 Euro's/Dollars an hour per man is 4800 Euro's/Dollars a day for 6 men. Times 365 is 1.752.000 Euro's/Dollars. That already get's you well on the way toward 6 million (though i have also read something that was closer to 3 instead of 6 million)

Something still doesn't make sense to me here. So you employ 6 people for 8 hours each day every day of the year and pay them $6,000,000 -- that's $1,000,000 for working 8 hours a day every day of the year. Excellent pay.

I think the problem is your $100 an hour. For a standard working week that is $100 x 40 (hours per week) x 52 (weeks in the year) = $208,000 a year. That is a good salary from where I come from. Do security staff really get $100 an hour?

Michael

459. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #76116 by mmurray on October 4, 2007 at 6:55 pm

You forget, there once was a word for non-racists, it was called "Abolitionist". These brave men and women (give credit where it is due, most were religious) spoke up, in some cases took up arms, to free the slaves.

You are confusing racism and slavery. Racism did not go away when slavery was abolished.

If you are not happy with an occasional tasty tidbit, the love of a kind woman, a refrigerator full of beer, modest career success, etc., and you think you are going to find happiness in jettisoning all your desire for these things, then commit suicide (no, don't!).

Don't tell me your day job is some kind of counselling ? :-) Seriously the evidence suggests there will be a lot of people who don't feel like you and I think Sam is suggesting it is a bad idea to hand them all over to the religious groups.

Michael

460. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #75950 by mmurray on October 4, 2007 at 6:20 am

mmurray I haven't read any books by the Dalai Lama. I was taught a little about Buddhism though by someone very keen to present it in a modern and secular manner.

I think a fair few things the Dalai Lama says are at odds with science, but my view is that they needn't be, since enough of Buddhism can survive a full acceptance of modern science.

BaronOchs -- you might enjoy that book as it is the source of the oft quoted quote of the Dalai Lama's that if science contradicts Buddhism then Buddhism should change. He, of course, doesn't believe that mind reduces to matter which probably is what allows him some scope to believe in things like reincarnation.

Michael

461. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #75939 by mmurray on October 4, 2007 at 5:57 am

Buddhism doesn't consider mind and matter to be separate.

Funny when I typed those words I thought I was likely to get corrected by someone who actually knows something about Buddhism which I don't :-)

I was basing this on the Dalai Lama's book 'The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality' where he says Buddhism divides reality into

(1) Matter - physical objects
(2) Mind - subjective experiences
(3) Abstract composites - mental formation

He also claims that, although various Buddhist traditions differ on the point they all basically agree that you cannot reduce (2) completely to (1) even though (2) depends on (1) to occur. This is what I meant by separate. My take on scientific materialism (which I agree with) is that all of (2) and (3) can be reduced to (1).

Michael

462. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #75925 by mmurray on October 4, 2007 at 4:52 am

I would appreciate some rebuttal arguments about this.

Hi Veronique,

No that's not me I am in Adelaide :-)

On the rebuttal's I am not sure. There is some interesting stuff on Sue Blackmore's website. She is a very long time meditator (and also drug user I think). She started out studying paranormal things and give up, due to lack of success, and moved into more mainstream things like consciousness.

You can find it at

http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/

She has an explanation for near death experiences in terms of how the brain behaves when you deprive it of oxygen.

I don't know what her explanation of OBE's (out of body experiences) is.

There is also something I only recently learnt about called sleep paralysis where people become conscious but unable to move. It is often accompanied by an intense feeling of pressure on the chest and or the presence of someone else in the room. Have a look at the wikipedia site

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

I would have thought the seeing things not there are `just' hallucinations although that is easy for me to say not ever having had a hallucination! There is just no evidence of energy that is different to the energy we understand in physics. Of course a lot of people use the word energy to mean all kinds of things.

In the buddhist meditation tradition they say that you experience all kinds of what we would call paranormal phenomena during higher levels of meditation. But these are to be ignored as they are not the aim of the meditation from a Buddhist perspective. I have never had anything like this happen -- lucky if I can sit still for the 30 minutes :-)

Michael

463. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #75904 by mmurray on October 4, 2007 at 2:40 am

Hi All,
like most of you I agree with Sam Harris about the labelling bit. But I have difficulty with the whole transcendental thing.

I think the rest of your comment is confusing meditation and all the weird things various gurus and religions claim about meditation. It does seem to be possible to change mental states doing meditation, there is scientific research into it and many people will claim to have benefited from it. That makes it seem worthy of study particularly as we are some way from understanding how the brain works and, in particular, how consciousness works. I don't think any of the above implies you have to buy into the whole enlightenment and guru thing or the buddhist idea that mind is some kind of entity separate from matter.


Michael

464. Hirsi Ali Returns to the Netherlands after Losing Body Guards

Comment #75859 by mmurray on October 3, 2007 at 10:31 pm

Certainly. There must be at least a couple. :-)

And I cut Hirsi Ali some slack because of her background. I can see how tempting that particular extreme must have looked under the circumstances.

And if I remember the book properly she got little support from the left in Holland at the beginning because she was seen as disruptive of the idea of multiculturalism which tends to be a left wing thing. I would also think that the fact that she had to fight for her freedom in such an individualistic fashion against social pressures to conform would lead her to sympathise with a right wing perspective of individual rights.

Michael

465. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #75856 by mmurray on October 3, 2007 at 10:16 pm

I may be wrong but it certainly doesn't sound like the Australia I heard about from friends and acquaintances (Actually the most negative thing I heard about Australia is its widespread racism especially against Asians, not that it is on the verge of becoming a theocracy)

I don't think anti Asian racism is the issue it used to be. Historically we had all the usual white anglo-saxon colonial prejudices about the inferiority of asians coupled to justifiable resentment of the very nasty treatment of our prisoners of war by the Japanese. If you look at this very recent survey

http://sydney.edu.au/us-studies/docs/Survey%20Presentation-3%20Oct%2007-Part%201.pdf

particularly the bit at the end about Japanese investment you will see how things have changed.

I won't go into the ongoing problems with our treatment of the indigeneous Australians we stole the country from in 1770 but you can get a nice short account in Jarred Diamonds book The Third Chimpanzee.

As for religion it is intruding more here as it is intruding more everywhere. Our current prime minister regards this as a christian country and himself as a christian and the opposition leader is a public christian as well. This is not done with the same intensity as it is in the US but it is still unusual by Australian standards to have the discussion at all. The health minister at one point trained as a catholic priest so you can guess what his attitude is on various issues. We had to take away from him the right to control RU486 and stem cell research has been an ongoing fight. The Government has also changed the law to enshrine marriage as something that can only occur between people with different dangly bits.

Ten years of conservative rule has not improved the country.

Michael

466. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #75816 by mmurray on October 3, 2007 at 6:38 pm

My blog on his talk and the use of atheism in politics:

Nice post on your blog. I think your point about politics is particularly important. Atheism has to be for everyone not just lefties just as we hope non-racism and looking after the environment are for everyone.

Michael

467. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #75784 by mmurray on October 3, 2007 at 4:10 pm

To fritter away half of your few precious decades on earth achieving nothing but a greater attention to your mental processes sounds like a waste to me. What a shame that would be: we've only got one life.

Most people who meditate aren't putting in anything like half of their waking time. In any case most people `fritter away' a lot of their lives worrying about the future, reliving things in the past and doing anything but living in the present. One of the aims of meditation is to be able to enjoy the one life you have and not waste it in pointless mental activity and avoid having to finish their lives with the Mark Twain quote:

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Michael

468. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #75783 by mmurray on October 3, 2007 at 4:03 pm

I mean I do love the idea of a god who ... sends dead children to a heavenly paradise ...
You love the idea of a god who kills children :-(

Michael

469. Letters: Theology has no place in a university

Comment #75207 by mmurray on October 2, 2007 at 3:51 am

Would I be correct in assuming that the statement "its leading theological halls are not fit to admit school-leavers" is identical in meaning to "its leading theological halls are not fit to admit students"?

No I think it only applies to students who have just left school and are expecting an Oxford undergraduate education. Further down he quotes the report as saying the education the theological colleges provide "does not resemble an Oxford experience in its essentials" and is not "a suitable educational environment for the full intellectual development of young undergraduates".

Michael

470. Dawkins - what can't he be blamed for?

Comment #75143 by mmurray on October 1, 2007 at 11:13 pm

I maintain that the consoling satisfaction of doing something, anything, together in a group, is one of the main things that keeps religions going. (And this makes football not too different from a religion.)

I agree, except I suspect a lot more people watching football know that their `faith' is a bit of a pretend than do in a church. I guess that is partly due to the modern commercial football where club loyalty for players depends on the price. Maybe religion would be better if the rabbis, bishops, popes and imams all changed `team' regularly: `And rumours abound this week that Tehran Mosque has offered $2,000,000 for Ratzinger. Sources at the Vatican deny any such deal and are confident that Ratzinger intends to see out his contract .... '

On the whole it seems to me that football (and similar sports) are a useful safety valve for our genetically inherited tribalism. Of course it can go over board into football hooliganism and extreme right wing politics.

Michael

471. Religion as a Force for Good

Comment #74937 by mmurray on October 1, 2007 at 7:15 am

And another one ....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2180725,00.html

Michael

472. Religion as a Force for Good

Comment #74686 by mmurray on September 30, 2007 at 1:17 am

There is also this little offering from Madeleine Bunting which I posted into the RDF website but which hasn't turned up yet.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/madeleine_bunting/2007/09/an_enlightened_politics.html

Note the snappy little title `An Enlightened Politics' burma = buddhism = enlightenment :-(

Michael

473. Religion as a Force for Good

Comment #74684 by mmurray on September 30, 2007 at 1:13 am

Methinks that a military junta can only take foothold from within in a society that is ridden with superstition. Is there anybody who knows if that ever happened in a 'moderately' rational society? I am not sure I see the conection. What about German, Italian and Spanish fascism ? Chile under Pinochet ? The other Latin American right wing dictatorships which probably, like Chile, were CIA operations. The various countries taken over by communism such as Russia and China -- the result was not perhaps what we mean by a military junta probably worse.

Michael

474. Religion as a Force for Good

Comment #74609 by mmurray on September 29, 2007 at 5:17 pm

Presumably

http://www.ianburuma.com/

Nevertheless, faith has an important role to play in politics, especially in circumstances in which secular liberals are rendered impotent, as in the case of Nazi occupation, communist rule or military dictatorship.

So the only people who oppose these things are those with faith ? What an offensive load of rubbish.

Michael

475. Why are we Muslims so self-destructive?

Comment #73261 by mmurray on September 24, 2007 at 3:25 pm

http://richarddawkins.net/article,1594,What-do-these-atheists-understand-of-religion,Yasmin-Alibhai-Brown

476. Crisis of faith in first secular school

Comment #73093 by mmurray on September 24, 2007 at 5:20 am

. Comment #73075 by Richard Morgan on September 24, 2007 at 3:35 am
avatarhttp://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fTzXJMU1sLc

Thank you Richard Morgan. That got 10 out of 10 on the made my eyes water scale or as my teenage kids would say ROTFLMAO

Michael

477. Crisis of faith in first secular school

Comment #72989 by mmurray on September 23, 2007 at 5:40 pm

Either overtly or by default, this country is still a Christian one.

Love it - reminded me of

I find it deeply offensive that, in what is still, after all, basically a Python-worshipping country, fourteen-year-old children can get to see this film.

If you missed Not the Nine O'Clock News I highly recommend it

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ykN-00i7VVs

I really liked the advertisements for some vicars precooked meals -- you could feed a multitude and have enough left over to fill four baskets. The advertising slogan was `They're a bloody miracle'.

There are some examples of the skits here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_the_Nine_O'Clock_News

Michael

478. Religion advances despite science (and thanks to Dawkins)

Comment #72978 by mmurray on September 23, 2007 at 5:02 pm

So who is this guy John Brookes

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

Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion within the Faculty of Theology at Oxford University. He was Director of the Ian Ramsey Center which according to its web page:
"Ian Ramsey Centre is involved in the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind (OXCSOM), a multidisciplinary initiative at the University of Oxford, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, which is exploring the physiological basis of beliefs and how belief systems affect states of consciousness in the physical brain."

Ah the Templeton Foundation... So my guess is he isn't an atheist arguing about tactics but just another theist of the `its God Jim but not as we know it' variety.

The Ramsey Centre is here

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~theo0038/

Ooh how embarrassing the current director is a fellow countryman.

http://www.hmc.ox.ac.uk/people/pharrison.html

and I just discovered the International Society for Science and Religion

http://www.issr.org.uk/

more wishy washy apologetics. Guess doing mumbo jumbo is easier that doing real science were you might wastes year of work because you got it wrong.

Michael

479. Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

Comment #72474 by mmurray on September 21, 2007 at 7:58 am

There are some other articles on that Ekklesia web site on atheism

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/tags/1111


Nowhere I can find that you can actually reply to anything though.

Michael

480. Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

Comment #72381 by mmurray on September 20, 2007 at 10:57 pm

[but I think that was Mr. Spock]

Oops. Dr Spock was the baby raising guy :-)

Michael

481. Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

Comment #72367 by mmurray on September 20, 2007 at 9:11 pm

I was thinking of outside in the sense of incapable of affecting the physical universe but you are right a God who was so up to date theologically that it doubted its own existence would do just as well!

Michael

PS: Must have been tired yesterday and missed the fact that you were pointing out a typo! Sorry. I meant universe.

482. Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

Comment #72358 by mmurray on September 20, 2007 at 8:05 pm

This article explains something that I had always wondered about. Why don't the people who keep telling us that TGD doesn't address the latest theological thinking tell us what the latest theological thinking is? Sure it might be difficult but people like Richard can explain technical biology to a general audience so surely there is a theologian somewhere who can explain modern theology to us or at least give us a glimpse of it. But they don't want to because it will mean admitting to all the regular church going public that the God TGD has supposedly not demolished is a mysterious deity who isn't really interested in their petty illnesses and concerns or whether they use condoms and by the way there is no heaven or hell. They just want to reassure the church going public that some theologian somewhere has answered the criticisms in TGD without explaining how much the church going public are going to hate the answer!

As Dr Spock would have said `It's God Jim but not as we know it'.

I am with MartinSGill -- if we can get these people to admit that the straw God TGD demolishes is the people's God we are well on the way to winning. If the God that TGD doesn't demolish is outside the University and not interested in telling us how to run our lives then who cares!

Michael

483. Against the grain: There are questions that science cannot answer

Comment #71932 by mmurray on September 20, 2007 at 12:51 am

Also, there is no such thing as a "believing scientist" as to believe in God betrays the whole nature of scientific method and investigation. However, there is such thing as an uneducated, misinformed and misguided pseudo-scientist who should not be taken seriously.

That's a bit harsh. There are certainly scientists who are Deists of some kind or who compartmentalize their science and their religion. I think they are misguided but uneducated, misinformed and pseudo-scientists they are not. Take Frances Collins for example.

Michael

484. Religious education

Comment #71546 by mmurray on September 19, 2007 at 2:31 am

"Use some optical illusions to establish the idea that there are different ways of seeing the same thing."

Why not "Use some optical illusions to show that humans sometimes see things that aren't really there."

Michael

485. Review of Darwin's Angel

Comment #70349 by mmurray on September 15, 2007 at 2:57 am

"His title - Darwin's Angel - is robust enough."

What is so robust about it? Dawkins did not name himself "Darwin's Rottweiler" (which no doubt the title of Cornwell's book toys with), it was given to him.

According to Wikipedia the Darwin's Rottweiler label can be traced to an article

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Media/seattle.shtml


by Roger Downey where he suggests it came from Charles Simonyi:

Evolution's first great advocate, 1860s biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, earned the nickname "Darwin's bulldog" from his fellow Victorians. In our own less decorous day, Dawkins deserves an even stronger epithet: "Darwin's Rottweiler, perhaps," Simonyi suggests. Now, thanks to Simonyi's gift of £1.5 million sterling to England's venerable Oxford University, the Rottweiler is unleashed.

Michael

486. Review of Darwin's Angel

Comment #70284 by mmurray on September 14, 2007 at 5:50 pm

20. Comment #70185 by Steven Mading on September 14, 2007 at 9:25 am

Great comment. Speaking as someone dragged up a Catholic I find guys like this who would appear to be Catholic to be particularly infuriating. The Catholic Church has a long list of objective opinions about the real world and it is quite clear that it has no room for believers who just detect a vague whiff of deity in the air.


Michael

487. Review of Darwin's Angel

Comment #70282 by mmurray on September 14, 2007 at 5:33 pm

Although I actually think that most people go to church not to hear a priest read from the Bible but rather to see and talk with their friends and neighbors (or attend whatever fun and entertaining activity the church is putting on that week)."

I think these people need to have a good hard look at themselves or better at what their church is doing in the wider world. If it is the Catholic Church then some of it eg aids and condoms in Africa is pretty ugly. By attending the Church they are, in my opinion, lending support to the political organisation. I wonder if any of the SS officers at the Nuremberg trials got away with saying they were just in the SS for the `glimpse of transcendence' or for the tea and scones (or beer and sausage?) after the big rallies.

Michael

488. San Diego Diocese Settles Lawsuit for $200 Million

Comment #68878 by mmurray on September 9, 2007 at 2:15 am

Can you imagine any other organisation being allowed to continue to be involved in the education of children after this appalling record?

Michael

489. The smallest signs of retreat

Comment #68643 by mmurray on September 8, 2007 at 1:56 am

Will one of you Brits fill us Yanks in on who this silly Miss Bunting woman is?

Wikipedia is your friend :-)

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

Michael

490. In God we doubt

Comment #67770 by mmurray on September 4, 2007 at 5:29 pm

Following on from NorthernBrights second excellent post... I've wondered more of late if we shouldn't be taking more seriously the line about `that's not my God you are rejecting'. While I'm sure a lot of the time it is a debating tactic I also suspect there are a lot of people out there who call themselves Christians who are not signed up believers in all the rules of some particular denomination. Coming from a Catholic background I always found this strange because I figured if you don't believe all of it you are out. But for many people this seems not to be an issue. So when we say `how can you believe in the Virgin Mary' they will just say `off course I don't'. A dialogue with people like this has to be more than just pointing out that things they have already rejected are silly.

Does anyone know if there is reliable survey data on what people of various religions really believe? Something with more detail than `they ticked the box Catholic so they must believe in ... ' Obviously it might vary are lot by country, socio-economic background etc.

My other thought is that we set up a `safe questions' section in the forum. Somewhere someone can asks questions of an atheist without getting heavily criticised. It would need careful moderating of course not least to remove the people who were trolling not asking.

Michael

491. In God we doubt

Comment #67767 by mmurray on September 4, 2007 at 5:10 pm

Yorker has the right idea, an occasional swear word, used at the right time makes life interesting by emphasizing a specific point. However, overuse of swearing ultimately dulls the senses and the actual point is lost. jcw

Going off-topic here but years ago I worked on a building site and my supervisor would put f*** or f***ing in between every word he spoke with occasional repeats to emphasise. When he got really wound up he woud say `f***ing, f***ing, c***' to show, I guess, he wasn't a man of few words!

In the context of a web site (as distinct from a building site) it is worth thinking about whether the impact of f*** on some people will just distract from what else you are saying.

Michael

492. In God we doubt

Comment #67526 by mmurray on September 3, 2007 at 5:44 pm

Thanks for the post NorthernBright it was very interesting. I overheard a conversation the other day between two people that I thought was very telling. One I expect was a Buddhist the other I think probably felt they were Spiritual in a modern western style. What interested me was the level of `magical thinking' epitomised by them refering to a difficult job they had had to take on as `things don't arrive till you are ready for them'. There is a clear need for a lot of people to feel there is a purpose in the universe. I can sympathise but I don't think it is true. I don't know how you get across to such people as they are not going to want to be told that they are not special or not being looked after. I think they will reject science with the `scientists are always changing their mind' type or argument. This is particularly true of medicine where a lot of scientific debate gets into the media without all the careful caveats and so it seems medical opinion is oscillating widely.

A couple of people refer to their first read of TDG. Count me into the group who cheered and punched the air (metaphorically). I am really tired of the social convention Richard is trying to challenge that says I can't criticise someone for saying something stupid if the stupid thing is religious. I wonder how much of the fervour of the ill-informed attack on TDG from people you might think were allies is because he has challenged that social convention?

Michael

493. In God we doubt

Comment #67523 by mmurray on September 3, 2007 at 5:23 pm

I thought we had been through all this science has no soul stuff back in the early 90's with books like

Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man. by Bryan Appleyard 1992

Interesting to note it's reissue in 2004 had a new title

Understanding the Present: An Alternative History of Science

The style of the complaints seem very similiar.

Michael

494. What do these atheists understand of religion?

Comment #67520 by mmurray on September 3, 2007 at 5:09 pm

My favourite Feynman quote:

"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature."

Richard Feynman. The Character of Physical Law

495. Review of Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion

Comment #67282 by mmurray on September 3, 2007 at 2:32 am

The same as when the opposing camp say things like "They're so, um, unscientific" or "Dawkins is almost religious in his convictions" or "The God Delusion has become the holy book for atheists" or any other variation on the theme.

For me the irritation is tempered by amusement at the thought that each person using this technique is clearly quite convinced that they're the first to do so and that they're terribly clever to have thought of it!

I always like the fact that apparently the worst insult they can give us is to claim that somehow we are like them. `Atheism is just another religion etc'

Michael

496. What do these atheists understand of religion?

Comment #67262 by mmurray on September 3, 2007 at 1:38 am

Some aspects of our nature are not susceptible to scientific enquiry, cannot be dissected, categorised and validated in terms that would satisfy the "rational" disbelievers, whose intellect is colossal but imagination puny.

These people are so arrogant. Have they any idea how much imagination you need to invent a radical new scientific theory. No they just want to gaze at their navels and feel all warm and fuzzy.

Michael

497. What do these atheists understand of religion?

Comment #67257 by mmurray on September 3, 2007 at 1:35 am

Of the most awesome creations made my man, most were inspired by God – the pyramids, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, the temples of India, St Paul's Cathedral and the works of Michelangelo.

Antibiotics, quantum mechanics, general relativity, Mars rovers, Apollo spacecraft, 747, Hubble telescope, lower infant mortality, longer life. Why can't these people see the awesome creations they are surrounded by ? I'd trade the fact that I can be confident that my children will get to adulthood alive and well for all the God inspired achitectural stuff above.

Michael

498. Review of Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion

Comment #67115 by mmurray on September 2, 2007 at 2:32 am

I'm glad to note that The Times at last has put my comments are up - but I notice that Professor Dawkins' are not. I'm a little confused I put my comment on after Professor Dawkins posted here to say he'd commented. I suppose they are checking the identity of the poster but I'd have thought they would prioritise this.

Veronique's seem to have been topped and tailed somewhat ??

Michael

499. Review of Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion

Comment #67094 by mmurray on September 1, 2007 at 9:53 pm

Is this Salley Vickers the author ?

http://www.salleyvickers.com

Michael

EDIT: Yes. Sorry I missed the earlier post that pointed this out.

500. Review of Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion

Comment #67086 by mmurray on September 1, 2007 at 7:28 pm

There are only 12 comments on the Times site.

Michael