301. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85905 by ADH on November 7, 2007 at 12:56 pm

"Is ADH an atheist when it comes to Zeus? I suspect yes"

Of course. So what?

"This particular atheist has no more wish to be separated from ADH's God than from the clutches of the Hydra"

There are atheists who are not so much atheists as anti-theists (Christopher Hitchens). I guess that is the kind of atheist I had in mind.

You will insist on pounding out your God = Thor = Zeus = all the other myths and figures of human fantasy. The human fascination for the transcendent Other (though the Olympian gods were usually far from being transcendent, though Mt Olympus was presumably quite a high mountain) which spawned these figures of fantasy may actually point to some Reality beyond ourselves, beyond the mere matter and energy that we are made up of. I notice that one of you earlier complained that children were reading too much fiction, thus having their other-worldly longings stirred. If I were you I would keep your kids away from fantasy of every kind. Fill their shelves with simplified editions of "The God Delusion", warn them away from Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter - that is if you want to keep them in the atheist camp. An atheist who wants to remain an atheist can't be too careful what (s)he !(or what (s)he allows his or her kids to read).

302. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85882 by ADH on November 7, 2007 at 11:54 am

Listen guys, I have not been evading any questions. It's just that this is a particularly busy and stressful week at work. I haven't had time! If tht sounds like a kop out, too bad!

As for my supposedly admitted abuse of children, I plead not guilty! I have brought my kids up to think for themselves, right. The fact of stating my beliefs in their presence hardly amounts to child abuse! Do you really think children's minds are like blank slates, ready to be written on by whoever gets there first and that what gets written there determines the kind of people they become. Fellow atheists of yours like Stephen Pinker would hastily disagree! I disagree with Stephen Pinker about most things, but I do agree that the child's mind is much more complex than that.

As for the content of my beliefs (which I admit they have been privy to), if it is true that indifference to God has eternal consequences, that it results in eternal separation from God (whether conscious separation or by virtue of ceasing to exist), then I believe that it would be a serious case of child abuse if I did NOT make that very clear. Having made it clear, I do not, I assure you, go on and on about it.

On the issue of eternal separation from God, well it is actually what atheists want, is it not? It would hardly be an act of mercy on God's part to admit into his presence people who would rather spend eternity in hell than be there. As CS Lewis said: "there are only two kinds of people - those who say to God 'Your will be done', and those to whom God will have no choice but to say 'Your will be done'.

I realise that these words will be like a red rag to a bull for most of you. So be it. I knew what this message board was like before I started contributing! I can handle it As CH said about himself, I have thick skin and a broad back.

By the way, I wish you could ask my kids whether they feel they were abused by the fact of my believing wht I believe and saying so in their presence.

303. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85817 by ADH on November 7, 2007 at 9:12 am

Hi fellas,

As I've been working today I haven't been able to post until now, and this will be a short one too. My next one may be a bit longer.

I realise that in my first posts on the thread I was fiercely sarcastic, so I am no stranger to sarcasm. If that's the tone some of you want to adopt, that's ok by me. I'll be ready for you.

Thank you Nighttripper for putting things in perspective with regard to my (albeit hypothetical) response to Luther. Luther was a brave man to stand up to the Papacy, but by no means was he infallible. I disagree with this quote from him on the place of reason, just as I abhor his anti-semitism.

Yes Keith, when I used inverted commas for the phrase "fell into my hands" I guess I was hinting at Providence guiding my search. I can't speak for the experience of other searchers.

I am aware of the paradox contained in the concept of prayer. I am not so naive as to believe that all my prayers will be answered in the way I would like them to be. I may not succeed in "praying my kids into the faith". They will have to make up their own minds about that. I guess my prayers are aimed at my need to be guided in how I broach the question of faith when I am talking to them. I have been told to pray for wisdom, and I am "naive" enough to believe that I will be given it, and have been.

Anyway, that's all for the time being. I must rush to a my next class.

304. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85703 by ADH on November 6, 2007 at 10:32 pm

Some of you have challenged me, very properly, to explain why my faith is not just a warm fuzzy ego-trip. I haven't got time to do that right now, but I will later today.

By the way, Teratonis, I think your perspective is completely skewed. In no way is faith a rejection of logic. You have to be pretty prejudiced when you say that Dawkins wiped the floor with all his opponents. I really think that Lennox had him nailed on the issue of the escape, the means of "transcending" our DNA that he was trying to posit - when he had quite clearly stated that we have NO CHOICE but to dance to the music of our DNA.

I'll be back later.

305. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85623 by ADH on November 6, 2007 at 2:09 pm

RascoHeldall, I do believe and I do care. But I don't have and nor do I want to have control over my children's choices! They have to get on with their lives, and I have to get on with mine, in my case in accordance, as fr as possible with my convictions. But I cannot and would never try to force my convictions on anyone. I believe in dialogue as a means of persuasion - rational dialogue (believe it or not!)

When I was about 16, though I was brought up in an evangelical home, I was about to chuck it all in. The questions I was being asked left me without answers (typically they were the same quesions that I see coming out on this thread). But then a book by CS Lewis "fell into my hands", and then others followed suit. I realised that there were answers to these questions, which, even if they didn't convince all my "interrogators", did satisfy me intellectually. I have to say that my faith is real. God is for me the foundation of everything that is. Life seems to me to be absolutely meaningless outside of a relationship with Him.

But that is "my" journey (a brief sketch of it). Everyone's journey is different. I don't know where my kids will end up in relation to the Christian faith. All I can do is keep praying and loving them for the wonderful young people that they are, irrespective if what they believe. I do believe that they will encounter God, that they will, and they will have to make a choice to follow or not.

I believe that all of us, including the posters on this thread, are still on a journey, and there may be surprises in store even for the most vociferous and belligerent atheists among you. Stranger things have happened.

306. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85496 by ADH on November 6, 2007 at 2:52 am

Windweaver, I've had a look at the article. I don't agree with it. You didn't really expect me to say that it opened my eyes did you? More about it later maybe. GOt to rush now.

307. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85487 by ADH on November 6, 2007 at 2:21 am

"And yes, per eric.malitz comment, how do you handle Christ's focus on eternal punishment? Do you interpret that focus in such a way that it does not disturb you that your children, if they reject Christianity, will be at the very least separated from God for all eternity (if not actually languishing in flames)?"

I am hoping and praying that they come to faith. But I am not going to alienate them by coercion. They know what we believe about the consequences of shutting God out of their lives. We don't mince our words about that. But we will not resort to fear tactics. Materialists also believe that people are separated from God indefinitely, because they don't believe that God exists. They will have to make up their own minds about which "paradigm" they find more convincing, and which they feel will satisfy their deepest longings.

308. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85484 by ADH on November 6, 2007 at 2:15 am

"If you children are raised secular like you say, I still will find it hard to believe you don't interfere in some way, as you state about 'correcting' what it 'realy' means to be a christian."

Of course I "interfere" if by interfering you mean "representing" to them what faith in God is all about, and how it impacts the way I behave and think. My kids DO respect me for that, and they respect what I believe. That is not hypocrisy. It would be hypocrisy if I mouthed on about Christian values but did not love and respect them or other people. I'm not saying that my lifestyle is always consistent. That does not mean that my faith is hypocritical.

309. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85452 by ADH on November 6, 2007 at 12:07 am

Windweaver, I don't want to derail this thread. But you asked me a question about the said article, so I'll answer it. Nobody who approaches these texts on the basis of a holistic understanding of the Bible would be troubled in the slightest by these socalled conradictions. You can't wrench phrases out of their context and thrust them alongside other phrases likewise wrenched from their context and say that they contradict each other. If you want me to I can deal with them one by one, but this thread is not the place for Biblical exegesis! I would like to say though that the way the Bible has long been dealt in Sunday schools and RE lessons has actually given wings to this "decontextualising", and also to articles like this one.

I agree by the way that a "comparative religions" approach is better than turning RE classes into an extension of Sunday School, which some fundamentalists would like to see. I think that even in Sunday Schools children questions should be raised in children's minds, but that they can be told, or shown, how the Bible has answers to the deepest questions that they are already asking by the age of four or five.

By the way, I have two teenage kids, both of whom went attended Sunday school. At no point did we ever discourage them from thinking for themselves. It has always been, and always will be completely up to them whether they believe what we believe. At the moment they do not, and maybe they never will. We have never done anything to "filter out" the influence of their peers or of their teachers, who in every single case are completely secular in their outlook. We do try to redress the balance when we are aware that the Christian faith has been misrepresented to them. We would like them to come to faith, but we have never DRILLED them into an acceptance of our convictions. If they do, it will be their choice, not ours.

310. Richard Dawkins at AAI 07

Comment #85447 by ADH on November 5, 2007 at 11:00 pm

I have just been listening to the first part. I must say I found myself agreeing with a great deal of what RD said. As a Christian theist, I am all in favour of atheists, feminists and everyone else doing what they can to get children and their parents to "think for themselves", to think critically about what is being "spoonfed" to them, from whatever source. When we do that, I hope atheists won't be too surprised to find that we won't necessarily come to the same conclusions as they have. I agree wholeheartedly that there is no such thing as a Catholic child, a Protestant child, a Buddhist child, just as their is no such thing as an atheist or a Marxist child. We need an education system which trains children to think through issues, to read widely, to weigh up the evidence in their minds, to observe and draw conclusions, and which encourages rather than debilitates their innate curiosity. We do not need a system which simply teaches them to jump through the exam hoops. I, and many other Christian theists, are completely with RD on this issue. But I think we need to make sure (as RD himself stated very clearly) that we are not replacing one form of indoctrination with another.

311. Atheism is a religion and you're as bad as the fundamentalists

Comment #85079 by ADH on November 4, 2007 at 10:59 pm

"So, ADH, how is my athiesm like your belief? Where are the similarities? And if athiesm is a belief, can you not join us? Or is this a belief too far for you?"

Fortunately, your atheism is very UNLIKE my belief. But it is a belief! As I said in a previous message on this thread, you have your rituals, your lithurgies, your "sacred" texts, your prophets, your priests and your Damascus road conversions. I don't know whether you sang the attendees at th AAI conference sang a hymn, but I wouldn't be surprised. There are probably a few in the making. Maybe I can make a suggestion. All the ex-christians among you will immediately recognise the music.

"Praise DICK from whom all truth doth flow
Praise him you creatures here below
Praise Chris and Sam and uncle Dan
We'll spread their words throughout the land"

Come on chaps, we can beat these FAITHheads at their own game. "Onward atheist DICKheads!"

312. Atheism is a religion and you're as bad as the fundamentalists

Comment #85075 by ADH on November 4, 2007 at 10:18 pm

"I like the idea of Steve99's "thread moderation, with posts not relevant to the subject being removed." Or as ADH put it "excising this 'religious nonsense' as soon as it appears if not before?" There is a place for 'religious nonsense', just not here at Debate Points."

It's easy to spar, until you have someone to spar against.

"No...but then, would these same words fall on the jihadist's ears as the truth?"

Precisely my point. The militants in this unholy war have shown that they are impervious to counter-arguments, much like the jihadists.

"For athiesm to flourish, we need better and better arguments."

You're right. MUCH better arguments!

313. Atheism is a religion and you're as bad as the fundamentalists

Comment #84948 by ADH on November 4, 2007 at 10:18 am

"That way religious nonsense that needs to be countered would not appear."

Steve, I assume that you are referring to my comments. What are you suggesting? That a moderator should be excising this "religious nonsense" as soon as it appears if not before? Don't worry, I can see which way the tide is flowing. I have no intention of wasting any more of your precious time. You will have no more arguments from me to counter. I promise never again to spoil your fidephobic love-in, which I suppose is what these message boards exist for anyway.

314. The truth in religion

Comment #84846 by ADH on November 4, 2007 at 12:23 am

"that is no reason to believe anything supernatural about him".

Steve, I appreciate your difficulty in accepting that there was anything supernatural about him, if you already hold the position that the idea of the supernatural is itself an absurdity. In that case nothing I or anyone else could say would persuade you that God could embody himself in a human being. How can he if God does not actually exist?

As regards what he said, take words like:

"The writings of Moses all pointed towards me" or
"Before Abraham was I already existed" or
"I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will not walk in darkness" (and many other statements like these)

If a self appointed guru went around making statements like these about him or herself nowadays we would dismiss them as a headcase. Our mental hospitals are full of such megalomania. If that is what we have in Jesus then we are wasting our time even talking about him. I'm sure there are many people on these boards who have already arrived at this conclusion about him.

Nevertheless, I defy anyone to open-mindedly read through one of the gospels and to come away with this impression of Jesus. If he was just another deluded mystic, another self-appointed guru afflicted with megalomania, then we will be hard-pressed to explain the enormity of his impact in every human culture right up to the present day. I know many people here will put it down to the gullability of the masses, the fact that he came to pre-eminence in a pre-scientific age. But people knew then as well as now that virgins don't give birth (that's why Joseph was heading for the exit before God actually sent a messenger to reassure him), that dead bodies don't come back to life (which is why the disciples did not believe that Jesus had been resurrected). And if that were the case, then you would have expected his influence to fade away among the scientiically trained. Yet that is not happening. Many top-ranking scientists and philosophers actually believe Jesus was who he said he was.

But as I say, if you have made up your mind already that the supernatural BY DEFINITION cannot be believed by any rational person, then all of this is going to be water off a duck's back.

315. The truth in religion

Comment #84812 by ADH on November 3, 2007 at 5:09 pm

Bonzai, Christians do disagree among themselves, and sometimes more vehemently than they should. None of us Christians has got it all taped, and if anyone says they have I for one won't give them the time of day. But the fact that we do disagree serves to prove that we are not the drones and clones that certain atheists are making us out to be. We are unite over essentials, though there might me some dispute about what the essentials include. I also believe that "Christianity" can be as much of a bandwagon for some as any other movement can. There are many who "jump on the bandwagon", ride with it for as long as they ind it useful to themselves to do so, and while they are on board they might well get the lingo and the mannerisms down to a fine art. It is possible to be on the Christian gravy train and not really have understood what it's all about, or even not to care less. There are hangers-on in every movement, who give the movement itself a bad name. I don't want to seem self-righteous. As I say, I don't have it all taped and both my understanding and my behaviour are far from infallible. But there is something unique and special about Jeus, something about his words that rings true, that gives hope and purpose, and that deeply challenges all huma cultural constructs, even (and perhaps especially) the "Christian" ones.

316. The truth in religion

Comment #84803 by ADH on November 3, 2007 at 4:56 pm

Good question BaronOchs. I'll need to think about your question a bit more. But for the moment my take on it is this. Jesus couldn't have foreseen the end of the world within his own lifetime precisely because he was very explicitly laying the foundations for a global movement. He warned the disciples that they would be taken and imprisoned and confronted by sundry religious and secular regimes with the choice to remain on board with him, so to speak, or to opt out. He also told them that he would be "going away", but would be returning. The apocalyptic language that he sometimes used which seemed to presage immanent catastrophe was about the fall of Jerusalem and the collapse of Judaism as a "national" religion. For the average Jew that moment was experienced as "the end of the world". It seemed to them, unless they were paying attention to what Jesus was saying, that the Romans, the empire of Caesar, had won. Judaism itself survived of course, but the Jews (and the Christians who were still broadly part of Judaism until the fall of Jerusalem) found themselves scattered far and wide. That was the event which Jesus was referring to in, for example, Matthew 24 and 25. Incidentally, that fact, predicting that "not one stone (of the temple) would be left on top of another makes it pretty unlikely that Jesus was fabricated out of bits and pieces cobbled together from the Old Testament, as has been claimed. Words like these would not have been put into the mouth of a character invented by 1st century Palestinians.

But it's getting late and I need to get to bed. I don't want to run the risk of tiredeness causing me to lose any important threads. So I'll try to give a fuller answer by and by.

317. Atheism is a religion and you're as bad as the fundamentalists

Comment #84776 by ADH on November 3, 2007 at 2:27 pm

"You just can't get away with trying to claim that science works as badly as religion. The 'you are just as bad as us' approach of theists is a sham."

I think that science works very well! When did I say that it doesn't. Science is beautiful! Where it does not work is when it comes to determining the reason for our existence and for that of the universe. That is why Dawkins arrived at the conclusion that there is no meaning and purpose ("DNA neither knows nor cares ..." "There is no meaning, no purpose, just blind pitiless indefference.") Of course that is what we see when we observe nature (red in tooth and claw), because meaning and purpose are not visible or determinable using the tools that scientists emply when they do science. If you insist that everything must be established using such tools or not establishes at all, then that is the conclusion you are going to arrive at.

318. Atheism is a religion and you're as bad as the fundamentalists

Comment #84774 by ADH on November 3, 2007 at 2:09 pm

"The atheist, and for a good number of reasons, BELIEVES IT in his mind."

You've just contradicted yourself. Christians could likewise say faith is about what we don't believe: we don't believe that matter and energy are eternal. We don't believe that the universe is devoid of a purpose which transcends it. I guess that makes us "amaterialists".

319. Atheism is a religion and you're as bad as the fundamentalists

Comment #84771 by ADH on November 3, 2007 at 1:55 pm

Steve I think you will find that the iniverse was assumed to be infinite in extent and time from the time of Aristotle until the 19th century, when the model began to be called into question. The name "steady state model" may not have been given to this paradigm until the mid-20th century (1948 to be precise), but this is a question of semantics. You will also find that many cosmologists remained committed to the Steady State model because of the implications with regard to the need for a Creator. Hawking made this telling statement: "Many people do not like the idea that time had a beginning because it smacks of divine intervention". That is why I used the term DOGMA. Scientists remained and remain committed to the Steady State model in the face of the evidence not because they are following the evidence wherever it leads, but the evidence is pointing them in a direction in which they don't want to go. It is ironic that the Vatican establishment clung tenaciously to the Aristotelean model for ideolgogical reasons, and several centuries later there have been equally powerful ideological reasons for which a large part of the scientific establishment have been clinging to some variation on the steady state theme. That smacks of dogmatism if anything does.

320. The truth in religion

Comment #84717 by ADH on November 3, 2007 at 10:06 am

Fair point monkey2. I didn't say that only the Christian gospel maintains this balance between individual and community. This is indeed the way humans have always found their fulfilment and their purpose. The Greek philosophers also had a lot to say about it - about finding and preserving this balance. But Christianity has come under fire for turning people into clones and drones. Not true at all. Christianity, rightly understood, helps people to preserve their individual distinctiveness without spinning off into their own little orbit. "He who finds his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will find it". If we are becoming clones it's not the fault of Christianity!

321. The God Delusion and Alister E McGrath

Comment #84692 by ADH on November 3, 2007 at 7:59 am

How is it that absolutely none of these responses makes the slightest attempt to demolish a single argument of McGrath's. You go on about his mannerisms, his phrasing, about him giving you the creeps etc. ad nauseam, yet not one of you has actually addressed his arguments. That is soooo typical of this message-board. It kind of makes one wonder which emperor has no clothes!

322. The truth in religion

Comment #84675 by ADH on November 3, 2007 at 7:07 am

"The Borg are an amalgam of humanoids of many different species that are enhanced with implanted cybernetics, giving them improved mental and physical abilities. Individual members of the Borg are called drones. The Borg function as automata; the minds of all Borg drones are connected via implants and networks to a hive mind, the Borg Collective, personified by the Borg Queen and controlled from a central hub, Unimatrix One. The Borg claim to seek to "improve the quality of life for all species" by integrating organic and synthetic components in their quest for perfection. To this end, they travel the galaxy, increasing their numbers and advancing by "assimilating" other species and their technologies, and subjugating captured individuals by injecting them with nanoprobes and surgically implanting prostheses, quickly changing their biological anatomy and biochemistry to the Borg standard."

If this is the direction culture is driving us in, "Religion" has lttle or nothing to do with it. But I do agree that we are moving in this direction. I would put it down to mass media, to the fact that via gormless absorbtion of the TV's staple cocktail of images and slogans, plus advertising, plus the virtual disappearance of the written word from people's leisure, and even from their formal education, we are producing a generation that is utterly incapable of critical analysis, wallowing in self-obsession, self-help, ego-massaging.

Having said that I do admit that swathes of Christendom have sold out to this culture of self-absorbtion, with little real intellectual engagement. Songs which endlessly repeat mantras aimed at inducing some kind of higher emotional state, sermons which focus on material and psychological health and wealth, and let the rest of the world go hang. People lulled into the absurd conviction that the next miracle is just round the corner, if only they have enough faith. The result of this mindless self-engrossment is, paradoxically, the loss of individuality. The "faithul" become clones of one another - same lingo, same thought-patterns (where there is any thinking worth speaking of), boring uniformity. But I should also point out, that "Christian" churches do not have the monopoly in this regard. The more self-obsessed people are, the more clone-like they become, and the mass media and the celebrity "cult"ure are leading us by the nose along this path.

The genius of the Christian gospel (unlike the multifarious and yet strangely uniform distortions of it) is that it releases the individual from the prison of "self" and makes him or her an integral part of an organic whole - a "body". Each individual is more fully him or herself the more they see themselves as capable of making a unique contribution on behalf of the community. I realise this is an ideal which is rarely reflected in actual Christian communities. But it is implicit and explicit in the Biblical text as a scenario that we can work towards. That insight has been the primary contribution of Christian theology to human society, and I defy anyone to show that we in the West have not benefitted fom it. But we have little patiece, we love shortcuts and we are too prone to turn our attention inward and become obsessed with ourselves. Once Christians do that they have lost it. They have sold out and just turn into the drones and "Borgs" that you quite rightly criticise them for being. But look around. Do you really see more "borgs", more automata, inside the church than outside it?

323. The truth in religion

Comment #84580 by ADH on November 2, 2007 at 3:20 pm

the Borg collective??

What's that?

324. The truth in religion

Comment #84574 by ADH on November 2, 2007 at 2:54 pm

BaronOchs, there is a lot of truth in what you say. As regards the strong claims made by Orthodox Christianity, I suppose you mean the claims relating to the identity of Jesus. Of course the question is, as you have rightly discerned, whether these claims were made initially by Orthodox Christianity or by Jesus himself. I do not think it is beyond dispute that these claims were invented by the Church rather than uttered by Jesus himself. I realise that a lot of serious scholars maintain the former. Nevertheless, there are (at least) equally competent scholars who maintain that the Jesus of the gospels is the Jesus who actually lived in Palestine at the beginning of the first century. It is not necessary to surrender to the often simplistic sentimentalism of popular religion in order to hold this view. Bishop NT Wright, for example, who could not be accused of pandering to popular religion, has compellingly argued that Jesus was indeed a 1st century Jewish peasant who preached the arrival, in himself, of the kingdom of God, and explicity confronted the kingdom of Caesar (he was politically subversive rather than "kosher") on the one hand and the Jewish collaborationist establishment on the other. His going to the cross was, paradoxically symbolic of the King taking up his position on the throne, challenging the powers that be to do their worst. His resurrection - yes full-blooded and bodied resurrection - was God decisively intervening in this world to begin the from now on inexorable process of putting the world to rights.

Believe me I have no truck with popular fundamentalist Christianity as normally understood. I believe it is soppy, sentimental, politically disengaged and inward looking, inordinantly and unbiblically focussed on personal miracle-working and outrageously individualistic. Its hymns reek with the "Jesus and me" and "all in the garden is lovely" theme. To tell you the truth it makes my skin crawl, and if Jesus were still in his grave it would have him spinning in it.

Believe me, it is just not true that the consensus of contemporary biblical scholarship undermines the accounts of Jesus life offered by the four gospels. If you are interested we can thrash this one out in more depth.

I also agree that Christendom in the past (and maybe much of it in the present) has been anti-semitic. But that is the result of seriously defective hermeneutics (not to mention our innate inclination to prejudice and hatred of the "other"). Luther himself was a proto-nazi in that respect! The Christian Church has a great deal to repent of!

325. The truth in religion

Comment #84559 by ADH on November 2, 2007 at 12:55 pm

"So The Samaritan stroy deals with Zenophobia that is nevertheless within the israelite loop, not the more deep divide between Jews and Gentiles."

That is indeed what the Samaritan story deals with. That was where the Jews had to start. There was no point in them trying to love their neighbour in the Gentile if they couldn't love them in the Samaritan! But Jesus himself exemplified kindness towards Roman centurions, for Jexample, in healing the son of one of them. The story of Peter and the centurion who loved God in his own way but on the basis of incomplete knowledge of who God was illustrates the fact that God's mercy was from the start intended to embrace Gentiles as much as Jews. Peter was loaded with culpable prejudice, which he had to be disabused of. The all-embracing love and kindness that the Jews might not then have been ready for, the Church was commanded to exhibit. The term "neighbour" took on a whole new meaning and stands now as a challenge to our innate (human not Christian) tendency towards prejudice and intolerance. Unfortunately of course the Church has slid back (or not really risen out of) precisely the kind of prejudice that Peter was guilty of. But the injunction in the New Testament is clear.

326. What the New Atheists Don't See

Comment #84528 by ADH on November 2, 2007 at 9:20 am

Quote: "I hereby nominate Theodore Dalrymple (ridiculous name) to be officially and permanently excommunincated from the atheist community."

Can you tell me when the Auto da Fe has been arranged for? I would like to come along.

327. The truth in religion

Comment #84452 by ADH on November 2, 2007 at 4:13 am

"If you find the arguments against the article 'woolly' and 'puerile' could you please provide your counter argument or are you all mouth and no trousers ?"

Once I have found an argument on this thread I'll do my best to counter it. Watch this space!

328. What the New Atheists Don't See

Comment #84449 by ADH on November 2, 2007 at 4:08 am

"What the Theists Don't See: Western civilization is built on science. Religion is only a decoration."

What ATHEISTS don't seem to see (tho' Dawkins did concede the point in his debate with John Lennox) is that Western science is actually based on a Judeo-Christian world view. Copernicus, Galileo (who remained a Christian even after his clash with the Vatican), Kepler, Locke, Newton etc. etc. Need I go on? Galileo's clash was not with a Biblical world view but will an Aristotelean cosmological model which can be traced back to Ptolomy. Although the Vatican had espoused the geo-centric model it certainly did not originate within Catholicism, and many of the exponents of this model were actually secular Renaissance humanists who had a vested interest in seeing the earth and especially Man at the centre of the cosmos. Galileo's views were not only resisted by the Vatican, but also by secular humanists.

It was in fact mainly protestant scientists, deeply committed to a Biblical paradigm, who rescued science from the clutches of Aristoleleanism. Without their foundational insights and exploration of the cosmos in accordance with what they saw to be their God-given mandate, science would still be in the "Dark Ages".

329. The truth in religion

Comment #84416 by ADH on November 2, 2007 at 2:59 am

Every new comment that appears here just serves to show how much truth there is in what Polkinghorne is saying. Keep digging folks! Your grave will soon be finished!

330. Atheism is a religion and you're as bad as the fundamentalists

Comment #84406 by ADH on November 2, 2007 at 2:33 am

"Religious fundamentalists end up making, and stubbornly clinging to, truth claims that fly in the face of what has been discovered through rational inquiry. No atheist who matters in the current debates is a fundamentalist, even by analogy."

I'm very sorry to have to say this, but that is precisely what not a few atheists have been doing lately. When the Big Bang was first posited as the most likely explanation for the beginning of the universe, the idea and the evidence were stubbornly resisted NOT by theologians, but by atheists (Hoyle being the most prominent example of such) because such an event pointed to the fact that matter and energy were not after all "eternal", and that they had a beginning which had to be external to themselves. The steady state model was, in fact, a dogma which few dared to challenge. Insistence upon this "dogma", in the face of evidence to the contrary, was precisely the attitude that you are attributing to religious fundamentalists.

Richard Lowentin has expresseed thus his a priori rather than a posteriori commitment to a materialistic origin of life: "we must not let a divine foot in the door". Is it "rational" to have made this commitment prior to one's assessment of the evidence?

Obviously if your definition of religion is "belief in a supernatural Being, external to the material world and responsible for its existence" then atheism is not a religion. But by that definition, neither is Zen Buddhism. But i your definition of religion is "a belief system with its attendant rituals and its priesthood responsible for mediating its "truths" to the masses, then atheism is a religion. It has its prophets, its priests, its "sacred" texts whose truths are taken for granted by its adherents, its rituals, its conferences, its boot camps, and much else besides. There is even a converts corner on RD's website for goodness sake, with its stories of Damascus road type epiphanies induced by private readings of "Breaking the Spell" (One spell to another!).

331. The truth in religion

Comment #84397 by ADH on November 2, 2007 at 1:47 am

The responses on this site to the article by Polkinghorne have (as I knew they would) lent huge weight to the points he is making in it. The average "new atheist" quickly loses patience with argument and descends with mind-blowing alacrity into crude, brainless ad hominem vitriol. Dawkins and Hitchens have led the way as pioneers of this style of debate, and their little flock not so much of woolly-thinkers as of non-thinkers, cheerfully follow suit, bleating out their predictable puerile inanities. Keep it up chaps, it's just what we expect of you.

332. Are the 'New Atheists' avoiding the 'real arguments'?

Comment #84145 by ADH on November 1, 2007 at 9:36 am

"No? Are you sure? If we still lived in pre-industrial, pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer societies, would your concepts of decency, worth and usefulness not be different than they are now? If everything you do, every action you perform, is about you and your immediate kin surviving until tomorrow, is that not very different than the sort of decisions we typically face in this day and age? The reasons we have "common human decency" today is because we (that is most societies) can afford to take the time, and have the financial, infrastructure and social resources to put them into place. In short, most modern societies can focus on other issues beyond mere survival, and that allows concepts like "common human decency" to flourish."

My dear fellow I am sure I am not the only one, even on this thread, who would regard this statement as crass chronological snobbery. So you really believe that the further we travel along the road leading away from these so-called primitive "pre-industrial" societies the more capable we are becoming of human decency! Socrates' dictum (later echoed and surpassed by Christ) "do not do onto others what you would not like them to do to you) was then rather out of place in the pre-industrial age in which he lived, was it not? I am quite sure that many examples of what we would now admire as "decent" and generous and altruistic could be found (if we had the tools for accessing the evidence) among the "hunters and gatherers" that you so glibly write off as "primitive". "Common human decency" refers to behaviour which we can safely assume to be common to the human species, not limited to those "lucky" enough to have been born after the industrial reolution! It is behaviour which (as you yourself suggest) transcends our survival oriented instinct. It is behaviour which has been rightly celebrated as "noble" and "public-spitited" and which has often involved a choice NOT TO surrender to the dictates of these instincts.

Your statement also suggests not only that early humans were incapable of "decency" but also that modern humans are uniquely capable of it. I suggest that that second idea also fies in the face of all the available evidence. The 20th century will not go down in history as a century when human decency, on the whole, prevailed over barbarism. Or maybe you have access to more enlightened historiography than the rest of us. If so, I apologise for my ignorance.

333. Are the 'New Atheists' avoiding the 'real arguments'?

Comment #84123 by ADH on November 1, 2007 at 8:09 am

I would argue that a scientific worldview, or rather an entirely science oriented world view, will indeed help to implement moral reform with great efficiency. But contrary to the opinions which predominate on this site, it will not and cannot offer suffiecient reasons for carrying out such reform in the first place. A moral climate which stands in need of reform is one where the weak are at the mercy of the strong, where they are left without a defense against the physical or economic, or indeed spiritual, "power" of those who would use them to their own advantage. Many atheists, I have no hesitation in saying, ight energetically in favour of the weak and defenceless. But they do not find their "grounding" for doing so within the parameters of a scientiic world view. Why do they do it? Common human decency is the reason most frequently advanced. Excellent. But "common human decency" does not arise out of the materialistic, evolutionary, survival-driven process.

334. Are the 'New Atheists' avoiding the 'real arguments'?

Comment #84092 by ADH on November 1, 2007 at 6:34 am

Ford Perfect, how useful is it to spend four years or more studying a subject which you have already decided is worthless anyway? More importantly, will not such an approach to an area of knowledge necessarily skew your analysis before you even begin? If you embark on the study of a "worthless" subject then of course your study of it will confirm you in that opinion, because your mind was already made up anyway. Anyone who studies a subject must necessarily begin with an inherent respect for their chosen subject. That would seem to me to be a sine qua non. Otherwise the conclusion that it is "worthless" would seem, to me at least, itself to be worthless.

335. Are the 'New Atheists' avoiding the 'real arguments'?

Comment #84014 by ADH on November 1, 2007 at 2:36 am

I would just like to remind everyone here that the fact that the writer of the article has a First Class Honours degree in theology does not automatically lend any greater credibility to his arguments than they would have otherwise. He may indeed know what he is talking about, but then so do all those others who have likewise obtained similarly impressive qualifications but who have not arrived at the same conclusions as he has. Or is he alone in "knowing what he is talking about" by virtue of his anti-theistic conclusions? Anyone who says yes has given the game away. The point is that what gives anyone any kind of intellectual credibility in the eyes of the new atheist community is above all else the fact that they have donned the uniform of the anti-theistic militants. There is something ironic about the fact that the "insights" of Edmund Standing are being celebrated by people who would claim that his degree in theology is actually not worth the paper that it is written on. Certainly it would not be, and his insights would be similarly worthless, had he arrived at different conclusions in the course of his study, as many equally and more brilliant minds have done.

336. Sam Harris at AAI 07

Comment #82666 by ADH on October 27, 2007 at 7:10 am

"Methinks she doth protest too much"

337. Debate between Michael Shermer and Dinesh D'Souza

Comment #80864 by ADH on October 23, 2007 at 8:39 am

Hanging is too good for those who claim that atheism leads to violence!! It's really about time civil society was purged of this religious scum! The first steps in this direction are thankfully being taken as we contribute on this forum. In the future there will be no Alister McGraths or John Lennoxes or D'Souzas in academia. People with obscurantist religious commitments will be frozen out of the educational system before they get anywhere near a university! Research grants will be withheld from anyone who is not able to demonstrate a wholehearted a priori commitment to scientific materialism. That's the shape of the future folks, and how glorious it will be! How wonderful it will be when it is no longer possible for these individuals to come out with their other-worldly arguments, or to fill the heads of our youth with their nonsense about being loved by some higher Being and finding hope for the future in that vacuous delusion, or to wage these unwarranted attacks upon supposedly violent atheists. One day the meaty, down to earth, substantive discourse "God is a delusion, DNA is all there is" of our Mentors Hitchens and Dawkins will prevail. We will all be much the better for it!

338. Debate between Michael Shermer and Dinesh D'Souza

Comment #80633 by ADH on October 22, 2007 at 11:59 am

What wonderul contributors you all are. You do credit to our (non)-movement. This is the grist that the atheist mill must turn on. We now live in a post-argument era, as the contributors on this site have been demostrating with such alacrity. The problem with using rational argument against these Christian guys is that they seem to know how to come back at us with seemingly rational (but not so as we all know) counter-argument, and some very unsettling questions, as RD discovered in his joust with Lennox. The battering ram of personal insult, the smooth-tongued sarcasm of the Hitchens variety, and the "This guy makes me vomit" approaches are much more effective.

As you guys on this thread have been doing we must proceed on the assumption of atheism. When you have made up your mind, as we have, arguments become unnecessary. We must keep using phrases like "as every right-minded human being knows, ..."; we must ridicule and verbally harass them; we must use whatever influence we have in whatever sphere to make these obscurantists look riiculous before their peers. We must pour scorn rather than argument on those who would admit even the tiniest sliver of the Divine into their discourse. Sooner or later a mind-set will be established according to which belief in God will almost universally be assumed to be equivalent to belief in little green men occasionally invading the planet and appearing to people here and there. Sooner or later the children of recalcitrant believers will be entrusted with other parents who will responsibly oversee their intellectual development, with regular "devotionals" from the ancient and contemporary atheist classics.

"There will be nowhere for them to hide. We will smoke them out."

339. Send The God Delusion to your MP

Comment #80372 by ADH on October 21, 2007 at 1:48 pm

Great news! But why stop here? We're obviously onto a winner with this one. I'm sure that we could arrange for "the God Delusion" to be sent to all our public educators, primary secondary and tertiary. We could even arrange, with a few Hitchens-style arguments to support our cause, for it to be read (alternating with extracts from "Letters to a Christian Nation", "God is not Great" and "Breaking the Spell" as well as from other classics by Prof RD) in school assemblies. Such bracing fresh air would serve to keep kids awake for the duration of the assembly and set them up for the daily grind. Maybe one or two more problematic passages would have to be excluded, at least where public reading is concerned, such as "DNA neither knows nor cares, DNA just is and we dance to its music". This is of course true, but it is a concept that needs to be delivered with some caution.

The idea of making the God Delusion available to our political leaders is particularly appealing for one other very good reason which no one has mentioned yet. Our political classes have shown recently that they are much less inclined to be analytical in their criticism and judgement of opinion than they used to be, and much more inclined towards the pithy, passionately delivered slogan. Perfect canon fodder therefore for material like the God Delusion and the other books by our other illustrious Mentors.