Dogmatism
Consider dogmatism.
For instance consider Sign and Sight’s acid comment on Prospect’s list of Topp famous public intellectuals.
Who is on “top” has been decided purely by how famous they are. No one in their right mind can take this list seriously, not even the people who drew it up…Even those who are prepared to see in the Pope – a professional dogmatic – an intellectual, would have trouble getting him on the list. Benedict XVI has not got his intellectual status to thank for his number one spot, but his public office…
That’s exactly the question – can a professional dogmatic be an intellectual? I wondered the same thing in the teaser when I first posted the Prospect list, on September 22 – ‘Do popes and clerics qualify as intellectuals?’ A letter to the Observer made a similar point on October 2.
It is not just faith schools that encourage sectarian strife. The religious institutions themselves are the prime movers and schools, important as they are for young, impressionable minds, need to be reinforced by regular sessions of ‘worship’ in which ‘holy books’ are to be accepted without question.
Without question, you see – that’s where the dogmatism comes in. Authority, worship, holy books, without question – it all converges on dogmatism.
And Simon Blackburn also says it –
But let us start with the tiny bit that is right. This is the association of religious belief with dogma, intolerance, and illiberalism, and the corresponding association of atheism and agnosticism with liberalism and toleration…It needs to be said, loudly, that it makes no more sense to talk of faith-based schools or faith-based education than it does to talk of superstition-based science or terror-based debate. There have, of course, been educated and enlightened people who profess faiths, but their education and enlightenment happened despite their superstitions, and not because of them. Faith is by its essence the enemy of education, which teaches people to base beliefs on reason and on reason alone.
Just so. So much is faith the enemy of education that at its most threatened it sends ‘students’ to ‘Faith camp’ to learn how to resist education – how to resist basing beliefs on reason and on reason alone.
Spend a couple of days at the workshop and it becomes clear that, for many of these students, college is fraught with peril…There is also the subtle pressure to conform to a non-Christian worldview. There are biology courses that ask students to accept evolution, which workshop organizers and most of the students reject as untrue and ungodly. There are literature courses that see any text, including the Bible, as open to multiple interpretations. And there are philosophy classes that view absolute truth as nothing more than an illusion.
We need another sweatshirt slogan, to join ‘Rootless cosmopolitans’ and ‘Faith is not a virtue.’ Dogmatism is the spawn of Satan – something like that. Entries on a postcard. No, wait – entries in a large envelope accompanied with a wad of cash.
“but their education and enlightenment happened despite their superstitions, and not because of them.”
I think he is taking this a bit too far. Didn’t many of the early thinkers derive inspiration from their faiths, which may indeed not have been strictly orthodox but were certainly a factor in their passion for observing and undertanding the world?
He is being rather presumptious in attributing motivating forces to early scientists and thinkers raised in a more religion-suffused world.
But he said despite their superstitions – which is pretty much a tautology. You don’t get a lot of education and enlightenment happening because of superstitions, do you?
The essence of dogmatism is the
refusal to argue and the intolerance
of opposing views. Firmness of opinion
or vehemence of expression has nothing
to do with it. Don’t bother responding
to this – I’ve said my piece.
_
But again, in many cases, their very “superstitions” were what at least partially inspired their curiosity and research. That’s all I am saying. Especially since we/you would argue that their core religious beliefs are “superstitions.” Ther ARE many scientists of faith is what I am saying.
There are scientists of faith.
They either must compromise the ethic of truthfulness (to observation and reason) and support creationism, or compromise the absolute acceptance of biblical truth by separating the ideas of religion in to a compartment so they can maintain belief, while behaving as ethical scientists in matters of science.
No form of special creation is scientifically tenable.
Even the claim that ‘God created the earth with the evidence of age built in’ fails to reconcile theology and science, because it is against the character of God to lie; and his omnipotence does not allow us to have him say ‘Bugger it, I set those isotope ratios before there were techniques to distinguish them, whaddaya expect?’
The point about thinkers of earlier ages is, of course, that back then various forms of ‘faith’-linked explanations provided the pre-existent best-fit hypothesis for understanding the material world, so they were the inevitable starting point for speculation and discovery. That is no longer the case…
“Even the claim that ‘God created the earth with the evidence of age built in’ fails to reconcile theology and science, because it is against the character of God to lie….”
It also fails because it’s not science. How the hell would you even go about falsifying the claim, let alone testing it?
“The essence of dogmatism is the
refusal to argue and the intolerance
of opposing views. “
“Don’t bother responding
to this – I’ve said my piece.”
Was that an irony fumble, ChrisM?
I think it was a joke.
“Even if any god exists, no god is detectable”
Short-form …
“God is not detectable”
These two statements do actually say different things, and one is not a short form of the other, it actually says a different thing.
The first one says that entites called gods may or may not exist, and also that should they exist, they are undetectable.
The second one says that an entity called God DOES exist, and that that entity is undetectable.
The first claim in the second statement is not a claim I assume you intend to make.
“Was that an irony fumble, ChrisM?”
It was irony in the oft misused sense. (Morrisetian Irony – irony is actually saying one thing whilst meaning another).
It did strike me as somewhat amusing though, and I like to think it wasn’t a fumble ;-). Most of the original post was fair enough, but the final sentance did ruin it a bit. Or maybe Adam was intending to be sarcastic.
Uh, I meant a fumble on your part, dude. Adam was clearly being ironic (in a non-Morrisettean sense).
CheisM
Either way, congratulations. First use of ‘Morrisetian’, if google is anything to go by.
‘Here’s another testable hypothesis: “Even if any god exists, no god is detectable”‘
That is not a testable hypothesis – it would require proving a negative.
“First use of ‘Morrisetian’, if google is anything to go by.”
On the other hand, “Morissettian” has over 400 hits on Google, almost all of them having to do with misunderstanding what irony is.
“On the other hand, “Morissettian” has over 400 hits on Google, almost all of them having to do with misunderstanding what irony is.”
I was being ironic. I was saying ‘Morrisetian’ whilst actually meaning ‘Morissettian’ ;-).
“Uh, I meant a fumble on your part, dude. Adam was clearly being ironic (in a non-Morrisettean sense). “
On a reread of the original post, I think you are correct. DOH!!!
“I was being ironic. I was saying ‘Morrisetian’ whilst actually meaning ‘Morissettian’ ;-).”
Nice save. All right, no points off. This time.
All good, but doesn’t anyone else here get p1ssed off with this lazy trend for ‘list’ journalism that gets everywhere these days, including otherwise intelligent media such as broadsheets as well as 24/7 pleb-tv?
Sight and Sound cover it in their preamble, it seems to merely encourage debate (ok not necessarily right here at B&W) based on ‘my guy’s better than yours’, and an all-too-easily entrenched view simply becomes more entrenched.. snore…
You’d have thought an allegedly heavyweight journals such as Prospect and Foreign Policy would avoid this unseemly nonsense, but just goes to show how obsessed so many in the media are these days with just shifting units and looking whizzy. The tarts. Sign of our post-modern Age of Theory no doubt.
And ChrisM, Karl et al – why has Alanis Morisette got so popular with you so-called intellectuals? Have you no self-respect ?!
Yeah, she’s so popular with us intellect-chew-alls that none of us could spell her name correctly. Anyway, Chris started it!
Best not tell Olivia
;-)
“All good, but doesn’t anyone else here get p1ssed off with this lazy trend for ‘list’ journalism that gets everywhere these days, including otherwise intelligent media such as broadsheets as well as 24/7 pleb-tv?”
Yes.
I suspect they do these lists/competitions because it gets them a nice bit of press coverage – look at In Our Time or Prospect, they both did pretty well out of it.
G. Tingey wrote:
“Here’s another testable hypothesis: “Even if any god exists, no god is detectable.”
outeast wrote:
“That is not a testable hypothesis – it would require proving a negative.”
I don’t see that. I think it is a falsifiable hypothesis, but it’s a bit up in the air whether it’s “testable” or not.
If a God were to reveal itself universally in such a clear, unambiguous way that other explanations for the evidence were far more strained and complicated than “that’s God all right,” then the claim that “no god is detectable” could be reasonably inferred to be wrong. At least one was just detected.
The trouble — as others here have pointed out in the past — is that the requirement that there should be clear, unambiguous signs of gods or we ought to work on more plausible alternative assumptions is supposed to be a moral failing, not discipline or prudence. You should not “test” God to clear up your doubts about its existence. That’s shallow.
Far better is untestable, dogmatic certainty based on unclear, ambiguous signs. From what I can tell this is supposed to indicate that you are humble and modest and undemanding, like a small child trusting in mommy. Unlike the snotty, snooty scientists, too critical for their own good.
“The trouble — as others here have pointed out in the past — is that the requirement that there should be clear, unambiguous signs of gods or we ought to work on more plausible alternative assumptions is supposed to be a moral failing, not discipline or prudence. You should not “test” God to clear up your doubts about its existence. That’s shallow.”
Exactly. And it’s also disloyal, and unkind, and treacherous.
And what I always wonder is, is it really possible for people to resort to bad thinking of that kind in one area and not let it leak into any others? I have serious doubts about that. Is it possible to be blindly credulous and authority-obeying in just one area and thoroughly rational in all others? Is it? Really?
Ophelia wrote:
“And what I always wonder is, is it really possible for people to resort to bad thinking of that kind in one area and not let it leak into any others? I have serious doubts about that.”
So do I. I belong to several skeptic organizations which attempt to scientifically examine and critique paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Though they try, it’s almost impossible to keep religion and religious faith as a separate area to be left alone. The methods are the same, the reasoning is the same, the defenses are the same, the errors are the same, the way of thinking is the same. And once you believe that the universe is fundamentally magic and faith is a virtuous method to learn by — how can you then justify drawing lines except as a matter of taste, habit, and personal identity?
So the paranormalists use religious belief as a weapon of defense. Psychics will often excuse test failures or buttress their claims by invoking the existence of God as evidence that “there are higher truths than those science can discover” or “we all have to be open to faith.” And the general public is primed to eat it up. No argument is more familiar than that one.
What follows is something I recently discovered and thought the discussion of authority and dogma warranted my contributing to this thread. I lately rediscovered the Harold Lloyd talkie feature “The Milky Way,” which I taped about twelve years ago from a broadcast on Middle East Television. This station ran (maybe still does; am out of touch) family entertainment and one hell of a lot of content from CBN, including “The 700 Club.” As I had taped the movie by timer, I had a few minutes of the previous programme as well. This was the kids’ Biblical indoctrination session known as “Superbook” (animation about Biblical stories; I think a computer got fused with a Bible and swallowed up some kids into an Interactive Virtual Biblical Reality) and at the end they ran a plug for the eponymous magazine, available free by writing to a P.O.B. in Nicosia. The plug starts with three children, two boys with a smaller girl in the middle, calling out “Hey, kids!” This is immediately followed by a lightning montage. A few of the main terms in the listing that follows are just about perceptible; having now analysed it, I’m no longer an objective judge as to which, though I definitely recall having some surprises when I first viewed it frame by frame. The entire sequence lasts seventy frames, which is a little under three seconds. Almost all of the terms below appear for no more than a single frame. Interspersed are all manner of graphic effects, including a couple of frames with abstract designs that appear to contain letters, but I was unable to make out complete words that made sense. Unless otherwise noted in my comments following each description in square brackets, I have faithfully followed the sequence’s use of upper and lower case. Because I’m not sure the Comments set-up always retains spacing as put into it, I’ve put a parenthetical number in front of each frame description, so there’s no confusion about what was together and what was separate. I transcribed it now specially for B&W, but when I first hit it two or three months ago, I did some googling for “subliminal” and “Christian,” in case someone else had already investigated this. Almost the only things these searches got me was Christian complaints about corrupting subliminal messages in rock music. If any B&Wers have specific expertise on the cognitive/neurological side of this that could clarify specific techniques beyond the obvious general message, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
Here goes:
(1) Superbook Magazine [in addition to further instances noted, appears frequently in partial form underneath various designs]
(2) BeLIEve [all caps, middle three letters about three times as high as the rest; I took a tape measure to my TV monitor]
(3) YOU
(4) you WANT
(5) TRUTH
(6) Superbook Magazine
(7) JESUS
(8) FREEDOM
(9) We [6 times in same frame; three all upper case, three all lower case]
(10) Superbook Magazine
(11) JESUS [very faintly]
(12) MAKES A JESUS HAPPY [main word held over from previous, overlapping with “A”]
(13) MAKES A LIFE HAPPY [“LIFE” has replaced “JESUS,” it is in black, rest of text in white]
(14) LIFE [as previous, rest has vanished]
(15) know future
(16) EVERY
THING [filling screen, broken into two lines]
(17) answer AUTHORITY [both upper case, letters of second word nearly twice as high]
(18) [previous still in background] YOU KNOW
(19) Superbook Magazine
(20) IS
(21) Superbook Magazine
(22) Superbook Magazine
(23) BABY
(24) Superbook Magazine
(25) you CAN
(26) Superbook Magazine
(27) DO it [in black; “NOW” appears faintly in white]
(28) NOW now [upper case white, lower case black]
(29) IS THE now [“now” held over from previous; colour relationship maintained]
(30) TIME [“IS THE” still faintly visible underneath]
(31) JESUS
(32) MEANS
(33) life
(34) Superbook Magazine
Very silly two-point follow-up:
A) Nick S. – you did mean “sign and sight” and not the British Film Institute’s “Sight and Sound,” didn’t you? Just a vaguely amusing blunder, easily topped by:
b) the highly evocative typo in the actual “sign and sight” piece: “A look at his print run figures, at his real pubic stature, makes this immediately clear.”
Um… wow…?
It’s a bit wordy, but since you were good enough to mention Shelley a couple of days ago, how about this, from the “Ode to Liberty”?
“bloody Faith, the foulest birth of time…”
Ode to Liberty itself is not bad. I’d quite like a sweatshirt that said Ode to Liberty (or would that be confused with the Ayn Rand kind…).
Sastra agreed with Ophelia that ‘it [is not] really possible for people to resort to bad thinking of that kind in one area and not let it leak into any others’, a sentiment with which I concur. However, she went on to an extraodinary piece of reasoning: ‘[O]nce you believe that the universe is fundamentally magic and faith is a virtuous method to learn by — how can you then justify drawing lines except as a matter of taste, habit, and personal identity?’
What’s wrong with this? Well, in talking about religion this is bizarre; the faithful believe that the lines are drawn by God; that is, it is the religious who are least inclined to actually believe that the lines which should be drawn are ‘a matter of taste, habit, and personal identity’. In fact it is 20th century secularism which is to blame for the latter attitude – with no God to dictate ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ one cannot fall back on any simple absolute. When the faithful plead cultural imperatives, etc, they do so not because they believe that it’s all a matter of personal identity but because they know that it’s the easiest way round many secularists.
The fluffier faithful – those who believe but make up their own ragbag, pick’n’mix religion – are among the worst thought-offenders, but though their credulity may be drawn from their religious faith the fluffiness of their thinking is derived from their secular heritage.
[lazy hypothesis offered for savaging]
Fair point. But that means that the faithful believe that the lines are drawn by a fictitious being. They of course don’t believe that the being is fictitious – but that’s because they have ‘faith.’ Onto-religion. That’s the part that seems leaky – or at least, if it’s not leaky, I’m puzzled as to why it’s not.
Given the inconsistencies in the Bible and religious practice, how rigorous are most Christians? Are the New Agers the only ones guilty of “fluffy thinking”?
You amuse me when you state faith is the ememy of education. Apparently you mean if you don’t except the Evoloutionist theoris (who don’t agree with themselves).Depending on the teory, the age of the earth varies. Why, because it takes that many years for their math to prove their theory. My children have degrees in Biology and Chemistry. They are able to have faith and work within the bounds of their areas of expertise, wihtout having to except all the garbage that the evolutionist state. Just a question why do they not see their theory as an acceptance of faith. 50 billion years ago a big bang on a single atom caused all that we have today. To them this is much easier to believe than in the beginning God. I love to hear you all call us intolerant.
Actually, the Big Bang occurred between 12 and 14 billion years ago, not 50 billion. But yeah, otherwise you’re right on about evolutionary theory having only a marginal and dubious position in biological science. It’s an incontrovertibly documented and mathematically proven fact that few biologists have even heard of this crazy theory, and even fewer actually accept it.
I also believe in the power of prayer to turn the head purple. Woo hoo!
Ed: How many evolutionists have run an Inquisition? Built a pyramid out of the skulls of their enemies? Demanded that their sister be raped by all the men of the village because Allah and honor demand thus? Or, for that matter, attended the funeral of a beaten to death teen shouting about their glorious “God’s” joy at his death. Or purchaed books that describe in drooling, pornographic detal about how we are all going to get’s what’s coming at the hands of the God of Love?
Sorry, philosophers’ and evolutionary biologists’ “intolerance” seems pretty trivial compared to the god botherers of history And no, bringing up Mao and Stalin won’t convince me either, as radical Marxism (sorry everyone) STILL seems to me to be very religious in its thought patterns.
Brian: My answer was to the statement that “Faith was an enemy of education”. There are numerous atrocities committed in the name of religion, but Faith itself is not the culprit. Humanist, Atheist, Agnostic, etc are all a type of faith it is the person’s worldview, so now the question is has any evolutionists done any atrocities? See I believe the killing of about a million babies a year is inexcusable, but they (Evolutionist?) say it is a blob of flesh not a human. This than means that I believe evolutionist do commit atrocities. The back to nature people or Druids, Satanist, and others who High Holy Day is today will conduct several; just check out a few headlines. Supposedly this is the fastest growing religion in Europe and North America. Now to answer what the “god botherers of history have done”, many people claim to be do things in the name of God. My question would be whom are they calling God? When you read the book of “Acts” which is the story of the beginning of Christianity, the people being abused are the Christians. When you look throughout history, you will see Christians: who started Orphanages, fought against slavery, helped in civil rights issues. All religions but one require you to work to get to Heaven, Nirvana, etc. Only Christianity as preached in the Bible shows that it is Faith that saves you. Now several religions use the Bible to state you have to do all kinds of thing to get the heaven, but my Lord only requested two. Matthew 22: 37Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38This is the first and great commandment. 39And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Now when I read this I have a hard time believing the people you are talking about are Christian. Read the Gospel of John and the Book of Acts and see if you would still call them Christians. Now when you talk about other Faiths they believe they are working or have to earn their salvation.
Wow. Where do I even begin to parse that rambling, incoherent rant?
Are serious or just trolling, dude?
Sounds like we got the real deal on our hands, Karl. Ed, don’t know quite how to break it to you, but one of the assumptions not usually made by the people who frequent this site is that just being written down in a book, even the bible, makes something true. And I suspect we also see the nature of faith in a slightly different light. If you’re out to convert unbelievers, I think you hit the wrong site.
On second read-through I see that Ed–after explaining to us at great length and in stream-of-consciousness fashion that faith, not good works, defines the true Christian–then goes on to define the true Christian as one who does good works. Therefore, anyone who doesn’t do good works is, by definition, not a true Christian. He probably thinks this is a devastating argument.
Something here about Scotsmen, oatmeal, and sugar is in order.
My original answer was to the statement “Faith is the Enemy of Education”. The paper makes the argument that it is faith that is the only enemy. Now in the article it sates that Christians teach ‘holy books’ are to be accepted without question. Which implies if you don’t except them that you are somehow more informed. What the article missed as far as I’m concerned is no mater what you believe you are accepting it on FAITH viz, Atheist, Agnostic, Science. Now I don’t believe all science is wrong, but people do have a tendency to use it to prove things for profit, or all the drugs would not be coming off the market. Now look at the court case in Pennsylvania trying to ensure that intelligent design is not taught in the school. Those against it state publicly that it is back by the Bible, which the actual theory teaches that the world did not just happen. Now to imply these Non-Bible believing people are not perpetrating a form dogmatism is a stretch. It was “Brian” who brought up “god botherers” implying that they more intolerant than the nice evolutionist, who think nothing of killing unborn babies.
Stewart if you converted that will have nothing to do with me, but you imply that your belief in Faith is different than mine, but faith by definition is just trust or belief in something not seen. I have not seen God but I have Faith He exists. You apparently don’t believe in God, so you have Faith He doesn’t exist. You will use books, papers, research, etc to prove your point. I use the Bible to prove mine.
Karl the best example faith verses works, I can give you of this comes from the Bible; the story is much longer than these two verses. Luke 7: 44And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. 50And he said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace. When Jesus speaks to Simon an unbeliever he points to her works, when He speaks to the woman he points to her Faith. Now the answer is; it is your Faith that makes a difference, and we all have Faith. Just depends are where you place yours.
Just a small correction, Ed. It’s true that all of us take certain things on trust, partly (in the case of science) because no one person would even have the time to personally reproduce every observation and experiment that has given us the body of knowledge we have. You put this in terms of “neither of us has seen god,” and then say that you have faith he exists and that I have faith that he doesn’t, as if this somehow puts us on an equal footing. Do you have faith that everything neither of us has seen actually exists? If the answer is “no,” why is god the exception? I don’t have a reason to believe in god because I’ve seen no evidence for his existence (not just not him). I don’t know whether for you the bible is a narrative to be taken literally, but one of the (many) reasons I treat it just as I would any other text of similar age, written at a similar stage of human civilisation, is that the supernatural events described in it do not match my experience of the world in which I live. Inasmuch as I can understand some rudimentary science, it does match the way I’ve experienced the world. For those reasons, I would not compare the kind of faith I think you mean to anything that I can be said to have.
I don’t know if I shall be checking back on this thread. I do hope you appreciate my taking time to respond seriously and not dismissively to what you wrote. Should I check and you have taken it further, I would appreciate a clear answer to one question: if you thought there were a way in which you could bring me around to your views by discussion, would you try and pursue it? A one-word answer will suffice to let me know how to proceed.
Yes, I have never been hurt by discussion.
It’s not a question of hurt, but of priorities with one’s time. I am old enough to have experienced many, many arguments and discussions about these questions and unless something were to be thrown up that I thought worth considering and that I hadn’t heard and considered before, I couldn’t justify the expenditure of time. I have also experienced discussions that began provocatively promisingly but were only attempts to tease me into spending more time on the issues than I felt was merited. However, I do thank you for responding honestly and civilly.
I have learned through the years that I will never be the one who changes someone’s mind to my Christian beliefs and it took me years to learn that Christ never force his opinion on others. Now whether I have anything new to offer would remain to be seen, but Solomon says Ecclesiastes 1:9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. However I am told to in 1 Peter 3:15
But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear: I will leave the decision with you to proceed any further or not.
Ed,
Not to seem curt, but please take the time to make a clear, coherent argument if you expect a serious response. Here are some pointers:
1. Know thy audience. If you want to persuade someone of something, start your argument from premises we all share. (Hint: Quoting the Bible as an infallible source of knowledge won’t work around here.)
2. Don’t beg the question. That is, don’t use your conclusion as one of your premises.
3. Keep your issues straight. (For example: Don’t conflate evolutionary theory with atheism. These are two different things. And don’t conflate either of these things with abortion, which is another different thing.) Pick a topic and develop that topic; then, after you have properly developed it, connect it logically to the next topic, so that what you have just finished arguing for will support what you wish to argue for next.
If you do not follow these basic rules of logic and debate, you will waste everyone’s time and, consequently, you will be ignored or even mocked.
Karl
My argument was clear for the point I was making.
Answer to 1: I understand who the audience from this site is they would consider themselves Intellectuals, and some could be considered Intellectual elitists. Now I believe the Bible is infallible, but I did not use it to convince you of that; the use of the story was to show the difference of works only or faith, which produces works. You were the one who said I contradicted myself when I said that Faith saved you and than used the two commandments from the Lord showing that Christians should not behave in certain ways. I did not realize, because you believe the Bible is fallible, that it can’t be used, as an example of showing that there is not a contradiction in saying one must have faith and than works follow. The story just showed how different people look at the different aspects of the same action to determine the other’s motive. Maybe I am wrong; maybe there are more Atheist out there who have read the Bible and than made a determination that it is not true, instead of just accepting their Professor’s word or a web site like this one. The reason I wonder this is because of the way they dismiss it out of hand so easily when you talk with them. I have no problem with someone not excepting my beliefs, but the reverse of that is not true if you believe than your logic is flawed or even suspect as mentioned by one of the earlier commenters.
Answer to 2: To this I made the assumption on a definition. I take Faith as belief in something I cannot explain. I will stand corrected if I understand there is nothing that you except as true unless completely proven by facts.
Answer to 3: I guess the idea of lumping all groups into one category is distasteful no matter what side of the argument you are on. I understand that an Atheist is one, who does not except that God exists; an Agnostic believes there might be someone out there, and an evolutionist is someone who accepts a particular theory. However, I was responding to Brian, who placed all “godbothers” into one category, and used examples of two different Faiths, so I should not of made the connection that was how one categorized people. Now abortion is the atrocity I mentioned while it was rape and the inquisition that Brian stated. Now is Brian actually saying that all People of Faith commit these atrocities, or because People of Faith committed them all Faith is wrong. I in no way believe that all intellectuals think that abortion is the right thing to do, as I mention no one likes to be lump into a category and than dismissed.
Now that I understand everyone will follow the rules you mentioned, I have no problem with complying. The idea of being mocked or ignored really is not an issue with me, you grow use to it when others don’t except your beliefs. How I found this sight: I read on Fox News where the God Bloggers were going to have a convention, so I went to the Blog section of GOOGLE and typed in Faith, and behold this article was one of first few that came up. It was and article on dogma, which I also believe, is wrong, but they included Doctrine in their definition of Dogma, and than question if people of Faith (Rabbi, Priest, and a Bishop) could possible be intellectuals, so read the comments and than responded.
Brian used fuzzy logic, so I replied in like fashion.
I hope this was a clearer explanation.
“There are numerous atrocities committed in the name of religion, but Faith itself is not the culprit…Now when I read this [Matthew 22:37-40], I have a hard time believing the people you are talking about are Christian.”
As I understand it, a Christian is one who believes in the divinity of Jesus and the doctrine of the atonement. Plenty of people sincerely believe those two things and still have committed atrocities.
“the use of the story was to show the difference of works only or faith, which produces works. You were the one who said I contradicted myself when I said that Faith saved you and then used the two commandments from the Lord showing that Christians should not behave in certain ways.”
So, if you have Christian faith, you will automatically do good works; and if you don’t automatically do good works, then that shows you didn’t have true Christian faith? But that’s just another way of defining out of existence all those embarrassing counterexamples of the Christian faithful doing not-so-nice things. That’s an illegitimate move in any kind of reasoned debate.
Ed, please don’t take this as me re-opening the discussion in the way you’d like, but I thought it might be helpful to clarify at least one other thing. And that other thing is yet another area in which a religious attitude and an atheist attitude are not comparable (by “atheist,” I’m not talking about someone who claims there is proof there is no god; I’m sure Karl and just about everybody else who comments on B&W would agree that such people are idiots). While it may seem to you that both sides are somehow campaigning for their beliefs or non-beliefs in a similar manner, there is a crucial difference. In order not to get bogged down in all the different belief systems, let’s limit the religious side to Christianity for a moment. There one has a belief in an immortal soul and often specific calls to act so that the souls of others will not be damned for eternity. Without that belief, on the other side, one has only a desire for the maximum harmony and the minimum needless suffering in the here and now. Where you have an uphill battle is that you, to a great extent, are talking about questions that don’t seem relevant to the other side, since they ultimately relate to a future existence in which you believe but they don’t. I don’t know any atheists I would consider rational who are out to limit beliefs they may consider irrational in others, in the sense of curbing their individual freedoms. If you look closer, I think you will find that in the majority of cases in which atheists do act as a group against something religious it is because they perceive their own rights infringed by it (because it has attained a power that goes well beyond the realm of private individual belief). On the whole, though, I see a situation in which the religious have a far greater interest in persuading non-believers than vice versa, which therefore leads to a lot of very one-sided arguments.
You write “Maybe I am wrong; maybe there are more Atheist out there who have read the Bible and than made a determination that it is not true, instead of just accepting their Professor’s word or a web site like this one.” I consider this welcome humility. I accept that there may be (in fact, certainly are) some people out there calling themselves atheists who are dogmatic and approach the subject unintelligently and without being sufficiently informed. I would certainly not wish to be considered representative of them. I can’t think of any atheists I know who got like that because a professor said so or because they saw it on a website. I know many who are perfectly familiar with texts considered sacred by the religious, as well as many who emerged from religous backgrounds themselves. I think it safe to say that you will find very few atheists who are that way because of ignorance about religion. The bottom line, however, is that you have a far greater desire to tell us about your belief than we desire to tell you of our non-belief. We support education that does not indoctrinate, but that’s hardly the same thing, because we see indoctrination of children as something that closes off most avenues of thought rather than opening them. It is not my intention to persuade you out of a religion, or faith, that, I daresay, provides you with comfort. But, from this brief exchange, it appears to me that if you looked a little more closely at what goes on in the minds of atheists who do not match the negative stereotypes with which we are familiar, you may be in for some surprises.