Authors such as John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, and more recently George H. Smith, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, David Eller, and Sam Harris have put forth eloquent and effective testaments to disbelief, refuting a history of religious apologia from Aquinas to C.S. Lewis.
Footnote 166:
This monopoly also helps to explain the humanitarian abuses of ostensibly secular states (which are often cited as arguments against atheism): despots such as Stalin and Mao were not bona fide secularists, but as Harris writes had simply co-opted secular language while transforming communist ideology into something practiced as a religion. Such is the extent of the church’s historical grip on the state apparatus and governing culture: even so-called secularizing forces were often oppressive in the same way religious ones had been. Source: Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 79.
tpaine posted:i also think it's ridiculous and reeks of desperation to assume that new atheists had even a gnat's fart of an impact on american islamophobia at any stage
inside a pepe frog sam harris meme
tpaine posted:the strong connection between religion and capitalism, which is something this dingus forum never seems to want to discuss and i'm sure won't do it now
there's a lot of really interesting connections between religion and capitalism and i would be interested in such a discussion, assuming it proceeds along material lines.
tpaine posted:Petrol posted:
you could just start a thread if you actually want to talk about stuff. sometimes i think the wind changed one day and you were stuck being the cynical old clown who cried
that's a weird metaphor
in australian clowns are ancient wind deities
tpaine posted:did you read it
I read bits now and then. I might speed up soon because it's much better once you get past the initial religion arguments, not because I necessarily disagree with you but it doesn't break new ground in that tired argument treadmill and I have a personal distaste for thought experiments and the like.
tpaine posted:BadNewzKennels posted:Religion is too bound up in generic human behavior to be able to criticize it as the root of all evil imo. Like people may have used it as a way to identify in- and out-groups as they were fighting over resources but those resources were going to be fought over in any case.
I'm perfectly fine lumping religion in with a general irrationality and ignorance of science as the root cause of all evil but if you don't consider religion a uniquely poisonous aspect of a general human weakness then i don't what to tell you, except that you're a butt bird. and you don't want to be a butt bird do you
Okay I think the point of contention here is that realizing there's no supernatural world (or more accurately, that there's no reason to assume such but as Isaac Asimov said we're emotional beings so it's alright to be vehement on the topic if you want) does not make you smarter in the same way that say reading Wilhelm Meister does. It just comes down to what's life-affirming, Sophocles operated within the framework of religion and his plays are a good reason existence should have happened. Being an atheist is an improvement but that alone is not going to do the heavy lifting for you; guys like Harris act like it does which is bad and gay (not a homophobe) and which is in fact a burden on the intellectual life of a nation.
I have the utmost respect for your body of posting btw but pretending like a population becoming less religious but not taking to heart Schopenhauer and/or Nietzsche is anything other than a gigantic wasted opportunity is just taking the same shortcuts the people you criticize do.
shriekingviolet posted:a personal distaste for thought experiments
what is the definition of thought experiment in this context. is it like if someone asks you "so what would you do if you could do anything" and you go "AUGH!!" like charlie brown and walk out of the room
