Has anyone actually read The God Delusion? I have, and am now reading Dawkins' new "The Greatest Show on Earth." Dawkins is a brilliant scientist and makes some fantastic scientific observations about the physiological human tendency toward religion, being that we are the only animals aware of our own mortality - and all religions are essentially DEATH CULTS trying to explain the post-mortem (and use people's fear of death to gain earthly power and wealth.)

So to put Dawkins in the same boat as the Religious Right, which bases their arguments on NOTHING scientific is ludicrous. Schaeffer should not be taken seriously based on this observation alone.

I see that he is on Flanders' show, promoting his book. Preaching to the choir about the evils of the Religious RIght, as if we didn't already know. When Schaeffer is on with the "enemy", taking it directly to them, let me know. Until then, he's just a hack trying to schlep his wares to suckers.

Personally I haven't seen any atheists proselytizing anyone. Atheists have a right to not believe, express their non-belief and present evidence of their findings...that's not proselytizing.

I have to wonder why religious folks are offended by someone not believing or challenging their religious belief ?
I mean...shouldn't all beliefs be challenged ? Isn't that how the truth is found ?

Give me a break!

Dawkins' evangelism rivals Ted Haggard's....

Be honest.

Hey, Frank, you might really benefit from spending the hours to listen to Terry Eagleton mop the floor with "Ditchkins"... big investment of time but these lectures rock so hard it blew my atheist mind.

I don't like how pro-Obama Frank is... ignoring way too much to maintain that stance... and I'm uneasy about the strength of his condemnation going to do nothing more than add to the hardcore lying right's power to motivate crazies... but that was a great interview.

Seriously, though, spend the time on those Eagleton lectures.

Agent 99 @3

Honestly I know nothing of Dawkins. I've never hear of him. You may be correct.
I have seen Chris Hitchins...he comes off an angry egotist with major issues.

My point is that any beliefs not challenged is bound to become shackles for the mind....

For the record...I too believe in the Divine...I reject how the Divine is characterized in most religions. I will listen to the Eagleton link...thanks...

GritTV is one of the best shows on television, on the ONLY channel really worth having: Free Speech TV channel 9415 on DISH. Channel 9415 comes with every package, you have it if you have DISH. Laura Flanders is one of the greatest, smartest women hosting any show.

I was pointing all that out mostly to take issue with the hero Soul Rebel's pronouncements on this subject, but also to everybody.

Dawkins knocked everybody's socks off with his The Selfish Gene, including mine, oh, seeeeeeriously, including mine, but it went to his head. He's an insufferable prig behind this outright vicious effort to out-vicious the hardline lying Christofascists, and Daniel Dennet and Christopher Hitchens are his avid compatriots in this overbearing reification of Science.

I am an atheist. I don't find anything particularly laudable about faith in anything... except that it's just nice and sometimes even encouraging of good things... but otherwise, pfeh, so what? I do really have a problem with deriding people's beliefs to the extent that you cease making a point and abandon reason in favor of purely brutal invective... especially when the most it is doing is selling your books or popularizing your blog.

Fuck that. It's evil.

And, while I have NO wish to support religion, "Ditchkins" and many others have turned science into their religion, as avidly, as devotedly, as unreasoningly, and maybe even more rabidly than most of their fellow religionists. One can be tolerant of others' beliefs and work effectively to make sense prevail.

If it's at all possible for you, try to drop your biases in favor of science, and his rockstar status from that one transcendentally good book, against Haggard's unfortunately extreme creepiness. I know it's hard, but it's a great thought experiment and only takes a few moments. If you manage that brief objectivity, you can see here that Dawkins is being seriously insufferably antagonistic, just dripping with the sense of superiority, and that Haggard makes some good points, especially the one near the end where he mentions "intellectual arrogance".

That last point is KEY to the entire polemic. It is the one thing that insures millions of should-be-Democrats will race to the polls to vote for the plutocrats, EVEN when you tell them it's against their own best interests.

Of course, nowadays, voting Democratic is just about as lethal, but if you're wanting to SOLVE the problems arising from fanatical religious fundamentalism, you DON'T feed the very basis for the fanaticism. I don't care how smart Dawkins is: He FLUNKS on this one.

We are continually dropping into the pit of polemicizing issues to the point where all it does is feed the opposition's energy and fatten politicians and plutocrats.

IT'S DRIVNG ME STARK RAVING MAD.

And that crap about humans' physiological tendency toward religion is just that: C-R-A-P. We are all, even the very stupidest of us, radically more intelligent than we let ourselves be, and even when we don't know we're doing it, we sense stuff from our own greater intelligence and we want it. This really puts the spin and velocity on the big questions, and on a hot desire to be able to rely on something. It drives some to organized religion, others to science, others to the arts, others to violence, others to healing, others to addiction, others to shut out everything else on earth in favor of family... just about everything... an obsession with nature... an obsession with sex... horses... sports! It's purely how much we really do sense but cannot credit because of needing to function in consensual reality, no matter what, no matter on which side of any of these rabid debates one might find oneself. It's only physiological insofar as it's our physiology doing the sensing, being so much better than we consciously allow it to be. It's the very intellectual prowess about which men like Dawkins are so vain that actually cuts them off from real understanding.

The mind is much more competent than its computational faculty alone, but the ego, especially the huge egos, will have none of it.

I had not heard of Dawkins or Harris or other atheists until tonight and did watch the Dawkins/Haggart video and read a bit of Harris to be able to put some of this in context.

Yeah so Dawkins was being arrogant, but you know what? Haggart used this as an excuse to change the subject away from what Dawkins was saying. Very neatly done. One minute, Dawkins was skewering Haggart about science and exchange of ideas, having called Haggart out (appropriately to my mind) on his hypocrisy in saying that he wants his flock to think for themselves. Next minute, Haggart had scolded Dawkins for arrogance, sidestepping the points Dawkins had made. And with the full fervor of righteous indignation in his voice, Haggart was arrogant himself, but he got away with it because he was prepared. It was a ploy to defuse Dawkins and throw him off guard.

Nice piece of religious right psy-ops. Of course we can't possibly listen to people like Dawkins. They're just arrogant.

Classic ad hominem. And arrogant or not, it doesn't matter how people like Dawkins approach a dialogue, there will always be the ad hominem attack that distracts from the actual ideas.

Next I checked out Harris's "Response to controversy."

Harris states that he has been taken out of context in many instances.

He says he has been taken out of context on the "killing people for what they believe" quote.

From his article:

The following passage seems to have been selectively quoted, and misconstrued, more than any I have written:

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan...

...Some critics have interpreted the second sentence of this passage to mean that I advocate simply killing religious people for their beliefs. Granted, I made the job of misinterpreting me easier than it might have been, but such a reading remains a frank distortion of my views. Read in context, it should be clear that I am not at all ignoring the link between belief and behavior...

Now, I ask is the distortion deliberate? Not, I think, by Frank here. But that's the beauty of the psy-op.

It was a ploy to defuse Dawkins and throw him off guard.

It is the unerring gut reaction of anyone on the receiving end of such an attack on their mentality, morals, beliefs.... It is the thread that binds these people together. It doesn't matter how lucid Dawkins' position might be, or seem, next to Haggard's, he was assaulting Haggard viciously and he got the gut truth in response.

We ahould all be so lucky as to get a chance to assault Ted Haggard viciously.

As I wrote in a previous response to Schaeffer on this - I can accept that people have many strange beliefs, of which belief in a deity is but one. I can accept, indeed, be thankful, that we live in a country where (theoretically) these strange beliefs are protected (not that my quasi-religious "belief" in hallucinogenics would ever stand up in court) by the First Amendment.

But I do not have to respect them. I do not have to respect the idiots on the Dover School Board, and the many like them, who would teach creationism alongside evolution (being that evolution is "just a theory." I do not have to respect that the least likely demographic to be elected to public office is an atheist (only a single confirmed atheist holds a congressional seat, CA-18, Pete Stark, yet atheists/nonbelievers are around 15% of the US population.) So yeah, I'm a little combative around ignorance, especially when that ignorance is often hateful and destructive.

It's a catch-22 always with this kind of thing. I'm intolerant of the intolerance of religious idiocy.

Anyway, Dawkins' new book isn't about religion, it's about evolution, certainly something he has every qualification to write about, and if you haven't read it you should.

Would that a vicious assault would actually work... but it actually fuels the problem. The recognition that most of these people, by their own lights, are acting in good faith, respecting that much, even when it's clear that it is fantasy, at least gets you to the point where you can work out differences, find the common ground to begin working through the ideological clashes.

Obviously many make their living off the ideologies continuing to clash and so anyone who actually wants to turn this around needs to do it on a grassroots level... and, also obviously, that means a whole lot of people need to turn into adults with their hearts and minds set on effectiveness instead of just letting it frustrate us so much all we do is vent our spleen.

Don't get me wrong, 99, it's not like I don't understand what you are saying - nor do I wish to debate the merits or the maturity of your position vs. mine. However, the more one speaks out against idiocy, the more it recedes (and the more one appeases idiocy, the more one gives it.) I guess I just have expectations that eventually human civilization as a whole will grow up. Could happen, maybe.

This is the first thing I've disagreed with you over in a long time, 99, maybe ever. But I do respect your position.

Thanks.

I find myself listening to Eagleton all over again, and now I have a better sound system for it and can hear it really well on the Real Player links I made of it. I hope you get the time... four lectures at Yale, a little over an hour each, and it's just dazzlingly good stuff. He gets right to the kernel of it, through these lectures. I think you might even provisionally stop disagreeing with me if you listen to him... or at least feel a little more patient with religious people.

The link above was to my post about it, and the image link takes you to the YouTube versions, but here are links to the whole shootin' match... Q&A and all... just in case you want to dive in at some point.

It's really very entertaining, and dazzlingly well put... sublime in its implications... and while he very thoroughly mops the floor with "Ditchkins", he also says stuff all Christians and atheists should hear.

xoxoxox

'Atheists proselytize' = oxymoron

Soul Rebel and Agent 99

Great exchange by you two. That is exactly the type of well thought, mature respectful encounters I would love for society at large to have. Sadly it seems only heated invective and spittle flying conflict gets any attention now.

Both of you present coherently your thoughts and beliefs. 99 I haven't finished the Eagleton vids yet...but I like what I'm hearing so far.

As I stated earlier I too believe in and commune with the Divine. Yet it's nothing that I can concretely prove exists, all I have is personal experience which lacks perspective for the outside listener.
I also believe that Universal Intelligence (God as it were) doesn't need to be worshipped, donated to or proselytized as much as it wants to be simply left to it's own devices to heal and express the Love that fuels it.

Most religious folks are acting from an egoic sense of duty that excludes the very Love that that powered creation. I say creation not to diminish evolution....the Genesis creation story is just that A STORY....evolution is creation in progress, everything evolves; from stars to single cells.

To get a sense of God in action...I invite you to study Gandhi, MLK and Mother Theresa....there are many many others but those three typify God's Love.

I also invite you to read Mother Theresa's statement about her doubts of God's existence and her faith

I think both sides could benefit from reading that...especially preachers and christian apologists that demand fidelity to doctrine.
If Mother Theresa, a woman who dedicated her life to compassion and healing doubted...then anyone's doubts are valid.

Atheists who ridicule another's beliefs aren't much better...Mother Theresa acted on her belief, despite he doubts.

Bradblog rocks....the most intelligent discourse on the web.

Peace to da' middle east...

Thanks for your points of view on my interview and Hitchens, Dawkins etc. One point: my beef isn't with atheism at all. Atheists may well be correct about the so-called big questions. My beef is with the silly tone Dawkins and Hitchens take re their superiority to all lesser beings, say religious people.

Do atheists live long enough to KNOW anything? Has science never fucked up? (Atom bomb and global warming anyone?) Does rationalism always work? I think the problem is that we humans are all a mess, whatever our excuse for bad behaviour be that God or Stalin or Mao.

I don't know anyone who does KNOW. We all hope, think, read a little and pass on. It's just silly to claim any final knowledge about the cosmos. That goes for the Jesus Saves crowd and for atheists too.

The point is you can deny or affirm spirituality, but words describing things aren't the things themselves. So the Bible is no less and no more a metaphor for reality than say Hitchens' books are or, for that matter, A "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

Reading comments here --- and especially in places I've written on this subject like Alternet recently --- one thing is for sure: the Dawkins/Hitchens groupies react just as defensively and irrationally to criticism of their heroes as the evangelicals do when you take on Billy Graham or one of their other icons.

99 wrote:

It is the unerring gut reaction of anyone on the receiving end of such an attack on their mentality, morals, beliefs.... It is the thread that binds these people together. It doesn't matter how lucid Dawkins' position might be, or seem, next to Haggard's, he was assaulting Haggard viciously and he got the gut truth in response.

I might believe it of a Haggard follower, but from Haggard himself? He is a consummate showman, and I have no doubt he had that "arrogant" argument ready to haul out when needed. If all of his little speech was extemporaneous, I'll eat my Unitarian Universalist chalice pin.

Dawkins, though hardly vicious, was deliberately provoking Haggard. Frankly, I don't blame him and rather think that it was his only hope of breaking through the facade. It got him kicked off the grounds, so I think he broke through.

Well, I guess you don't think having your Sunday service compared to something of which Göring would approve is vicious.

And, no, I don't think Haggard was ready for him. I think it was all he could do to keep from hauling off and punching him, and I don't think many would have blamed him if he did.

Even if it were a stock phrase of his, it's salient, and it certainly applied on the spot.

But, heck, it wasn't long after that Haggard had his big public meltdown and maybe Dawkins' disapproval sent him over the edge. Who can tell?

Haggard didn't bat an eyelash at the Goring comment. That was provocative, not vicious. Haggard was approaching vicious when he threw Dawkins off his property and threatened to destroy his videotape.

And after googling arrogant atheist, I conclude that calling atheists arrogant is the religious right's attempt to defuse the entire group.

Take a gander at:

Militant atheist arrogance and pride

More atheist arrogance

The arrogance of atheists

Also the atheist's rebuttal in the form of claiming the title:

The arrogant atheist

I call the labeling of atheists as arrogant a deliberate attempt to discredit them masked as righteous indignation.

Come on, come on, come on, I just watched that clip of Dawkins vs Haggard. Dawkins doesn't get in the least bit "arrogant" (if we must call it that!) until about 5 minutes in, where he says that scientific evidence shows that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. The arrogance comes from Haggard when he says "your children may end up laughing at you." I mean COME ON! Are we seriously to abandon real science to placate these foolish evangelicals?? This is not some knee-jerk defense of Dawkins. Haggard doesn't know jack shit about science, he has no scientific training, and yet he deigns to spout off to an Oxford biologist and Fellow of the Royal Society about the evolution of the eye using the classical creationist IDIOT argument that the eye is too complex to have evolved...WHERE is the intermediary eye, they ask, without recognition that the evolution of the eye IS ALL AROUND US, and that the human eye is far from perfect when compared with that of an eagle. And Haggard himself is being perfectly arrogant when he tells Dawkins not to be arrogant. Haggard is the insufferable fool here, not Dawkins.

I asked you to do a thought experiment where you didn't make judgments about science over religion or renown scientist and rabid fundamentalist asshole... where you just tried to look at it from the point of view of a guy with his church and this know-it-all coming in with a video camera and some nasty stuff to say. What I'm driving at is how easy it really is to see why these people are so pissed off. No judgment on the quality of either world view, just looking at the interaction, stripped of our biases momentarily.

The first time I saw that clip I started to freak about what Dawkins said to Haggard, but then I thought I was going to barf over how creepy Haggard was, and forgot about just how big a fucker Dawkins was being. Then I thought about it. Then I played it over. Doesn't matter if Haggard is a complete mess and all the awful things we think of him, from his point of view, or an objective one, Dawkins' behavior was vicious and outrageous, utterly uncivil, thuggish without putting up his dukes. It's amazing Dawkins didn't get cold-cocked on the spot. Most men don't take that sort of thing face-to-face and leave you standing.

That was way worse than the filthiest troll coming in and taking a shit on one of our threads. I don't think Dawkins called Haggard and asked to come video at his church and get his reactions to being smacked with horrific references to war criminals and mass murderers, even if he might have warned him that he intended to argue evolution against creation.

Dawkins seems to suffer under the delusion that his grasp of science makes him superior to Haggard. Sneers at Haggard's grasp of the Bible as though it and he were ludicrous. Spoze if he keeps it up long enough and hard enough all those people will just decide to believe him... want to slink off somewhere and hide... stop thumping on us with their Bibles? What binds groups together like no other thing is the feeling of persecution, the need for fellowship to hold up against persecution, and Dawkins is just heaping coals on that fire.

I agree that something needs to be done about how aggressive religious fanatics have become, but I hardly think being more aggressive than they are --- that way --- is going to cut it.

Accusing billions of people across the globe of keeping an imaginary friend would be insulting if it were not so deluded. I remind you that I am an atheist, and I remind you that Martin Luther King was not, was transcendentally not, and if there is no other reason on earth for people like Dawkins to want not to be total jackasses, utterly insufferable prigs, about this, that one should have done it, but no.

And what about those extremely salient points Frank made? What makes people so certain the scientific method is so superior to the religious one when science has gotten us into some pretty apocalyptic messes. Stuff people are sneered at for insisting all of a sudden gets picked up by a big name or big university and, pft, all that sneering just evaporates and we've taken science up another, probably temporary, notch. Science is riddled with outrageous weaknesses, despite its many strengths... but a bunch of us are really ill from its application on our food supply and its application in our environment... so... well... this really boils down to a school yard us vs. them thing, doesn't it? It does... when it is vital that we unify to get a bunch of global emergencies handled.... It isn't just our country. It's the planet.

Oh, oh, sorry, and, Lora, I know that they use this gripe about arrogance and smugness all the time! That's my point. They do it because it's true, and I chose a particularly vivid illustration of it. The madder they get, the more arrogant we get. We've had decades of experience with this drill now. Time for a new approach.

99, I think you are in contradiction with yourself, or maybe I have misinterpreted the many times you have railed against the Democratic Party. "The Democratic Party is spineless, bought, corporatist, and almost completely a part of the mechanism that perpetuates economic slavery, racial inequalities, class warfare, environmental scorched earth policies, illegal war," and so on, ad infinitum. (I did get that right, didn't I? And if so, I am in agreement.) I like politicians like Kucinich, Sanders, and now our new hero, Floridiot#2, Grayson. Because they have an intellectual arrogance and they lack fear. Now Sanders and Kucinich understand the way the power games are played in D.C., you have to stroke the right shafts every now and again or nobody gives you the time of day - but you don't think for one second if they could "get away with it" that either of them wouldn't be up in the faces of some Bach-asswards Boehner who is dishonest, stupid, incites people's fears - Jesus H I hope they would. And that's what we all loved about Grayson - he put aside all of the candy-ass bullshit and said "Enough of this. You, you, you, and you: Go Fuck yourselves."
These people are better because they are smarter. Not on a human level, I believe we are all equal there. But they are better equipped to make public policy because they have brains and they tend to use them in the direction of good rather than bad. That's a real plus in my book. The Dawkins-Haggard conflict is no different. Frankly, people like Dawkins - scientists - are better equipped by virtue of their intelligence and their study, to shed light on the origins of the universe and of man, and not some circus freak like Ted Haggard. That science has not solved all of the world's problems nor answered all of the world's questions is a straw man - it is by far the best information we have, and the unethical use of science is NOT the fault of science itself but the folly of man. Hubble looking 13 billion years backwards in time inspires awe and humility in me, and drives a desire to know more. In Haggard's flock the Pillars of Creation are a fanciful painting put on Earth by Satan to confuse the poor soft-headed followers of Jesus. It simply is not to be taken seriously on any level.

But what is a political party other than a belief system. Some are better than others, some are downright evil and hateful - yet I don't think any of us mind calling a spade a spade (arrogantly at that) when it comes to calling out the GOP or the Democrats on their nonsense. So why should a belief system that involves the supernatural be any different. Yeah, so Dawkins went to Haggard's church and called him out. So what? What's the difference between that and picketing the Republican National Convention, or the G-8/G-20/WTO(yet another belief system)? They are getting their parties crashed. And back to my original point about contradiction - shouldn't we stick it to people in the Democratic Party who sit on their thumbs while people die from inadequate healthcare and depleted uranium? Why? Because we think their voting record is stupid, or their legislation is stupid, or their rationale for being on this side or that side of a debate is stupid, and on top of it people are dying. We do it all the time, and it's not arrogance, we just think we're right and they're wrong - and regardless of evidence to one point or the other, they can dismiss it and say "Well, I get my facts and figures from somewhere else" (i.e. I know different scientists than your scientists). "Oh yeah, well I get my facts and figures from the CBO and the GAO and the WHO, and you get yours from The Drudge Report." Not unlike "Oh yeah, well I get my facts and figures from decades and decades of peer-reviewed scientific literature and discovery, and you get your from the scientific equivalent of a Crackerjack box."

I mean, COME ON!!

I'm sorry, Soul Rebel, my good friend. I think we have to try to stop putting so much emphasis on who's right and who's wrong on questions that can't be settled. We have questions that HAVE to be settled and calling each other out doesn't seem to work. I am convinced that the only way out of the bottomless polemics is to abandon them, to remember our common humanity and rise to the challenges by rising above our own urges to vent our wrath against people who should not be our opponents.

I mean, it almost amounts to a kind of avoidance tactic by now... subconscious as it may be. We have so much house cleaning that all the fighting is just avoidance of the hard work... and making a bigger mess.

I'm not talking appeasement. I'm not talking compromises. I'm talking identifying the real culprits and rooting them out. They're the ones getting rich off all these wedges driven. [I realize that Haggard was one of the wedge drivers, and my use of him here was only to illustrate where these people have real points.] It's either get strong enough to find solidarity on vital matters with people whose lifestyles, beliefs, opinions are radically different, or revolution, or succumbing to frank fascism. We can't really talk our ways around that... though we sure are trying to....

I hope you decide to listen to Eagleton. That was really good stuff, and I think it will give you good ideas and help relieve your irk.

I wanted badly to keep respecting Dawkins, because I loved that book, and because we have mutual friends and it would make it much easier on me if I could be more approving. But he fell into the trap of becoming what he reviles... and can't see himself doing it. The impulse to counter the dangerous surge from religious fanatics was sound, and warranted, but Dawkins has gone way too far, shockingly stupidly for a man of his mental gifts, and I really think he now hurts the cause more than he helps.

Grayson is dazzling, but he's giving his full-throated support to this crap mandatory health insurance bill and I caught his Democrats-have-conscience shtick and, well, clearly, we should spit in his eye when he pulls that crap. He’s new and so HE might actually take it, let the lightbulb snap on, and become a great leader... but... for as much of a relief as it has been to hear him actually pressing witnesses and standing up on the House floor... he's full of shit. He's a politician. If he were half the man he's trying to sound like, that bill would not be so awful.

He's got goddam nerve reading the names of the dead in the Republicans' districts JUST to get this piece of crap passed. I think I might have actually heard him semi-admitting that his sudden thunder these past few weeks is what helps him put this outrageously corporate-friendly bill across. I have to gather the strength to go find that clip and listen again, but I think I heard him say that. Even if he didn’t, he’s still throwing all his weight behind it, and so that is an indication we can’t trust him.

Oh, man, am I punchy... I'm hearing Tina Turner in my head.

xoxoxoxox

Agent 99, I started listening to Eagleton's lectures and quickly decided I'm not as enthralled as you were and am not willing to spend the 3 hours seeing it through. PZ Myers spent 8 hours reading Eagleton's book, "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate", which is based on Eagleton's Yale lectures. Myers read the book twice and has many specific criticisms of it which seem to refute your opinion of Eagleton's lectures. I would be very interested in knowing your rebuttal of Myers' criticisms. Here's the link (sorry, I'm not html literate) http://scienceblogs.com/...he_eagleton_delusion.php

A Course in Miracles asks....

As I think Agent 99 is asking....

"Do you want to be right, or do you want to be healed ?"

I think that's the fork in the road this nation has come to....right will be right no matter who screams the loudest, makes the worse allegations or smears the opposition the "best".

Right doesn't have to be defended...it does however need acknowledgement. We're not acknowledging righteousness when we engage to a higher degree in the tactics of our *opponents*...arrogance only begets more arrogance, attack only begets attack.

Maybe we should just *be" the change we want to see (thank you Gandhi); and stop trying to tear down the other side of the issue...let them become tangled in their own web of deceits, arrogance and intellectual dishonesty...if we engage them in the same way, we'll only have our own web to disentangle.

Thanks for the link, denvike, but while I'll check it out, it almost certainly will be something of a brilliant dud. I am immovably atheistic and have spent about twenty years learning how to drop what I only think, no matter how well-supported, in favor of SEEING and I can see the elegance of Eagleton's arguments too well. It's a damn struggle to endure the perfidies of organized religion, and to listen to hokum out the mouths of the unenlightened in any one of them, but Eagleton gave strong, strong evidence of understanding deeply some of the most important concepts that underlie most religious schools.

And BlueHawk's point above --- Do you want to be right or do you want to be healed? --- comes close to encapsulating the point I'm trying to make. Insofar as a lunatic fringe might take over America it will only be because the fascists deem it optimal to maintain their hold, so the fight for reason over superstition needs to be aimed at the plutocracy, the oligarchy, not at the people who might end up wanting a theocracy.

We always pick easier targets than the truly guilty, those at the heart of the problems, because they are too powerful. We risk our lives when we fight the real fight. We so hate to think it, we just won't and shift our ire onto safer targets... like the hapless hungry people the plutocrats abuse on the job instead of us... like the Bible thumpers they've found to be useful idiots for their never-ending wedge issues and cannon fodder... like the have nots who threaten to eat up all our tax money because the haves won't let them have enough....

So... well... thanks for the link anyway.

I live in a little town, one I could swear has more churches than houses, and most of the population consists of pissed off Hispanics who are staunchly Catholic, and not very bright white people who fuss over stuff like if The Lord will be angry with them for eating extra dark chocolate or buying a Lotto ticket.

The immigrant population will barely speak to the citizen population, scowl, cross the road rather than have to pass you on the street and acknowledge you, and the Spanish they speak to us is usually filthy invective most of us don't understand enough Spanish to catch. Even so, a few of them finally do smile at me now in passing, dropping the 'tude at last. The locals usually endure my barely discernible to them lefty pronouncements with a faint smile and worried look in their eyes. Mystified. But they go about looking for things like videos they think will matter to me and risk their skins to save the homeless guy under the bridge being attacked by transients. The very smartest of those I've met, the one with whom I can have the best conversations, didn't know where Honduras is, despite being able to speak Spanish fluently, and didn't know what a coup is, which ruined my whole tirade about Obama's first coup. But, then, I think I ruined him because he up and quit his job at the grocery store in favor of college.

The post master was a raging anti-Democrat Republican who fought with me over politics all the time. He had adopted SEVEN troubled boys to give them a good home and a good start in life, so, obviously, wasn't a selfish jerk. I finally started really talking to him about his political views, about what he wanted for our country, and the guy was a stone cold Democrat across the board... a real one, not just in name like so many Democrats in office. Turns out the thing that made him such an obnoxious Republican was his thing about abortion. He was adamant, above everything else in the world, that abortion is murder... and we are talking a guy who could barely keep himself from invoking The Lord every other sentence, except for Post Office rules against that stuff.

I said, "Fer crapsakes! Yer a Democrat through and through. The Republicans tease you with your heart's desire and you fall for it! You're helping them ruin the whole country because they keep seeming to be promising something they don't dare deliver because it will wipe out at least half of their base. Wouldn't it be better to vote for stuff that might make a better country and just work your ass off to get the abortion legislation you want?" I swear I saw a little thought bubble with a lightbulb switching on in it show up above his head.

He was converted!

Except. , he died of a heart attack about a week before he could finally go to the polls to vote in the Democratic Primary.

So... don't tell me these people can't be reasoned with.

That's wrong. That's just an excuse.

denvike

I have given your pharyngula link a hard scan and either the book is nothing like the lectures or PZ is on another planet. The idea that "Ditchkins" would never read the book being a point that leapt out as darn ludicrous. Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and others I can't name because I know them, were glued to it and, even though I have withdrawn most of my attention, feel it has actually tempered some of their thunderously ill-considered attacks... made a couple of them feign humility at odd moments... so... well.... Thanks for the link, and maybe I should try to get my hands on the book since I appreciated those lectures so thoroughly.

BlueHawk

I think we don't have to give up being right to be healed; we just have to give up wanting to impress opponents with how right we are... stop beating them over the head with it and start interacting with them like compatriots in this hell hole we call the world.

xoxoxox

Agent 99 @30

We always pick easier targets than the truly guilty, those at the heart of the problems, because they are too powerful. We risk our lives when we fight the real fight. We so hate to think it, we just won't and shift our ire onto safer targets... like the hapless hungry people the plutocrats abuse on the job instead of us... like the Bible thumpers they've found to be useful idiots for their never-ending wedge issues and cannon fodder... like the have nots who threaten to eat up all our tax money because the haves won't let them have enough....

Outstanding point 99...

Danke, danke....

If Dawkins were talking that way to any run-of-the-mill Bible-thumping average Joe or Joan I'd agree with 99 --- totally inappropriate and out of control --- arrogant if you will.

But Haggard? Mr. Mega-church Bush Family advisor and manipulator extraordinaire?

No. You can't have a dialogue with the likes of him. It's war and Dawkins attacked. A bit nasty - the Goebbels reference. Vicious, hardly. But straight to the gut with the science. I don't blame him --- I applaud him, actually. He shook the hypocritical two-faced willfully ignorant deliberately misinforming religious leader and I'm glad because any other language would have slipped off like water off teflon.

I don't buy any poor-wittle-Haggard,-he-was-abused-by-the-nasty-atheist line. How much of Bush policy did Haggard promote or even help orchestrate? How many Bush followers and voters did he bring to the polls? I have NO sympathy for the man and I have no problem with Dawkin's tactics.

Again, for your average God-fearing evolution-hating neighbor it would be inappropriate and would do more harm than good.

I wasn't stumping for anyone to have sympathy for Haggard.

The point actually was that any average Joe or Joan does take blinding offense to people being arrogant about their supposed mental superiority.

I'm glad you caught me going off down the garden path, mixing my Goebbels with my Göring, but I'm mystified that you don't seem to think the Goebbels reference was all that bad.

Hello! Welcome to the United States, welcome to our church....

Thank you. That was an impressive show. Goebbels would have been impressed....

Yeesh. Maybe I'm just too used to country boys, but even the most progressive of them would have clocked the fucker on the spot. End of conversation.

And, it just occurred to me, what makes Haggard's willful ignorance any worse than Dawkins' willful arrogance... especially when a great deal of his arrogance really is based on ignorance?

I can so agree that Haggard is/was pretty awful in a lot of ways and has done a lot of damage, but, honestly, I don't think he did more than Dawkins is doing by steeling the minions against his antagonism instead of finding some way to infuse a little mutual tolerance into the game....

I mean, I guess, we agree that it's awful for regular people, and only disagree on the point about him saying it to Haggard. I think Haggard, from his own point of view, is pretty much like everyone else, and gonna flip when some guy comes in and smacks him upside the head with that... so not going to slow him up on the anti-science gig... but, truly, might have contributed to pushing him over the edge, and off the pulpit.

I guess I'm not so willing to think that Haggard is an honest guy who is just preaching the word of the Lord; if so, I agree Dawkins was pretty harsh. However, if he can't tolerate having his belief system challenged sharply, then I should think either he is very vulnerable as a person, or there is something wrong with his belief system. I don't know the details of his going over the edge. Maybe Dawkins gave him that extra push; if so, he must have been pretty unstable already.

While I wish no one, not even Haggard, harm, I think he was doing a great deal of harm by spreading his lies about science to his flock, and much less harm when not in the pulpit.

I think you keep missing a crucial nuance to what I'm saying.

From Haggard's perspective, he's an honest guy who's trying with all his might to preach the Word. From the perspective of those on the receiving end of our harshness, our ridicule, we are intellectually arrogant... ergo probably dangerous, not to be trusted, people to be fought... for the good of all they hold dear. Many in these ranks are not very bright, not very educated, pretty tired of the world kicking them in the teeth and looking to the church to give them stability and community. Dawkins' crusade is completely the wrong way to deal with the problem. Attack mode, here, is just making things worse. In a real sense, they're already entrenched, in defense mode from the mundane cruelties of the modern world, and this just helps convince them they were right to take refuge in this mentality and feel a big sense of justice in defending it.

99,

I get it. The problem I have with it is that I don't believe Haggard IS an honest guy. And in trying to look at it from his perspective I keep channeling a shrewd, calculating power-hungry ruler who is outwardly benevolent but inwardly iron-fisted (maybe I'm just too vividly recalling scenes from the Jonestown documentary I watched recently). He's too slippery for ordinary civil friendly dialogue. Not only slippery, he's dangerous. Tactics are justified, IMO.

Why do I think so? I have no proof, but anybody closely associated with GW Bush and his policies is extremely suspect. Anybody willfully ignorant of scientific fact and into spreading that ignorance to thousands is also extremely suspect.

HIs flock will not take kindly to atheists no matter how they present themselves to the head hypocrite. In battle you have to bring down the generals.

Okay. I give up.

RE: Haggard....

He sure as hell wasn't honest with himself as regards to his sexuality. I'm not privy to his conflicted torturous delusions about his being gay. But it's pretty apparent the guy was in major destructive denial.

I don't know if he felt his sexuality something he could change or what....But he injured his wife and children because he couldn't be honest with himself. Sadly that's the plight of some homosexuals who are taught to be self-loathing. Who knows what mental-emotional-intellectual contortions Haggard put himself through to keep the illusion afloat...

Whether it was willful or not...it was utterly dishonest.

Almost nobody in history has ever been consciously evil in the Snidely Whiplash sense. We all have what we feel are decent reasons for doing what we do, or what we feel are righteous excuses for it. In this, one's religious ideas and political leanings are immaterial. If you could stand and accuse Hitler of being Hitler he would resist you to his dying breath, might even kill himself, or you, before giving you a chance to prevail in such a thing.

Rarely does anyone just capitulate to aggressive accusations of their ideals or morals or strongly-held beliefs being less than laudable. Usually the mere chance that these might be cast in an unflattering light causes people to feel threatened, and they become preëmptively defensive. If this does not derail the possibility of being made to look wrong, or bad, or stupid, or in some way shameful, they become outright hostile and begin groping around for allies to help obliterate this unhappy turn of intercourse, try to cite historical good guys who exemplify their good qualities, grasp at straws to use as cudgels... and stupidly frequently succeed in this.

No matter how progressive.

No matter how conservative.

No matter how religious.

No matter how scientific.

People modify their nasty behavior when their fellows, people in their circles, begin making it the companionable thing to do. One does not necessarily have to condone or excuse any of it in order to befriend them, help them feel they're going to live through taking their heads out of their asses.

The Dawkins side of the instant polemic is as nefarious as the Haggard side, and neither, clearly, shows the slightest inclination to budge. No. Certainly both wish to escalate. It's as though recognizing their common humanity and wishes for a better world and caucusing from this basis is completely out of the realm of feasibility... something space aliens do in sci-fi novels... or lunatics mutter about in the bin... but not, fates forfend, within a real world "civilization"....

Nope. Never that.

99, you should write a book. Seriously. I understand fully your intent on Dawkins, and it is a cause for introspection. Now, without tooting my own horn, I happen to have an IQ that is either genius or very close to it. I am often fully convinced of the merits of my positions because of this. All things being equal, the truth is I'm probably right about 99% of the time when dealing with the average person (family, friends, coworkers, spouse - dare I?) and I can out-debate (sometimes it is just 'outlast') them, point our glaring errors in their arguments, knock their feet out from under them (figuratively speaking.) Plus, I don't tend to enter debate which I can't "win." However, the result is more often than not a pissed-off (family, friends, coworkers, spouse - yikes!) rather than a "converted" one.

So your positions make perfect sense in a personally applicative way to me.

What is left for me to decide, or at least mull over, is what do I want in the end. I loathe the whole notion of having to choose between "being right and being healed." I have long made the connection that the two are one and the same.

Anyway, I may be budging.

Write that book.

Anecdote: I got into one of these right vs. healed battles with my father-in-law over Brad, of all things. I asked him if he'd read such-and-such story that was a BradBlog headline, and he told me that he'd taken Brad off of his favorites because he didn't like Brad's self-promoting tone (apparently Brad should't advertise so much where he will be appearing, who he will be filling in for.) Anyway, I thought his reason was stupid. (It should be known that there a very few individuals whom I will publicly defend under any circumstances: Dennis Kucinich, Michael Moore, Randi Rhodes, and Brad. That's about it.) So I tore him apart over breakfast, and the only thanks I got was "You are an asshole." I was a correct asshole, but an asshole nonetheless. But then again, another comment was "Why can't you just let people have their opinions?" And my problem then is where the responsibility lies, or is it the tact of the presentation, to let people know that they are full of shit (when they are of course - which is most of the time) and there is a better way of thinking available to them if only they'd just listen to reason. It is doubly a conundrum for those who do have a much higher IQ than the average, and again, I don't say that to sound superior.

BTW, did some shit go down between Brad and Randi after he filled in for her a little while back? I used to listen to her religiously, but then NovaM tanked and I didn't get the podcasts any more, but I caught the tail end of her saying soemthing that I thought was a snipe against Brad, and I never did figure out what it was all about.

Hey, thanks, SR... nice thing to find on my way to the sack.

I am supposed to be writing another book. It's my assignment from my teacher... but it's supposed to be a novel, and it's supposed to be something the general public can grok, leave them with some important ideas. I need to get to that... but having killed off both the writers in me, I have been trying to create the right space for the birth of another one, the right one. Doing drills where I don't say everything, compress, or just do a drive-by... just trying to relax into it and let it come when it's ready to be born.

I am clueless about anything one way or another about Brad and Randi. I hate, loathe and despise commercial radio... gives me horrific headaches.

I have some comments on IQ shooting its own foot off that should better go in an email and I will try to do that tomorrow.

Your father is right about Brad....

xoxoxoxox