Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion.

[NorthernMonkey]

I just want to say we've beaten the "Who gets their name in the locked beta forum this year?" by about a hundred replies. I would like to take a moment to thank all of you who made this happen.

We've only just started...

[andydes]

[Half time whisle]

Right, everybody switch sides. Everyone must be bored arguing the same points, anyway. It's time for a change.

I can feel the power of the Lord surging through me now, who want's to be saved first?

[Angstrom]

the word of the Bible is the literal word of God, our creator, an overscale human male who lives in the sky. In addition to being anthropomorphically shaped and concerned only with the toing and froing of humans, He is 'without beginning or end' and powerful enough to create an infinite universe, one larger than himself.
He is both infinitely merciful and good while being also vengeful and jelous, without fear of conflict, because we cannot know God as He moves in a mysterious way, although we can "know Him" through Jesus Christ our saviour who died on the cross for our sins. Mainly that was an attonement for our original Sin, when Adam (the original human and a white man), 4000 years ago took an apple from the tree of knowledge, which is not any kind of metaphor, but was a real tree.


mmm, I feel all warm and savedy inside. how marvelous.

[muscleandhate]

the word of the Bible is the literal word of God, our creator, an overscale human male who lives in the sky. In addition to being anthropomorphically shaped and concerned only with the toing and froing of humans, He is 'without beginning or end' and powerful enough to create an infinite universe, one larger than himself.
He is both infinitely merciful and good while being also vengeful and jelous, without fear of conflict, because we cannot know God as He moves in a mysterious way, although we can "know Him" through Jesus Christ our saviour who died on the cross for our sins. Mainly that was an attonement for our original Sin, when Adam (the original human and a white man), 4000 years ago took an apple from the tree of knowledge, which is not any kind of metaphor, but was a real tree.


mmm, I feel all warm and savedy inside. how marvelous.

What the fuck man, did you just make that up? Sounds like a cool story.

[andydes]

Heh, heh, I may have opened the flood gates for a host of sarcastic posts.

However, I've two questions for you godless heathens.

What's the simplest form of life possible that must have randomly been thrown together when life first started? ie. must have been able to change other basic organic molecules into replicas of itself to reproduce and kick start the whole evolution process? Is there a theory of how these could evolve into more complicated single cell organisms one tiny step at a time? As most of the parts of a cell would be useless without the others all working together.

The four basic forces of gravity, electromagnitism, strong and weak nuclear forces are all in very fine ballance. If any one of these was different by a fraction of a percent, then the universe couldn't exist in a form that could surport life. eg. no nuclear fussion, no stars or planets, no complex molecules. Is this evidence that the values of the fundamental forces were defined by something with a vested interest in creating life? ie God.

"I believe in a life eternal, as promised by our lord, Jesus christ" The Wickerman (the good one, not that Nicholas Cage rubbish).

[JACKAL & HYDE]

Was Dawkins there to see the so called "Miracles"? No

No scientist ever is there, that's the key. All miracles to date have only been witnessed by the believers, and no physical evidence is left behind of any measurable significance. Junkies are helped through withdrawal syndromes, but god has never fixed a limb, replaced an eye, or even meted out grace and miracles in any semblance of order...... Like I said before again and again, miracles tend to happen to rich white europeans, and very randomly to others.
Once again, people are not jumping up and down to answer this, because there is no answer that makes religion look good. The bible pretty much states that miracles will occur to those that pray etc. but in real life it simply does not work that way.

I've already defended the position on God/no God so well on page 75 of this thread, that no credible scientist world wide could jump in with a slam dunk. And although I question his existence myself, anyone with half a brain knows that the christians believe that there were no real "miracles" after Jesus. They believe (as was written in the Bible) that God had had it, wanted to take this planet and destroy everything on it including us, but instead, sent his "son" down and asked the people to just simply believe. i.e. no more sacrifice, rituals, death... So the "praying - oh my God its a miracle!" is only mans hope. There is nothing in the Bible as you've stated about miracles being performed now; after Christ. If there were, there would be no Faith, eveything would be absolute. And I can only imagine that if God was sitting in the sky with big red eyes exclaiming "WORSHIP" every day, the world would be a real shitty Orwellian place. If I were a God, I dont think I'd design it that way either.

[Angstrom]

The four basic forces of gravity, electromagnitism, strong and weak nuclear forces are all in very fine ballance. If any one of these was different by a fraction of a percent, then the universe couldn't exist in a form that could surport life.

Are you familiar with the "anthropic principles" , mainly the weak one?
roughly speaking they can be summed up by the phrase
"so its all about you eh monkey boy" or possibly "so if you weren't here you wouldn't be reading this but because you are you are."

Lets imagine a big bang on more than 4 dimensions, a universal 'beginning' that makes use of the multiple worlds theory. In millions of universes the hydrogen bond is weak, or gravity tastes of purple - but out of an infinity of universes created by the big Brane crash two of them have the forces all balanced nice. Unfortunately one of them smells of burnt cabbage and the other has this really annoying monkey planet.

[djadonis206]

Right off the bat Dawkins says the most ignorant statement imaginable and loses me. Dawkins - "The Universe would be a very different place if there was such a thing as a God". < This was 10 sec into the interview. First off, how in the fuck would anyone know that?
So what is he saying? That if there was a God, there would be no death/destruction and pain? Idiot... So what? We'd all run around in a peaceful weeee fun fun teletubbie environment 24/7 telling each other we love each other all day and no one would ever get hurt or die? Shut up... Its more likely a God (if one exists) would never create such a thoughtless shit place by any stretch of this clowns imagination. How about living the human experience? Work/happines Pain/Joy Positive/Negative? Even if most of us are undecided on the existence of a God, science would be the last place I'd look for an answer for the truth. A bunch of zealot egomaniac Oxford types like yourself and scientists that cant even tell us what the fck lies beyond the event horizon of a black hole 10,000,000 light years from here or what was before the "Big Bang" trying to act like you have all the answers. lol And that by reverse engineering a few mysteries here on Earth in the last century you feel you can claim without a shadow of a doubt that there is no God? Paaalese... Even Forest Gump would have the where with all to ask the question "What if God created man through evolution"? Destroying half of the scientific communities argument. I'm no religious zealot, but even an ass could see through this Dawkin clowns garbage.

And on "Religion" I think WIRED Magazine (A pro Evolution/Science mag) made a great point a few months ago on this.

"Gary Wolf describes the disdain that the New Atheists have for believers. One could argue that religious fervor has caused more grief than any other motivator (see the Crusades, the Inquisition and ongoing Middle East unrest).

But the root cause of such strife is not belief in God - but it's intolerance of the beliefs of others. The conviction that ones chosen religion is the only path to salvation and that other religions are populated with Infidels deserving of conversion or slaughter is at the crux of almost every struggle on the planet today. Sadly, since atheists exhibit the same dismissive intolerance, they are no different from or better than any of these groups.

Thinking that religion is somehow the cause of all the fighting in the World and that getting rid of it will bring about peace is to be completely blind and ignorant to history. The greatest destruction of human life and freedom in the past century was caused by atheist countries. If atheism is adopted by governments and humanity; once again, it will lead to nothing more than dictatorship & brutality (survival of the fittest) and Mass murder (extermination of opposing or unwanted biological masses)." (By the millions)

Well put...

and calling people stupid because they pray is kind of lame

you've heard the story about the super religious guy who gets trapped in a flood - this guy went to church everyday and prayed every night

a news story says a flood is coming and for people to evacuate

the guy starts praying - he says god will protect him

well this flood happens and he has to climb up on his roof to survive. He starts praying for Jesus to rescue him. While he's praying a boat comes by and yells to the guy to jump in

he says, "God's going to help me. I'm waiting on him"

a helicopter swoops down and says "hop in!"

he says, "nah, I'm praying to god.. He's going to help me."

well eventually the guy dies on his roof - he gets to heaven and confronts god

"Hey asshole, I thought you were going to help me!"

god says

"Dumbass, I sent you a boat, a helicopter and told you well in advance a fucking flood was coming."

the point, if you're waiting for some parting of the red seas or turning blood to wine then you're going to wait for ever

but prayer does work, if you believe in prayer and have faith - drug addicts are given other drugs addicts to help work through their problems (meetings) cancer patients are given doctors, hospitals and really smart people who are working on a cure

[djadonis206]

and more on the subject of prayer taken from the hit tv show South Park

STAN
Jesus, why does God hate me?

JESUS
Huh? He doesn't hate you, he hates me.
He's gonna let me be crucified again.


STAN
He hates me more. He doesn't answer
my prayers. I prayed to him every day
and he never answered me.

JESUS
Well, yeah, but just because God doesn't
answer your prayers doesn't mean he
doesn't care about you.

STAN
Well then, why didn't he give me what
I wanted?

JESUS
Well, God can't just answer every prayer
and suddenly give you everything you
want. That takes all the living out
of life.

STAN
What do you mean?

JESUS
If God answered all our prayers, there'd
be nothing left for us to do ourselves.
Life is about problems, and overcoming
those problems. A-and growing and learning
from obstacles. If God just fixed everything
for us, then there'd be no point in
our existence. That's why he wouldn't
show up to my New Year's party.

STAN
I just wanted my period.

[dj superflat]

i cannot quite believe that this thread is this long, even given the controversial nature of the thread. is this the longest non-poll thread ever?

[Nuance24]

Atheism is not intended IMO as an opponent to religion.

So do you think atheism - a belief system of 'no god' - would exist without belief systems of god?

Evolution is definitely not set up as an opponent to religion, it's not a religion, and it's very sad that people are blind to this.

Please elaborate. Are you familiar with the Renaissance period? Do you think that would have happened without the ubiquity of christianity at the time? Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, to name a few, are arguable the most instrumental people on our current spiritual/non spiritual views. To disagree with ones spiritual beliefs is inherently to create your own. What is explicitly two is implicitly one.

Listened to the podcast. The man is full on new age. What I'm doing is much better than the church.... etc. Eastern mysticism and Jung etc.

In the 30+ hrs of his lectures i have listened to thus far, i have yet to hear him say he is in any way more important than any church of any religion. I think you would be more interested to hear his stuff on the ego and the self and how we identify our 'self.'

My parents are into this stuff, and honestly, my take is it's hit or miss whether it works to calm a person down or not. My step mom is deep into it, and she's a wreck to this day.

Anybody who looks to religion or philosophy to solve their problems is only creating a support system for the problems to exist. If someone were to tell me they had a problem i would ask who exactly has the problem.. Show me your real self.. It's impossible.. It's all an illusion.

Personally my take is people look to religion and spirituality for a sense of calm outside themselves, they want a system of some sort that imposes order on the chaos they feel inside etc. and it works to a degree, but not really.

Christianity loves to tell people that faith will heal all their problems. Just donate, come to church and do good and all will be well. Then people find that that's all a lie so they look elsewhere, yet they carry with them the beliefs that there is some other religion that really does solve their problems or they realize that everyone's full of shit and turn to science and view the world as some sort of machine and themselves as puppets.. Anything to keep the ego alive.

People become indoctrinated and lose their sense of wonder at the world, but at some core level I believe any thinking person knows they have not figured it all out

I would never consider an interest in philosophy or open mindedness the equivalent of indoctrination and have only recently learned to really see the beauty of the world.. I don't know why everyone thinks they need to figure out the meaning of everything, what fun would that bring? I think that desire is just another symptom of people trying to solve their problems and forgetting that life is the meaning. This is it.

[Tone Deft]

What's the simplest form of life possible that must have randomly been thrown together when life first started? ie. must have been able to change other basic organic molecules into replicas of itself to reproduce and kick start the whole evolution process? Is there a theory of how these could evolve into more complicated single cell organisms one tiny step at a time? As most of the parts of a cell would be useless without the others all working together.

From what I remember about scientists putting simulated lightning strikes into pools of goo... They were looking for amino acids to form, the building blocks of proteins. Viruses are crazy simple forms of almost life, they're just molucules with binding sites and the ability to reproduce rampantly.

The four basic forces of gravity, electromagnitism, strong and weak nuclear forces are all in very fine ballance. If any one of these was different by a fraction of a percent, then the universe couldn't exist in a form that could surport life. eg. no nuclear fussion, no stars or planets, no complex molecules. Is this evidence that the values of the fundamental forces were defined by something with a vested interest in creating life? ie God.

They're not in balance, they're in stasis, more or less. Gravity for example is quite weak, while the strong nuclear force is quite strong. If the forces were to change then the world as we know it would just fall/pull apart.

To me that's another one of those "Here's an impossible question, the only answer can be god." That mentality would keep us in the dark ages. Curiousity is a wonderful thing, 'god' stifles that.



God is dead
and no one cares
if there's a hell
I'll see you there.
With all the NIN nails talk, I had to drop that.


There is no god, there is no devil, just chaos and it's beautiful.

Have a religion, be happy, we can all agree on that basics, be cool to other people, clean up after yourself, let's work together to make the world a better place.

Bill & Ted put it best, 'Party on and be excellent to each other'.

[popslut]

But if God had intended us to take showers he's have given us armpits which faced upwards.

[Machinesworking]

So do you think atheism - a belief system of 'no god' - would exist without belief systems of god?

There would be no word for it, and people wouldn't act any different than they do now.
The thing is atheism in no way defines my world view, there are no tenants to it, and I have no place of worship. Plenty of atheists have no time for science, or arguing with christians, they simply do not believe in a god.
This is so insanely funny to me in a way, but atheism is not a crowd, I don't hang out with atheists only, and we have no order etc. I like it that way.

The thing is to me it's a matter of mankind growing up, and I don't think I'm better than other people because I was allowed to think about what I believed about an afterlife, and decided that we simply have no clue, and that our concepts about god and the afterlife were to me obviously so far off as to be not worth my time at all. I simply think people are wasting their time with religion , and as long as it's not attacking physical science, or the right s of gays, or asking for special tax exemption status etc. I don't care. But religious people vote against gays, try to get the bible taught in schools, and their organizations don't pay taxes. All of which i do not agree with.

Evolution is definitely not set up as an opponent to religion, it's not a religion, and it's very sad that people are blind to this.

Please elaborate. Are you familiar with the Renaissance period? Do you think that would have happened without the ubiquity of christianity at the time? Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, to name a few, are arguable the most instrumental people on our current spiritual/non spiritual views. To disagree with ones spiritual beliefs is inherently to create your own. What is explicitly two is implicitly one.

The point I'm trying to make is science, and the advancement of our knowledge about the physical universe shouldn't be constantly at war with religion, I honestly wish that religious people were more flexible about this stuff. Some are, but a lot are not.

Listened to the podcast. The man is full on new age. What I'm doing is much better than the church.... etc. Eastern mysticism and Jung etc.

In the 30+ hrs of his lectures i have listened to thus far, i have yet to hear him say he is in any way more important than any church of any religion. I think you would be more interested to hear his stuff on the ego and the self and how we identify our 'self.'

I'm sure there is some good stuff in there, but what I got was 13 minutes of him comparing himself and his teachings to gurus and traditional religion, basically saying that their approaches were more about keeping you coming back while he was looking to cure you.
basically I got 13 minutes of a sales pitch on how his system was better.

My parents are into this stuff, and honestly, my take is it's hit or miss whether it works to calm a person down or not. My step mom is deep into it, and she's a wreck to this day.

Anybody who looks to religion or philosophy to solve their problems is only creating a support system for the problems to exist. If someone were to tell me they had a problem i would ask who exactly has the problem.. Show me your real self.. It's impossible.. It's all an illusion.

I'm not Ok with that, it goes back to positivist linear thinking. IE you created your problem etc. That to me is the ego of a person who feels privilege, and wishes to salve their guilt by blaming other people for the unfairness of life.
I ran into a girl in my twenties and ended up dating her for a while, she told me her life story. She was beaten ritually by her mother, and her mother had this amazing ability to attract pedophiles as boyfriends and husbands.
There is no limit to human suffering, and to try to BS your way into saying that you create your problems etc. is absolutely disrespectful IMO. Sure, plenty of nervous middle class americans who never suffered what some have might benefit from getting out of the victim role etc. but it falls apart completely when you confront a real psychological trauma situation, and especially if that trauma was ritualized, as in the case of my ex-girlfriend.

Personally my take is people look to religion and spirituality for a sense of calm outside themselves, they want a system of some sort that imposes order on the chaos they feel inside etc. and it works to a degree, but not really.

Christianity loves to tell people that faith will heal all their problems. Just donate, come to church and do good and all will be well. Then people find that that's all a lie so they look elsewhere, yet they carry with them the beliefs that there is some other religion that really does solve their problems or they realize that everyone's full of shit and turn to science and view the world as some sort of machine and themselves as puppets.. Anything to keep the ego alive.

and to play the devils advocate here, what's wrong with that? Eastern mysticisms constant badgering about how naughty an ego is leaves me cold. I have yet to meet a person who is devoted to that line of thinking that has come even close to succeeding. Mostly I run into people who have actually inflated their egos with a false sense of success and feeling they are on the right path.
And like I mentioned earlier, a total lack of compassion towards those that have been hurt, who are still in the process of repair, or who might never be whole, just some lame ass crap insinuating that their suffering is of course now their fault. Which to a degree is true, but is about the lamest thing you could say to somebody trapped in patterns of behavior where they weren't allowed to feel.

People become indoctrinated and lose their sense of wonder at the world, but at some core level I believe any thinking person knows they have not figured it all out

I would never consider an interest in philosophy or open mindedness the equivalent of indoctrination and have only recently learned to really see the beauty of the world.. I don't know why everyone thinks they need to figure out the meaning of everything, what fun would that bring? I think that desire is just another symptom of people trying to solve their problems and forgetting that life is the meaning. This is it.

Again though, desire is a big part of life, being out of balance to me works in both directions. Trying too hard to not be trapped by the ego leads to other parts of ones ego taking over etc. We are after all here to spread DNA, we have a real desire for life, and that shouldn't be suppressed IMO.

[Machinesworking]

Was Dawkins there to see the so called "Miracles"? No

No scientist ever is there, that's the key. All miracles to date have only been witnessed by the believers, and no physical evidence is left behind of any measurable significance. Junkies are helped through withdrawal syndromes, but god has never fixed a limb, replaced an eye, or even meted out grace and miracles in any semblance of order...... Like I said before again and again, miracles tend to happen to rich white europeans, and very randomly to others.
Once again, people are not jumping up and down to answer this, because there is no answer that makes religion look good. The bible pretty much states that miracles will occur to those that pray etc. but in real life it simply does not work that way.

I've already defended the position on God/no God so well on page 75 of this thread, that no credible scientist world wide could jump in with a slam dunk. And although I question his existence myself, anyone with half a brain knows that the christians believe that there were no real "miracles" after Jesus. They believe (as was written in the Bible) that God had had it, wanted to take this planet and destroy everything on it including us, but instead, sent his "son" down and asked the people to just simply believe. i.e. no more sacrifice, rituals, death... So the "praying - oh my God its a miracle!" is only mans hope. There is nothing in the Bible as you've stated about miracles being performed now; after Christ. If there were, there would be no Faith, eveything would be absolute. And I can only imagine that if God was sitting in the sky with big red eyes exclaiming "WORSHIP" every day, the world would be a real shitty Orwellian place. If I were a God, I dont think I'd design it that way either.

Ok you're arguing two different points here. Which do you believe? that Dawkins couldn't know the truth because he didn't witness the miracles? or that real christians don't believe in miracles?
Go ask the catholic church what they believe, or pentecostals, or born again christians. All of them believe in the power of prayer to shape the physical world.

...and yeah, haven't you noticed you live in a shitty Orwellian place? Industrial music 101 IMO..
Take a look at the recent wars etc. and tell me we aren't switching Oceana and Eastasia at whim.