Futher Discussion on Athiesm.

[Charon]

This thread is continuing the ongoing conversation about Athiesm, Dawkins, and Religion.

Original Thread is here

Split thread is here

I'm a mod of P&T, plus I got a go ahead from Magi, so I'm making this new thread to continue the discussion which Comrade Tortoise resurrected from the grave.

To be less graphic, he is, in my opinion, overly aggressive in his fight against religion.

Heaven forbid (hahah) someone be passionate about something? Seriously, all he does is intellectually criticize. He does not try to destroy the rights of religious people, he does not try to institute discrimination regimes toward the religious. If all he does is be strident in intellectual criticism of religion, what is your threshhold? Is someone strident in their criticism of objectivism overly aggressive?

Passion and hatred are two completely different things. If he is trying to destroy religion, which he is, he is trying to destroy the rights of religious people. And I watched a speech he gave at the TEDs a few years back where he was supporting the creation of an Athiest lobby in the United States as a response to religious lobbies. While I can understand the reasoning behind such a move, I have to worry because religious lobbies have caused so much shit for us, why will an athiest lobby pushing an athiest ideology be much better?

In my opinion he is just as radical as any other fundamentalist, he just does it for the other side.

I dont see him preying on the downtrodden, or making some inborn characteristic a death penalty offense. He also only refers to ideology as evil, as opposed to religious fundies who equate non-believers themselves to tools of the devil.

As I have mentioned before, congratulations Dawkins, you are better than people who are the scum of the Earth, that does not make him a good man or a good role model. Honestly, what you are espousing out of Dawkins sounds a lot like the tired old "hate the sin, not the sinner" from Christianity. Do I need to remind you how well that has worked out for them by and large? I have little reason to think that Athiests, or Dawkins, will be any better at making that distinction.

Furthermore, his popularity ensures that this "Religion is the most evil thing man has ever produced" opinion of his gets spread to his fans.

Ok. Look at the death toll. I have a hard time thinking of any human invention which has caused the most pain and misery. Can you think of one?

Oh lets shall we? Would you prefer I start with Communism, Nazism, Capitalism or Nationalism? (And I like those last two.)

Lets delve more into this question though. First lets put some limitations on it, because if we leave it open to "any time anyone has ever died where religion was sort of involved" we might as well declare the various forms of Love to be the most evil creation of man and call it a day. So lets start nice and easy where someone was killed because the majority of people thought "Religion demanded it". There isn't much ground for argument here. It either happened or it didn't. I'm also going to focus on wars since the first century CE here, since those are the areas where we are going to have at least a modicum of concrete data to work with. By the way, most of my sources are coming from here

So we'll start with the spread of Islam in 600 CE. That was roughly 700,000 people killed.

Next we'll move on to the Crusades, where between all of them it's estimated that 4 million people died.

Islam's forays into India over six centuries have such wild figures that it's really impossible to say how many people died besides "a lot". So I'm gonna give religion a bit of a bad mark and raise it from these numbers and up it to 20 million.

The Inquisition and the Witch Hunts. These offer little more than a paltry 100,000 to the list.

The 30 Year War. This one is a bit trickier. Starts as a war between protestants and catholics, and then gets incredibly messy. What the hell, we'll blame it on religion. That nets another 8 million.

For any conflicts I may have missed, and the general deaths that would occur without war I'll throw in another 20 million. I think that number is incredibly generous. But hey, I'm feeling generous.

Not included in this list are the Conquest of America, which while there were people killing natives for God, it was by and large a capitalist venture. As was both the Islamic and European slave trade. The majority of Ottoman Wars were likewise Nationalist in my opinion. The Holocaust does not count because for one, Religion was not demanding the death of the Jews, and for two by the 1940's anti-semitism had become much more than a religious hatred.

So that totals out to 52,800,000 people killed by religion in 2000 years. Not gonna lie, that's a pretty bad number to have. Lets compare it to some other numbers though, shall we?

For Nationalism, World War II alone nets roughly 60 million deaths all on it's own. The First World War adds on another 15 million. The Napoleonic Wars tack on 4 million. Just between those three Nationalist conflicts we're up to 79 million deaths. This doesn't even get into the Nationalist conflicts of China or the Revolutionary War for America, or the American Civil War, you get my point.

For Capitalism, The Conquest of the Americas is another tricky number, but I'm gonna go with his figures at 20 million. The European and Islamic Slave Trade nets another roughly 20 million each. This is again a short list, and we're already up to 60 million people.

Nazis. Well, you can put that one in the World War II deaths and there's 60 million.

Communism. Oh Communism. You tried so hard, and got so far, and in the end you killed 90 million people

So congratulations to Communism, which has managed to, in one Century, nearly double the amount of people that religion has killed in twenty centuries. And before we forget, Communists are supposed to be Athiests. So Athiests have killed more people than Religious people ever have according to these numbers.

This is, of course, before we get into the millions of people that religion have actually helped between various community building organizations, homes that they've built, billions of dollars that have been donated to charity, tens of thousands of tons of food that have been donated to the needy, and tens of thousands of families that have been relocated from dangerous nations due to a church.

"Why would you choose to denigrate people who've simply found something to believe in?"

Except he does not denigrate the person. I have seen speeches by the man, I have talked to him. He answers criticism with a certain acerbic wit(he is british) and certainly laughs at his (piles and piles) of hate mail. However he does not denigrate religious people any farther than he mocks their ideas. He himself will often quote the adage "There will always be evil people. However only religion will get good people to do evil things". He explicitly makes that distinction.

For one. His adage is horseshit. You should know this and I am shocked and appalled that you have actually seem to believe that hateful and ignorant garbage. There are a thousand reasons why a good person may do evil things, religion is in fact one of them, but it is far from being the only one. As to the rest of the argument, I point back to my first comment about "Hate the sin, not the sinner" and how well that works out.

Based on this, who gives either of us the right to claim moral superiority over the other?

Their actions. He does not denigrate the morality of some guy who believes in Jesus, but rather the people who think that their belief in Jesus justifies hurting people and particularly those who do go out and hurt people.

Do I necessarily agree with everything he says? No. I dont go to the level of thinking religious instruction is child abuse--certain types of it, like homeschooling can be(but not always--but not in and of itself.

Here I will agree with you. Anyone who believes that their belief in Jesus (or their belief in damn near anything) justifies them hurting other people is an asshole who deserves scorn. But here's my point, there are a hundred other beliefs that a person can have that will lead them to hurt others. A lot of them a hell of a lot more vitriolic than religion. Especially when you consider that it encourages many more people to go out and help people. The same cannot be said of many things.

He claims that non-belief in a god can't motivate people to destructive acts, and that is true, since "I don't believe in a god" is not a positive belief statement. OTOH, the belief that "religion is evil" is a positive statement of belief, and therefore can motivate people.

Yeah. It motivates you to change people's minds. That is it. Very explicit in all of his dialogue is the separation between person and idea.

Again I fall back on "Hate the sin, not the sinner". It doesn't work. And I also call horseshit on the idea that Athiests will magically be able to keep from turning "Religion is evil" from a motivation to change people's minds to a motivation to punch people in the face when no other ideology has ever achieved this.

Science is a method of determining fact using ones senses and experimentation. Many of the early scientists were religious men and by that I mean they were Priests, Imans and Monks. For that matter today, many Priests hold Ph Ds in scientific disciplines. There is no reason to assume an opposing or even hostile relation between the two expect for groups of bitter, angry people who are opposed to pretty much everything expect their own perks and powers.

Well, the hostility can take two forms. Ideological hostility (the catcholic church burning books, creationism etc), and epistemological.

The epistemological hostility is the mutually exclusive nature of the ways of knowing (faith vs reason and empiricism) that requires a certain degree of compartmentalization to reduce cognitive dissonance. You cannot be both a person of science and faith and still be logically consistent. There is nothing really demanding someone be logically consistent to be good at their jobs, but it does not help. Take Newton for example. He hit a stumbling block (multi-body problems), and threw up his hands, claiming God Did It. It took someone who had no such theology (LaPlace) to solve the problem.

This whole thing is just patently ridiculous. You are making the assumption that all people are defined by their religious belief. Which is not the case. For many people, religious is part of their definition, it is not the whole of it. That means they can chose which side to follow when an inconsistency appears. Which means that no, there is no reason that a religious person cannot also be a scientist. I also like how you basically said that something like 60% of scientists are bad at their job there.

As for Newton. Yes, it was clearly his faith in God which caused him to throw up his hands, it couldn't have POSSIBLY been the inherent bias a scientist has for their theory (and if you say that a good scientist does not I am going to slap you so hard you will think you have turned into a tree frog. A good scientist shouldn't, but they always do. Part of human nature). Or fuck, it couldn't be as simple as he just didn't think of it. No no no. His faith in God is the reason he couldn't figure it out. If it hadn't been for that nasty belief in God he probably would have figured out Quantum Physics.

Stephen Hawking? Clearly he's turning in early at night and declaring that God Did It. Albert Einstein? He stayed a patent clerk because God Did It. Copernicus? God Did It, why worry about the orbit of the planets? Galileo? Well why would the Earth not be the center of the universe? That's what the Catholic church says so obviously God Did It. Pythagoras? Fuck, I'm amazed he came up with more than 2+2=God Did It.

[The Cleric]

A small thing I'd like to point out. Human population increases on a exponential scale. There have been a lot more people to kill in the past few centuries than there were in the past millenia. Coming body count isn't exactly fair; if X is responsible for 10 million of 100 million, and Y is responsible for 1 million of 3 million, which would you say is more destructive? I am not asking this rhetorically; should things be compared on a straight body count or in the context of the number of people eligible for slaughter at that time?

[Cynical Cat]

Charon your numbers for deaths by religion are at best bullshit. They don't count indirect deaths from religion but your communism numbers do. That alone is enough to chuck them.

Communism numbers can't be dropped on atheism. Communism is a belief system which isn't even automatically atheist for one. Marxist Communism supposes that atheism is the correct theologically but it makes many assumptions about the material universe. It's like blaming slavery in the American South on Christianity because the slaver holders were Christians.

[General Havoc]

Even if the above were not true, a comparative body count is pointless as essentially unknowable, to say nothing of completely arbitrary. How does one finger Christianity OR any other philosophy such as Capitalism in the slaughter of the native populations of the New World when 90% of the killing was done by Smallpox, which last I checked, has no ideology? Nationalism and religion are not mutually exclusive, and deaths from engagements like the Thirty Years' War can be reliably lain on both altars. The Holocaust was not a religious event, and yet to claim religion had nothing to do with it is fallacious. And who is to speak of all the myriad of unknowable small-scale murders committed in the past and still today by religious fundamentalists in conflicts as far separated as the Jewish War of 70 AD and the Taliban campaigns of the 20th and 21st centuries? You will never arrive at a figure of any precision, nor one that all would agree is accurate even within several orders of magnitude.

Suffice to say, which is true, that a non-theistic philosophy can inspire acts just as bloody as any religious crusade, jihad, or holy war. The French and Russian Revolutions spilled blood in buckets. There are even outright and intentional atheistic massacres to be described, among them the Chinese pacification of Tibet (and other places), Pol Pot's regime, and to a debatable extent, the ongoing excesses of the North Korean government. And while Cyncat is correct that the sum total of Communism cannot be dropped wholesale on Atheism's doorstop, neither can one claim that Atheism had nothing whatsoever to do with it. While not every Communist was an Atheist, a great many, including many of the most violent practitioners of atrocity within it, were. Whatever you wish to ascribe the Holodomor to, it is difficult to posit an overtly theological cause.

[Cynical Cat]

Many Communists were atheists but so are many libertarians and both ideologies are opposed in nature. Neither of them base their ideologies and acts in atheism. There's much stronger grounds to blame Christianity for Nazi misdeeds, with centuries of authority approved anti-Semiticism, than to blame atheism for communism's crimes.

As for non-theologically orientated extremists, yes they can do as much damage. Fanatics are fanatics. The Tamal Tigers, a bunch of extremist pyschos with no particular religious position, are a great example.

[frigidmagi]

A quick reminder gentlemen. So far everyone has been more or less respectful. I expect it to stay that way. Just think of this as a conversation in a nice dining room and I'm in the corner with a loaded rifle. Otherwise I'll be staying out of it. Remember to cite sources.

[General Havoc]

In the purest sense you are correct, Cyncat, but nevertheless, Communism in various forms and types around the world (particularly Maoist ones, it would seem) did see people slaughtered for professing a religion. It did this because Communism, far more so than Libertarianism, speaks to the question of religion as an opiate of the masses, a tool by which the exploiting class exploits the exploited class. Libertarianism as a political philosophy, does not really speak to religion in any sense (I'm sure there are forms of it that do, but they're not the ones with which I'm familiar at least). Most, or at least many forms of Communism do. Perhaps if Libertarians overthrew governments and seized control of nations, then they would act similarly. Who's to tell?

[Cynical Cat]

I don't deny Communists killed people over religion. They also used religion as a tool (which is why the Russian Orthodox loves Stalin). They didn't kill them in the name of atheism, but in the name of Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Mao. Communism killed in Communism's name, not in the name of not-God. Atheism, as a belief, is not a stance that attempts to justify murder and extermination or any moral stance whatsoever. It's a separate question. Communism, Islam, Christianity, Nazism, and so forth do advocate positions where mass killing is considered (within their framework) moral.

[General Havoc]

I don't think it's a tremendous stretch to say that Shining Path guerrillas who cut out the tongues of priests in the villages they overran, or the Red Guards who forced Tibetan monks to sodomize one another at gunpoint before burning them to death, might have been acting out of a certain antipathy towards religious structures, as was a major element in their philosophies. Insofar as they killed people in the name of not-God or Communism, the question cannot be answered, as the demands of enforcing there being no god was an element of the particularly violent brands of Communism they practiced. Communism killed a lot of people for a lot of reasons, the majority of which likely had nothing to do with religion, but militant atheism was a prominent feature of some of the most extreme forms of communism, and more than a few people met extremely ugly ends as a result of that feature, I would say.

[Cynical Cat]

Hostility to religious institutions was certainly present in the extreme forms of Communism, but ascribing violence against religious institutions from a violent revolutionary movement hostile to the status quo purely to atheism is over reaching.

[Charon]

Charon your numbers for deaths by religion are at best bullshit. They don't count indirect deaths from religion but your communism numbers do. That alone is enough to chuck them.

Communism numbers can't be dropped on atheism. Communism is a belief system which isn't even automatically atheist for one. Marxist Communism supposes that atheism is the correct theologically but it makes many assumptions about the material universe. It's like blaming slavery in the American South on Christianity because the slaver holders were Christians.

Honestly I couldn't find any numbers for indirect deaths from religion. I tried to account for that with the extra 20 million but I could be low balling it. I will openly admit that. If you can find that information I'd love to get my hands on it. The point remains however that if you have no objections or additions to the numbers that I have listed so far that religion has a long way to go to make up for the numbers that communism has killed. The minutia of the argument does not seem to be working at the moment however, but I will get into that in my response later.

As for the Athiests being to blame. It can't be laid fully on their doorstep but there is no mistaking that they certainly played their part. I'll admit that I may have gotten caught up in my post in blaming atheism for all of those actions.

Even if the above were not true, a comparative body count is pointless as essentially unknowable, to say nothing of completely arbitrary. How does one finger Christianity OR any other philosophy such as Capitalism in the slaughter of the native populations of the New World when 90% of the killing was done by Smallpox, which last I checked, has no ideology? Nationalism and religion are not mutually exclusive, and deaths from engagements like the Thirty Years' War can be reliably lain on both altars. The Holocaust was not a religious event, and yet to claim religion had nothing to do with it is fallacious. And who is to speak of all the myriad of unknowable small-scale murders committed in the past and still today by religious fundamentalists in conflicts as far separated as the Jewish War of 70 AD and the Taliban campaigns of the 20th and 21st centuries? You will never arrive at a figure of any precision, nor one that all would agree is accurate even within several orders of magnitude.

That is a concern I had in trying to tie the death count down. No one is ever killed for one specific reason. Even during the Crusades, plenty of people went out of greed. Hell, the 4th Crusade was entirely based around greed. I tried to get it down as much as I could, but I have obviously not succeeded.

My main point I believe still stands however. That yes, religion has killed many many people, but in the grand scheme of things the numbers it has killed does not automatically rank it as the one that has caused the most pain and misery.

[Cynical Cat]

As for the Athiests being to blame. It can't be laid fully on their doorstep but there is no mistaking that they certainly played their part. I'll admit that I may have gotten caught up in my post in blaming atheism for all of those actions.

The issue isn't atheists but atheism. Most Nazis were Christians, most Southern slavers were Christians, most Americans and Europeans who killed millions to expand their imperial holdings in the 19th Centurty were Christians and so on but we aren't arguing for adding the Congo body count to Christianity. That Communists are largely atheists counts for the same. It's true in the same way the Belgians in the Congo were Christians, but in both they were not the driving force behind it.

On the other hand, Catholicism has its hands all over a lot of AIDS deaths in Africa.

[Comrade Tortoise]

Passion and hatred are two completely different things. If he is trying to destroy religion, which he is, he is trying to destroy the rights of religious people. And I watched a speech he gave at the TEDs a few years back where he was supporting the creation of an Athiest lobby in the United States as a response to religious lobbies. While I can understand the reasoning behind such a move, I have to worry because religious lobbies have caused so much shit for us, why will an athiest lobby pushing an athiest ideology be much better?

Yeah. He is trying to destroy religion by convincing people through rhetoric not to be religious. Oh no!!! That is like saying that I am trying to destroy the rights of people who oppose universal healthcare, because I try to convince them to support universal healthcare. It is patently ridiculous.

Religious Lobby: Restrict abortion rights, creationism in school, unconstitutional faith based initiatives, government sponsored religious conversion of soldiers.

Atheist lobby: Hey guys... our government is supposed to be secular, and maybe we should not give religious people who kill their sick children with prayer rather than taking them to a doctor a free pass on criminally negligent homicide and neglect charges.

OH NO!!! The horror! THE HORROR!!!

As I have mentioned before, congratulations Dawkins, you are better than people who are the scum of the Earth, that does not make him a good man or a good role model. Honestly, what you are espousing out of Dawkins sounds a lot like the tired old "hate the sin, not the sinner" from Christianity. Do I need to remind you how well that has worked out for them by and large? I have little reason to think that Athiests, or Dawkins, will be any better at making that distinction.

There is a very large difference.

1) Sins in Christianity are largely arbitrary, they often make no moral or ethical sense.

2) Christianity believes in metaphysical evil. The mustache twirling kind. This makes it impossible for them to actually hold that position consistently.

3) An atheist generally does NOT believe in metaphysical evil, and it is not at all inconsistent for them to despise a bad ideology, but recognize that it can be held by people who are otherwise good and decent.

If you view religion as the equivalent of a mind-virus like many of the new atheists do, it is not at all consistent to hate the infected person. It would be like hating people who have a tapeworm encysted in their brain. It does not make any sense.

So congratulations to Communism, which has managed to, in one Century, nearly double the amount of people that religion has killed in twenty centuries. And before we forget, Communists are supposed to be Athiests. So Athiests have killed more people than Religious people ever have according to these numbers.

You seriously pulled this shit out? Really? I expected better from you.

Atheism is one belief. There is no god. It is not a complete philosophy, only a component of one. Communism and most religions ARE complete philosophies. Do I need to spell out why equating communism and atheism in this case is insanely intellectually dishonest?

Look, a large part of the reason communism has killed religious people (for instance) is because they tried to replace religion with communism. As in, "worship dialectic materialism, and praise be to Stalin!"

In that sense, communism itself had many of the properties of a religion.

This is a distinction that is not often made in public, but religion is not a problem because people believe in a sky pixie. It is a problem because belief in the sky pixie, and in the Rightness of the sky pixie can and has been used to justify Terrible Things. It is a problem whenever someone thinks that they have a monopoly on truth and a monopoly on moral authority. Religions just tend to think they have these things more often than secular ideologies.

As for the raw numbers:

There are a number of problems, some of which Cat has already addressed. However there is a large statistical problem with comparing deaths in the medieval period directly to deaths in the modern period. I ought have specified this. It is a lot easier to kill more people when the population is in the billions, and you have modern weapons (murder is REALLY facilitated when it is industrialized murder). So, a better comparison would be to compare the death tolls as a percentage of population. I can do all the stats later if we like.

This whole thing is just patently ridiculous. You are making the assumption that all people are defined by their religious belief. Which is not the case. For many people, religious is part of their definition, it is not the whole of it. That means they can chose which side to follow when an inconsistency appears. Which means that no, there is no reason that a religious person cannot also be a scientist. I also like how you basically said that something like 60% of scientists are bad at their job there.

Wow. You must have inserted words inside your head that are not there, here, let me explain things to you more simply:

The epistemological hostility is the mutually exclusive nature of the ways of knowing (faith vs reason and empiricism) that requires a certain degree of compartmentalization to reduce cognitive dissonance.

I actually have a friend(I know, shocking) who works on how cognitive dissonance is affected by the embededness of belief systems. Depending on how much a belief system ties in to a person's world view, it may generate more dissonance than something that matters comparatively little.

It turns out that religious beliefs tie into everything about a person's life. It is NOT easy to compartmentalize it away.

You cannot be both a person of science and faith and still be logically consistent. There is nothing really demanding someone be logically consistent to be good at their jobs, but it does not help.

Look kids! This is when I say the exact opposite of what Charon thinks I said!

For the average every day scientist, who actually does research (more on that in a minute) being religious is not really a problem. If you are studying the details of a well known system (like Ken Miller does), you will never ever have a problem compartmentalizing away the two different ways of knowing that you use.

It is when you are on the edge of knowledge, like Newton was, where you have problems.

As for 60% of scientists... No. The number of people actually doing research who are theists is not nearly that high. That number is defined by people who have BS in science. Most of those individuals go on to some other sort of professional school (like dental school), or do grunt work within industry. They are scientists, but not researchers which is who that prior line of reasoning addresses.

Once you get to the actual researchers, those who have or are working on a PhD, then the number of religious people drops like a stone into the 10% range.

As for Newton. Yes, it was clearly his faith in God which caused him to throw up his hands, it couldn't have POSSIBLY been the inherent bias a scientist has for their theory (and if you say that a good scientist does not I am going to slap you so hard you will think you have turned into a tree frog. A good scientist shouldn't, but they always do. Part of human nature). Or fuck, it couldn't be as simple as he just didn't think of it. No no no. His faith in God is the reason he couldn't figure it out. If it hadn't been for that nasty belief in God he probably would have figured out Quantum Physics.

Go back and study the history of science for five seconds. Yes, every scientist likes their own ideas. The best ones can get over it, but that often involves some spitting, clawing, and angry salvos of data to settle out.

Newton had difficulty developing the math for multi-body problems. All it was, was a relatively simple extension of the calculus which he INVENTED. But, he could not figure it out, so he literally claimed that the grace of god stabilized the orbits of planets. Then, because that explanation fit the predispositions of the scientists at the time who were mostly clergy, that was the explanation until the Napoleonic wars. When you are on the edge of knowledge, religion becomes a problem, because it gives you an easy way out.

The last bit is not worth addressing, because it flows from an idiotic strawman argument. Oh, and Hawking is an atheist, and Einstein thought that the universe was god, but only in a very loose sense. Copernicus was ham-strung for years by a neo-platonic elementalist obsession with regular solids... and then there was Pythagorus. Pythagorus, and the mathematical mysticism that won out in Greece which he more or less started, arrested to a large extent the early proto-empiricism that was blossoming at the time. Slowed it down.

[Charon]

Passion and hatred are two completely different things. If he is trying to destroy religion, which he is, he is trying to destroy the rights of religious people. And I watched a speech he gave at the TEDs a few years back where he was supporting the creation of an Athiest lobby in the United States as a response to religious lobbies. While I can understand the reasoning behind such a move, I have to worry because religious lobbies have caused so much shit for us, why will an athiest lobby pushing an athiest ideology be much better?

Yeah. He is trying to destroy religion by convincing people through rhetoric not to be religious. Oh no!!! That is like saying that I am trying to destroy the rights of people who oppose universal healthcare, because I try to convince them to support universal healthcare. It is patently ridiculous.

Those don't add up Ben. One is getting rid of a belief, the other is instilling a belief. And he isn't wanting to use rhetoric. He wants us to teach children from a young age to not support religion, spirituality, or any sort of "mysticism". To me that seems just as much brain-washing as the other way around is.

Religious Lobby: Restrict abortion rights, creationism in school, unconstitutional faith based initiatives, government sponsored religious conversion of soldiers.

Atheist lobby: Hey guys... our government is supposed to be secular, and maybe we should not give religious people who kill their sick children with prayer rather than taking them to a doctor a free pass on criminally negligent homicide and neglect charges.

OH NO!!! The horror! THE HORROR!!!

I wasn't saying an Athiest lobby would be immediately as bad as the religious lobbies (who deserve to be shot for forgetting that they should be pushing for urban renewal and low income assistance). I was concerned about what happens if the Athiest lobby turns are hard line as the religious lobbies. You wanna pray in public? Illegal! Churches should be banned as places of ignorance and hatred!

Again, I'm not saying it will happen, I'm saying it could happen. WE already have enough bullshit to worry about with the religious lobbies, we don't need the other side forgetting that they're supposed to be supporting the rights of athiests and going on an anti-religion crusade instead.

As I have mentioned before, congratulations Dawkins, you are better than people who are the scum of the Earth, that does not make him a good man or a good role model. Honestly, what you are espousing out of Dawkins sounds a lot like the tired old "hate the sin, not the sinner" from Christianity. Do I need to remind you how well that has worked out for them by and large? I have little reason to think that Athiests, or Dawkins, will be any better at making that distinction.

There is a very large difference.

1) Sins in Christianity are largely arbitrary, they often make no moral or ethical sense.

Dude. I don't know about you, but the 10 Commandments make a hell of a lot of sense to me. You know, don't murder, don't sleep with your best friend's wife, don't steal, if you believe in me, don't go around worshiping other gods. Hell, even don't take the lord's name in vain makes sense. How would you feel if every time something I didn't like happened I said "Fuck you Ben".

Then there's stuff like, don't fuck animals. Don't have incest babies. Human sacrifices are bad, mm'kay?

Which leaves Gay sex is bad, and don't eat pork or shellfish, among others. So yeah, I will completely agree that those don't make sense. But we aren't that far away from people seeing both of those laws as patently ridiculous as the other and ignoring them.

2) Christianity believes in metaphysical evil. The mustache twirling kind. This makes it impossible for them to actually hold that position consistently.

3) An atheist generally does NOT believe in metaphysical evil, and it is not at all inconsistent for them to despise a bad ideology, but recognize that it can be held by people who are otherwise good and decent.

We are talking about religion in general here Ben. Not just Christianity. I used Christianity as an example of Jesus's teaching regarding sin. But I have to disagree that it has as much to do with Satan twirling his mustache as it is simply human nature getting in the way of a good idea again. You hate Jerry Falwell right? And every person in the Westboro Baptist Church. You're not religious, so what's your excuse for being unable to separate your hatred for the ideas from your hatred of the people?

If you view religion as the equivalent of a mind-virus like many of the new atheists do, it is not at all consistent to hate the infected person. It would be like hating people who have a tapeworm encysted in their brain. It does not make any sense.

Wait wait wait. A mind-virus? Fucking seriously? And I'm the delusional one for believing in some super invisible diety? Also, for shits and giggles. That is exactly how Christians are supposed to view it. EXACTLY like that. But there are many who can't do it. It has nothing to do with their knowledge of religion, 90% of religious people don't know enough about religion to fill up a gallon bucket. It has to do with human nature. And I'll also go back to my point about Falwell and the Westboro people.

So congratulations to Communism, which has managed to, in one Century, nearly double the amount of people that religion has killed in twenty centuries. And before we forget, Communists are supposed to be Athiests. So Athiests have killed more people than Religious people ever have according to these numbers.

You seriously pulled this shit out? Really? I expected better from you.

Atheism is one belief. There is no god. It is not a complete philosophy, only a component of one. Communism and most religions ARE complete philosophies. Do I need to spell out why equating communism and atheism in this case is insanely intellectually dishonest?

Look, a large part of the reason communism has killed religious people (for instance) is because they tried to replace religion with communism. As in, "worship dialectic materialism, and praise be to Stalin!"

In that sense, communism itself had many of the properties of a religion.

For one, as Cat has pointed out that Stalin is basically a Saint to the Eastern Orthodox Church. For two, I have already backed out of blaming Athiesm directly for those deaths, though there is no denying that those deaths were caused by individual athiests.

This is a distinction that is not often made in public, but religion is not a problem because people believe in a sky pixie. It is a problem because belief in the sky pixie, and in the Rightness of the sky pixie can and has been used to justify Terrible Things. It is a problem whenever someone thinks that they have a monopoly on truth and a monopoly on moral authority. Religions just tend to think they have these things more often than secular ideologies.

Bolding by me for emphasis. So since you have said that you believe that the majority of morals held by religions are ass-backwards and immoral, you believe that Atheism has a monopoly on truth and moral authority? Because if EVERY believer is wrong, than the only people who can be right are those who do not believe.

As for the raw numbers:

There are a number of problems, some of which Cat has already addressed. However there is a large statistical problem with comparing deaths in the medieval period directly to deaths in the modern period. I ought have specified this. It is a lot easier to kill more people when the population is in the billions, and you have modern weapons (murder is REALLY facilitated when it is industrialized murder). So, a better comparison would be to compare the death tolls as a percentage of population. I can do all the stats later if we like.

Honestly I would like to see the numbers. It's an interesting question.

This whole thing is just patently ridiculous. You are making the assumption that all people are defined by their religious belief. Which is not the case. For many people, religious is part of their definition, it is not the whole of it. That means they can chose which side to follow when an inconsistency appears. Which means that no, there is no reason that a religious person cannot also be a scientist. I also like how you basically said that something like 60% of scientists are bad at their job there.

Wow. You must have inserted words inside your head that are not there, here, let me explain things to you more simply:

The epistemological hostility is the mutually exclusive nature of the ways of knowing (faith vs reason and empiricism) that requires a certain degree of compartmentalization to reduce cognitive dissonance.

I actually have a friend(I know, shocking) who works on how cognitive dissonance is affected by the embededness of belief systems. Depending on how much a belief system ties in to a person's world view, it may generate more dissonance than something that matters comparatively little.

It turns out that religious beliefs tie into everything about a person's life. It is NOT easy to compartmentalize it away.

Bolding for emphasis

And Ben supports my argument with his own quote. It depends upon how much a person believes. You are correct, a person that believes strongly in their religion will not overcome this dissonance. But for people like me, who's faith is not that strong? Yeah, no damn problem.

You cannot be both a person of science and faith and still be logically consistent. There is nothing really demanding someone be logically consistent to be good at their jobs, but it does not help.

Look kids! This is when I say the exact opposite of what Charon thinks I said!

My bad.

For the average every day scientist, who actually does research (more on that in a minute) being religious is not really a problem. If you are studying the details of a well known system (like Ken Miller does), you will never ever have a problem compartmentalizing away the two different ways of knowing that you use.

It is when you are on the edge of knowledge, like Newton was, where you have problems.

As for 60% of scientists... No. The number of people actually doing research who are theists is not nearly that high. That number is defined by people who have BS in science. Most of those individuals go on to some other sort of professional school (like dental school), or do grunt work within industry. They are scientists, but not researchers which is who that prior line of reasoning addresses.

Once you get to the actual researchers, those who have or are working on a PhD, then the number of religious people drops like a stone into the 10% range.

You never specified that we were only speaking about researchers. That's why I threw out the 60% figure.

As for Newton. Yes, it was clearly his faith in God which caused him to throw up his hands, it couldn't have POSSIBLY been the inherent bias a scientist has for their theory (and if you say that a good scientist does not I am going to slap you so hard you will think you have turned into a tree frog. A good scientist shouldn't, but they always do. Part of human nature). Or fuck, it couldn't be as simple as he just didn't think of it. No no no. His faith in God is the reason he couldn't figure it out. If it hadn't been for that nasty belief in God he probably would have figured out Quantum Physics.

Go back and study the history of science for five seconds. Yes, every scientist likes their own ideas. The best ones can get over it, but that often involves some spitting, clawing, and angry salvos of data to settle out.

Even the best ones don't get over it without some other scientist pointing out the error. There was a big "bet" between Hawking and Kip Thorne and John Preskill involving Black Holes that shows this. People have blind spots involving what they already know. They don't look at it as closely as they would new or outside information and will often skip over it.

Newton had difficulty developing the math for multi-body problems. All it was, was a relatively simple extension of the calculus which he INVENTED. But, he could not figure it out, so he literally claimed that the grace of god stabilized the orbits of planets. Then, because that explanation fit the predispositions of the scientists at the time who were mostly clergy, that was the explanation until the Napoleonic wars. When you are on the edge of knowledge, religion becomes a problem, because it gives you an easy way out.

Ideas are not Athena CT, they do not spring fully formed out of the head of a person. Just because Newton invented the calculus does not mean he could account for every possible derivation there-in. You're saying you never built something and had to spend years fixing all the little bugs and things that go wrong? And you're sure that you found all of them? You don't eventually go "Fuck it, close enough"?

Newton probably spent years trying to fix it before he finally gave up, which I attribute more to the fact that Science was still getting it's feet under it than his religion got in the way.

But hey, whatever. Maybe researchers shouldn't be religious. I might be willing to grant you that. So why the fuck do I have to give up my faith? I have no intention of being a researcher. I am certainly in no position to get in the way of scientific progress. Nor are most people. So why is it such a bad thing that we have faith?

Oh, and Hawking is an atheist,

Is that why he's said "I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science," he said. "The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws."

Sounds more like a deist to me.

and Einstein thought that the universe was god, but only in a very loose sense.

Still deistic. So yes, those two are technically not religious. But they still believe in some sort of deity.

Copernicus was ham-strung for years by a neo-platonic elementalist obsession with regular solids...

Not sure how that supports your point. Neo-platonic elementalism is not religious. It was supported by the church, yes, but that does not make it religious. Nor does it undermine the fact that he did great work.

and then there was Pythagorus. Pythagorus, and the mathematical mysticism that won out in Greece which he more or less started, arrested to a large extent the early proto-empiricism that was blossoming at the time. Slowed it down.

Oh Pythagoras and your weird science-religion blend of insanity causing... Not entirely certain what you're trying to say here. Proto-empiricism slowed down Pythagoras' mathematical mysticism? Wouldn't this be a bad thing? I mean, sure it was mysticism, but it was still mathematics.

[frigidmagi]

Which leaves Gay sex is bad, and don't eat pork or shellfish, among others.

Actually...

I read alot over Christmas break, one book I read was Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches by Marvin Harris. In this book Marvin Harris an anthropologist(cheer now) examines a number of religious laws (such as Hindus not eating cows and Jews not eating Pork) and finds... They make sense.

I shall attempt to expand via the pork.

First, there's the old chestnut of badly cooked pork is more likely to hurt you. It's supposedly even worse in a desert. Harris rejects this as primary reason, pointing out that other cultures will eat things that are fucking outright poisonous. Plus pork is mind blowingly delicious, it's like the damn thing evolved to be eaten by us (this is a joke Ben, please do not explain).

No, no, no the secret lies in the environment and the feeding habits of the swine. The Hebrews inhabited a fairly arid area and were heavily dependent on the sheep, goats and cows of the area. This was a place of unforested hills and plains. Sheep, goats and cows can live on the grasses of this area, stuff that no man can live off of. The damn pig on the flip side, prefers grains, tubers, fruits, nuts. You know... The stuff we eat! So the pig, which produces no wool, nor any milk is a direct food competitor with man in this region. A region where food can be hard to come by.

Plus it's hard to herd pigs over a distance, if you're a nomad or a semi-nomad that's kinda of a big deal.

So the Bibical God told the Hebrews not to eat or farm an animal that would be taking food out of their mouths, had no other product but meat to offer, would be next to impossible to herd and could fucking kill them if improperly cooked. Let me remind everyone that in a pre-industrial society raising animals only for meat is a luxury. You can do it if you live in a rainy, temperate land where food is easy, in a harsh, hot, sunny land where you wrestle with the earth? Not so much.

In short, pigs in the middle east in the damn bronze age consumed to many resources for to little pay off. Forbidding their farming makes sense, you don't even need to believe in God for that.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled mud throwing contest.

[Cynical Cat]

That is, unfortunately, not true. Archeologists can easily tell which ancient settlements are Jewish are by the presence or absence of pig bones. There is no getting around pig farming having a long history of success in the Middle East. Whatever the origins of the prohibitions against eating pigs it wasn't because practical.

[frigidmagi]

Let me point out that this started when the Jews were nomadic. As I mentioned twice above. So by the time you have settlements the rule is already in place. So I really don't see the clash just because other groups didn't have the prohibition doesn't make anything I've listed about pigs less true.

[Cynical Cat]

Let me point out that this started when the Jews were nomadic. As I mentioned twice above. So by the time you have settlements the rule is already in place. So I really don't see the clash just because other groups didn't have the prohibition doesn't make anything I've listed about pigs less true.

This is the objectionable line, which happens to be your conclusion.

In short, pigs in the middle east in the damn bronze age consumed to many resources for to little pay off.

That's patently not true because lots of other people did it. I did not attack the statements that there are drawbacks to herding pigs or that they were less advantageous in a number of ways.

[Charon]

My main goal in bringing it up was that sure it may have made sense back then. Whatever. It doesn't really make sense now. That's the important part.