RE: Thing I've learned at the age of reason
July 8, 2012 at 3:38 am
(This post was last modified: July 8, 2012 at 3:39 am by CliveStaples.)
Quote:- people like George Carlin, Bill Maher, Brian from Family Guy, Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin deserve my full respect
Darwin, sure. He was a great scientist.
Carlin, meh. Good free speech / free thinking advocate, I suppose, but not really much substance there--or at least, not in the material I've seen.
...Bill Maher? He's a "clapter" commentator, he just says things and the people who agree clap and laugh. I don't know of any substantive contribution he's made, with the possible exception of "Religulous" (which I haven't seen, and therefore won't criticize).
Brian from Family Guy? Total pandering. Family Guy's whole schtick is "Haha, these people I disagree with are dumb" or "Hey, we're reasonable!" And that's it. Zero depth, zero substance, just surface-level assertions about how correct and intelligent Their People are, and how wrong and strange Other People are.
And Dawkins? His stuff about genetics is good, and he seems like a smart guy, but his criticisms don't seem particularly sophisticated or philosophical. Mostly just quasi-"GOD IS AN INVISIBLE MAGICIAN ROFL" stuff. Which I guess explains why people here might like him.
(July 7, 2012 at 6:57 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: You have way too much optimism on this. Refuting every theist argument is easy, deconverting them is another story.
They have all these 'pillars' (flawed as they are) that support their belief. You will be able to destroy one of them, but they will just shift to another. While you are refuting their next pillar, their mind will be rebuilding the one you just destroyed as if nothing happened.
Remember this, you can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into.
Which is also a reason why it's hard to convert (strong) atheists.
“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”
