(July 24, 2012 at 1:16 am)Shell B Wrote: What do you mean what is this "he" bullshit? The question is clearly referring to the Abrahamic god, which is the only god referred to as god with a capital G. It is clearly established that that particular god is masculine. Fairy tale or not, it is their fairy tale and it is their masculine god. Your god might be female. Plenty of gods are, but that god is not. Acting all incredulous about it is like freaking out about Gandalf being referred to as he. In the damn book, he is a he. You can't change that because the book is from whence he sprang. I never understood that silliness about that particular god's gender. We don't question whether Aphrodite was a she.
You mean besides a) implying that atheism/agnosticism is relative to the Abrahamanic god(s) alone, b) that either I'm an atheist (false) or the Dawkins scale is incomplete ("Let us, then, take the idea of a spectrum of probabilities seriously, and place human judgements about the existence of God along it, between two extremes of opposite certainty"), or c) it shows an inordinate amount of stupidity in a book criticizing others for their failings.
Also, "I'd be surprised to meet many people in category 7, but I include it for symmetry with category 1, which is well populated." (i.e. If you aren't on the spectrum towards 7 then you are on the spectrum towards 1, and vice-versa — a clear error. If he'd used different labels than "atheist" or "agnostic" one might equivocate, but he didn't.