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Thoughts and questions from God Delusion
#3
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion
I apologise in advance for not having the concentration span right now to read through your entire post, though I did give it as full a consideration as I'm able. I just want to pick up on a couple of points that leaped out at me.

First, while I do happen to have what you generously term a dynamic vocabulary, I would never insist that others treat my words as anything other than what they're worth or that I am smarter than you merely on that basis. If the atheists you describe represent the totality of your experience, you're about to get a pretty comprehensive education here I suspect.

Second, I would love to see how you can justify this without tying yourself in knots:

Quote:For example, if one's experience of elves is limited to reading Tolkien and imagining them - which I love to do - I would posit that this is a less reasonable basis for believing they exist in our universe than say, praying to God for healing from uterine cancer and having an apple-sized tumor "spontaneously disappear" overnight, confirmed by medical imaging by a non-religious physician (which happened to my mother, FWIW) is a basis for believing in God.

At the risk of over-egging this particular pudding, how do you determine that belief in a god and its alleged actions is more reasonable than belief in elves and other weird and wonderful Tolkien inventions?

Finally, re: Dawkins saying that "raising children in a religion is tantamount to child abuse and possibly worse than sexual abuse." Let's be clear on what he actually said on this point, lest we tilt at men of straw. Let's look at what the Professor actually wrote:

Quote:Even without physical abduction, isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about? Yet the practice persists to this day, almost entirely unquestioned.

Quote:Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place. It was an off-the-cuff remark made in the heat of the moment, and I was surprised that it earned a round of enthusiastic applause from that Irish audience (composed, admittedly, of Dublin intellectuals and presumably not representative of the country at large). But I was reminded of the incident later when I received a letter from an American woman in her forties who had been brought up Roman Catholic. At the age of seven, she told me, two unpleasant things had happened to her. She was sexually abused by her parish priest in his car. And, around the same time, a little schoolfriend of hers, who had tragically died, went to hell because she was a Protestant. Or so my correspondent had been led to believe by the then official doctrine of her parents' church. Her view as a mature adult was that, of these two examples of Roman Catholic child abuse, the one physical and the other mental, the second was by far the worst.

Quote:'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' The adage is true as long as you don't really believe the words. But if your whole upbringing, and everything you have ever been told by parents, teachers and priests, has led you to believe, really believe, utterly and completely, that sinners burn in hell (or some other obnoxious article of doctrine such as that a woman is the property of her husband), it is entirely plausible that words could have a more long-lasting and damaging effect than deeds. I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.

Quote:Earlier in our televised conversation, Jill [Mytton] had described this kind of religious upbringing as a form of mental abuse, and I returned to the point, as follows: 'You use the words religious abuse. If you were to compare the abuse of bringing up a child really to believe in hell . . . how do you think that would compare in trauma terms with sexual abuse?' She replied: 'That's a very difficult question . . . I think there are a lot of similarities actually, because it is about abuse of trust; it is about denying the child the right to feel free and open and able to relate to the world in the normal way . . . it's a form of denigration; it's a form of denial of the true self in both cases.'

Those quotes from The God Delusion are, as far as I can determine from my pdf copy which I so happen to keep handy, the sum total of every reference to religious-indoctrination-as-child-abuse. In every instance where he makes the direct comparison - both of them, you'll note - he is referring to the psychological damage of conditioning a child that its only worth is to burn in hellfire forever (or as Colonel Robert Ingersoll, my favourite quotable nonbeliever, put it in 1880: "I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope, but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in a hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell"). Even then, Prof Dawkins uses the conditional "arguably".

Then you immediately follow up with the remark that he is a civil and charitable man, thus such shocking opinions are granted a free pass. This is, I have to say, an unwarranted and unfair dismissal, akin to saying "oh, don't pay him any attention; he's old and set in his ways".
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist.  This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair.  Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second.  That means there's a situation vacant.'
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Messages In This Thread
Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by jacklegger - September 4, 2012 at 5:23 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by jacklegger - September 4, 2012 at 7:04 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cyberman - September 4, 2012 at 6:33 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by jacklegger - September 4, 2012 at 10:13 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by greneknight - September 4, 2012 at 6:59 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by greneknight - September 4, 2012 at 7:05 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Jackalope - September 5, 2012 at 1:22 am
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by greneknight - September 5, 2012 at 2:14 am
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cato - September 5, 2012 at 2:46 am
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by greneknight - September 5, 2012 at 3:10 am
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cato - September 5, 2012 at 8:49 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by pocaracas - September 4, 2012 at 7:07 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by greneknight - September 4, 2012 at 7:11 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by pocaracas - September 4, 2012 at 7:18 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cyberman - September 4, 2012 at 7:19 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Minimalist - September 4, 2012 at 7:08 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by padraic - September 4, 2012 at 7:51 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cyberman - September 4, 2012 at 11:05 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by greneknight - September 5, 2012 at 12:58 am
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cyberman - September 5, 2012 at 2:24 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by pocaracas - September 5, 2012 at 4:23 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cyberman - September 5, 2012 at 6:59 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Tempus - September 5, 2012 at 4:23 am
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by greneknight - September 5, 2012 at 4:42 am
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by greneknight - September 5, 2012 at 8:45 am
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Red Celt - September 5, 2012 at 9:23 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Mister Agenda - September 5, 2012 at 12:44 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by pocaracas - September 5, 2012 at 7:18 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cyberman - September 5, 2012 at 7:28 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Minimalist - September 5, 2012 at 8:56 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Red Celt - September 5, 2012 at 9:43 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cyberman - September 5, 2012 at 10:15 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Red Celt - September 5, 2012 at 10:30 pm
RE: Thoughts and questions from God Delusion - by Cyberman - September 5, 2012 at 10:35 pm

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