RE: Richard Dawkins' Faith In Free Will Is As Blind As A Christians To God
July 6, 2010 at 7:56 pm
thanks for your reply sn.
if we instead use your description of people making a 'decision to be open minded' then we still come to the same problem as far as i see it, for open-mindedness and narrow-mindedness are personality traits that people don't get to decide over. there may be one or two who make the jump from one to the other, but it is rare and the change over from open to narrow may well be bigger than vice versa, from my personal experience of people at least.
i've had a look for my copy of the god delusion but for the life of me can't find it so have instead taken the lazy option of pilfering a dawkins quote from the net: 'God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture'.
from this we can take that RD believes the idea of god survives as a 'meme' (there is currently not the slightest evidence for memes, as far as i'm aware, so this atleast is an act of faith) which is somewhat independent of human evolution. he is suggesting that memes have their own seperate 'survival of the fittest' thing going on; religion was once invented by someone in a particular environment whereby it helped that person, and this meme spread to many other people, but now we live in a more enlightened environment, RD see's this old human invention (which it certainly is) of god as redundant.
i cannot find a decent quote in regard to his 'educating religion out' philosophy, but i think we can take is as read when we look at his current 'crusade'
against religion, why else would he be touring the world, writing his books, demanding religion not be taught in schools, if not to educate the world better? does he not dream of a day when most of the world is enlightened to his way of thinking? would you say not? if not, then his crusade can be seen as little more than a celebrity/money making scheme.
these two attitudes together is why i paraphrase it into 'educating religion out of people' which is the same as your 'opening up people's minds'. it seems to me he has dreamt up memes as a way of saying 'look, religion isn't natural, it's a poison that can be withdrawn from us' because without the invention of memes, he has no case, as darwinism tells us that people are religious because it is inherent in their biology, and anything inherent in their biology cannot be 'educated' out.
my definition of 'taking control of your destiny' does not differ from the dictionary version. dictionary version: The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will. if you were to 'take control of your destiny', you would be 'unconstrained by fate', because you would be controlling it. so my definition is fine, just a different way of saying it.
and i never mentioned anything about the body's response to sexual stimulation being anything to do with the mind's ability to conclude whether something is true or false. i just said some people are born inclined to be gay and some people are born inclined to be non-scientific. some people are born inclined to be athletic, some to be comedians, some to be artists, some to be scientists. nobody would doubt this. so why doubt that people are born with an inclination to believe that there's a flying spaghetti monster? dawkins does. he believes religion is learnt, youngsters picking up old memes off their deluded elders. can you teach someone to be funny? nope. and neither religion.
sure, you can teach them all about jesus and allah and the all the idiosyncrasies of the different religions, but jesus and allah are not the essence of religion, they are the bullshit details that somewhat satisfy the enquiring mind. religion is much deeper than that, it is in the bones and blood of many human beings. we can teach them that jesus and allah are nonsense, but they will only fill the void with something else.
if you believe that religion is only an idea borrowed by one generation from the previous, then you have to believe there is something like 'memes' going on, for which there is no evidence.
if we instead use your description of people making a 'decision to be open minded' then we still come to the same problem as far as i see it, for open-mindedness and narrow-mindedness are personality traits that people don't get to decide over. there may be one or two who make the jump from one to the other, but it is rare and the change over from open to narrow may well be bigger than vice versa, from my personal experience of people at least.
i've had a look for my copy of the god delusion but for the life of me can't find it so have instead taken the lazy option of pilfering a dawkins quote from the net: 'God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture'.
from this we can take that RD believes the idea of god survives as a 'meme' (there is currently not the slightest evidence for memes, as far as i'm aware, so this atleast is an act of faith) which is somewhat independent of human evolution. he is suggesting that memes have their own seperate 'survival of the fittest' thing going on; religion was once invented by someone in a particular environment whereby it helped that person, and this meme spread to many other people, but now we live in a more enlightened environment, RD see's this old human invention (which it certainly is) of god as redundant.
i cannot find a decent quote in regard to his 'educating religion out' philosophy, but i think we can take is as read when we look at his current 'crusade'
against religion, why else would he be touring the world, writing his books, demanding religion not be taught in schools, if not to educate the world better? does he not dream of a day when most of the world is enlightened to his way of thinking? would you say not? if not, then his crusade can be seen as little more than a celebrity/money making scheme.
these two attitudes together is why i paraphrase it into 'educating religion out of people' which is the same as your 'opening up people's minds'. it seems to me he has dreamt up memes as a way of saying 'look, religion isn't natural, it's a poison that can be withdrawn from us' because without the invention of memes, he has no case, as darwinism tells us that people are religious because it is inherent in their biology, and anything inherent in their biology cannot be 'educated' out.
my definition of 'taking control of your destiny' does not differ from the dictionary version. dictionary version: The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will. if you were to 'take control of your destiny', you would be 'unconstrained by fate', because you would be controlling it. so my definition is fine, just a different way of saying it.
and i never mentioned anything about the body's response to sexual stimulation being anything to do with the mind's ability to conclude whether something is true or false. i just said some people are born inclined to be gay and some people are born inclined to be non-scientific. some people are born inclined to be athletic, some to be comedians, some to be artists, some to be scientists. nobody would doubt this. so why doubt that people are born with an inclination to believe that there's a flying spaghetti monster? dawkins does. he believes religion is learnt, youngsters picking up old memes off their deluded elders. can you teach someone to be funny? nope. and neither religion.
sure, you can teach them all about jesus and allah and the all the idiosyncrasies of the different religions, but jesus and allah are not the essence of religion, they are the bullshit details that somewhat satisfy the enquiring mind. religion is much deeper than that, it is in the bones and blood of many human beings. we can teach them that jesus and allah are nonsense, but they will only fill the void with something else.
if you believe that religion is only an idea borrowed by one generation from the previous, then you have to believe there is something like 'memes' going on, for which there is no evidence.
