/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1393601]

Dawkins is overrated

see for yourself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm4HbqUKmY0

[Anonymous No.1393616]

Is that the one where he admits he believe in SPACE ALIENS??

[Anonymous No.1393633]

indeed. most anti-theists are foolish. he also thinks god and religion are the same thing which is as foolish as what religious people believe.

[Anonymous No.1393637]

>>1393633
What is god?

[Anonymous No.1393643]

>>1393637
a higher power

[Anonymous No.1393646]

>>1393643
what does it mean to be higher? what is a power?

[Anonymous No.1393651]

>>1393646
stop being anal about it, you know exactly what i mean. a reason for existence and something beyond the universe. something that makes the physical laws what they are.

[Anonymous No.1393691]

old news bro, he's a evolutionary biologist trying to be a anthropologist. He uses fallacies like a monster, and his ethno-centrism is pretty maxed out. I agree with him on a few points but his style is just garbage.

[Anonymous No.1393706]

I had a nice discussion with a friend last night.
What he was basically saying was that being a radical atheist is as dumb as being radical about a religion.

he considers himself an agnostic.

[Anonymous No.1393730]

>>1393706

Wow, that's so novel and not at all what every drunk, stoned and undecided dumbass says.

[Anonymous No.1394094]

>>1393730

You're probably hipster enough to not fit in any category.
I'm so proud.

[Anonymous No.1394097]

>>1393706
i have never met an agnostic that wasn't arrogant

[Anonymous No.1394105]

>>1394097
what would you consider yourself to be?

[Anonymous No.1394109]

>>1394105
a sex-haver

[Anonymous No.1394113]

>>1394105
a ninja

[Anonymous No.1394116]

A Jedi.

[Neuro !qdUPARcrn. No.1394118]

>>1394105
The Ass Vagina of Lucifer Niggerbastard

[Anonymous No.1394119]

he's just the sasha grey of atheist

[Anonymous No.1394123]

>>1394119
I love you.

[Anonymous No.1394141]

[Anonymous No.1394144]

Dawkins rhetoric and style isn't really any more offensive or disrespectful than Nieztche's, I don't get why people get all mad at Dawkins for.

[Anonymous No.1394148]

>>1394141
just because I feel superior doesn't stop me from being right

[Anonymous No.1394149]

>>1394118
dat sack of babyshit
>>1394119
but then who is hitchens?

[Anonymous No.1394150]

>>1394148

[Anonymous No.1394154]

He seems to see it as his personal crusade - as though he has a real chip on his shoulder.

I can see why one might be passionate that the American religious right or fundamental Islam be stopped, but is there really so much harm if my mild-mannered neighbour wants to believe in fairy-tales?

[Anonymous No.1394160]

>>1394150
no, I'm pretty sure the first comic showed there are a lot of people who feel the same as I. I certainly don't think I'm the only one who notices that both sides are unbearable.

[Anonymous No.1394157]

>>1394149

Ron Jeremy

[Anonymous No.1394156]

>>1394141
I love you.

[Anonymous No.1394162]

>>1394154
Dawkins has been asked that before, he said it does no harm but that person is being willfully stupid. An arrogant answer yes, but arrogance isn't a crime.

[Anonymous No.1394173]

>>1394154

I feel he tries to yank people's beliefs away. he hopes by ridicule, people will let go of their beliefs. he instead should push for education, even so people who remain faithful aren't ignorant in other aspects. personally as long as someone educated, their beliefs or religion don't matter. Newton himself was a hard core christian

[Anonymous No.1394192]

>>1394173
>Newton himself was a hard core christian

He wasn't a traditional Christian by any means, he rejected the Trinity and Jesus's godhood. Arian Christianity was viewed as heretical at the time and Newton had to keep his true views secret.

[Anonymous No.1394203]

>>1394173

He does push for education. Hence why he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

[Anonymous No.1394213]

>>1394192

At the time. If it was now he would probably be lumped with militant christians. He's main beef with the catholic and angelican churches was that they kept teaching unchristian values and a bible translated wrong. he himself planned on translating the whole thing, word for word

[Anonymous No.1394224]

>>1394213
Of course, but I don't really see the point of bring up how religious Newton was. Not all religious people are stupid but we must remember that Newton didn't know everything we know now. You also have to take into account the times he was brought up. Would Newton have been religious if he was born in 2010? Perhaps, perhaps not.

[Truman Capote !kwxizAOFlk No.1394232]

There is nothing irrational in believing that there is life on other planets besides earth somewhere in the universe.

[Anonymous No.1394233]

>>1394192
>Implying you have to believe in the Trinity (a fabrication of the Catholic church, which has no Biblical foundation, mind you) to be a Christian.

[Anonymous No.1394267]

This is so not /lit/ related

But I can't resist anyway.

The issue is that all these activists be they evangelical Christian or evangelical atheists or angostics, ascribe too much value to a proposition that has no value, which cannot have truth value the proposition "There is/n't a God" is essentially meaningless. So instead they all burden up a bunch of other pointless things into it "religion opposes reason", "athesim opposes morality", "religion causes wars and strife","atheists cause genocides" or whatever. But its all irrelevant.

Religion doesn't cause people to be irrational, people are irrational, humans are irrational creatures, the question is only in how we apply irrationality and what value we place on rationality. The moral issue is more complicated but there's no reason to think society would degrade to anarchy without God.

Religion doesn't cause war, or terrorism or any such thing, and atheism doesn't lead to genocide, people will always justify their actions be it with religion or misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Its like the Aesop fable with the Lamb and the Wolf.

[Anonymous No.1394281]

>>1394233
>implying it's not all fabricated

[Anonymous No.1394326]

>>1394144
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

I've heard of this Dawkins fellow and why anyone would make a commitment to either side of an argument that cannot be proven one way or the other - at least at this point in time - is falling into a dialectic trap. In other words, a waste of time and manufactured to create a distraction for idle minds. Nothing wrong with looking into it but coming to a conclusion either way is a sign of ignorance no? Maybe even insanity?

[Anonymous No.1394365]

>In other words, a waste of time and manufactured to create a distraction for idle minds.

Do you mean literally manufactured? \

[Anonymous No.1394424]

>>1394326
>Nothing wrong with looking into it but coming to a conclusion either way is a sign of ignorance no? Maybe even insanity?

No its just a decision, based on inconclusive evidence, we make those all the time, there's nothing wrong with it. Most of our day to day decisions aren't done with absolute knowledge. Call it preference, aesthetics or pragmatics, whatever criteria we use doesn't matter.

[Anonymous No.1394431]

hey look at me I hate richard dawkins I'm such a reasonable guy, not like those crazy radical atheists I see on south park

in fact i am an AGNOSTIC

[Anonymous No.1394452]

Has anyone in this thread read his books?

[Anonymous No.1394461]

>>1394452
Honestly Selfish Gene is a decent popular science explanation of evolution, beyond that it just becomes too much Hooray Atheism going on.

[Anonymous No.1394465]

>>1394452

probably not. no one reads on /lit/, they act like they do.

and I watched video. matches his books well.

And his books are cogent and argued well.

[Truman Capote !kwxizAOFlk No.1394470]

>>1394431

He's not agnostic because he believes there is no God, even if he is only 99.9% sure.

[Anonymous No.1394500]

>>1394470

True. In God Delusion he says that there is no way to absolutely disprove the idea of god due to the claim that it is totally insubstantial, but as there is no reason to believe in it he doesn't

[Anonymous No.1394537]

Agnosticism is just soft core atheism. Any doubt that arises of religion soon becomes it's undoing, unless the person doubting is willfully stupid.

As for the matter of Dawkins, any scientific mind can agree that the existence of Alien life is highly probable. But you will never hear them say they have visited us or some bullshit. It's just probability demanding there being life somewhere else in this huge universe.

Second, Dawkins is an atheist, and if you have read any of his books you should notice how he goes by a 'modern'/scientific oriented definition of Atheism, where god is not deemed non-existant, just not important.

The idea of god is just deemed irrelevant. It's like an idea that deers make awesome lime pies while making your own lime pie, what if they do? Do we know?

It's absurd, but what if they somehow truly make pies. Until someone shows us the pie making deer it is irrelevant.

Read his books, they are quite nice. Loved the Greatest show on Earth, though I haven't read it (was gifted the audio book and heard it on a trip, the British accent makes for awesome dialect).

[Anonymous No.1394609]

>>1394537
>any scientific mind can agree that the existence of Alien life is highly probable

Yeah, no.
There isn't enough data to say that the existence of alien life is highly probable. We have one data point, its like being given a deck of cards of unknown number, drawing a single card, it comes up to be a "4" and without knowing anything else about the deck trying to give the probability of a "4". its possible that we could estimate the probability with a better understanding of the mechanics of how RNA proteins form, and the likelihood of forming a self-replicating string, and the likelihood of that string replicating enough to offset the random denaturing of RNA strands. We could presumably get a probability of life forming per unit volume of primordial soup, then we just need data for likelihood of primordial soup formation on alien planets and an approximate for the amount of time from replication time of RNA to formation of actual life and the likelhood of conditions staying favorable that long. As for non-earthlike life, we have absolutely zero data and can't even conjecture well. A sheer probabilistic analysis however is like trying to draw a trend line from a single data point, any line is arbitrary. It doesn't matter how many billions and billions of stars if there are if the probability comes out to be infinitesimal.

[Anonymous No.1394626]

>>1394609
Drake's equation.

Granted, it's all mostly based on conjecture, but OH! It's reasonable conjecture. This is what most scientists can agree on, that it is PROBABLE.

I'm not saying they are 100% sure there is, just that most agree that, in fact, it is probable.

[Anonymous No.1394642]

>>1394626
The Drake equation is worthless, half the parameters are wild guesses, as for "most agree", that's as worthless a statement as "9 out of 10 dentists recommend trident"

[Anonymous No.1394648]

>>1394642
* Sigh* ok then