One world, many views?

zayzayem — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:23:45 +0000

A lovely opinion piece in The Australian by a law professor on why it's not really bad manners to point out to someone over dinner that believing in some of the ghastly claims of homeopathy, magentic resonance or even astrology, even if they are a local member of mensa.

There is absolutely nothing close-minded or even killjoy about saying homeopathy and crystal healing are crappity crap based on crap only designed to take your crap. There is no vast conspiracy.

And a lot of the people who swallow the nonsense are people who should know better; like atheists, scientists and nurses. This is how we can get nonsense acupuncture heals breast cancer studies in the press... *siiiigh*

On a side note. Those of you interested in rationality might be interested in this WEBPAGE. When someone denies evolution you can just go FOSSIL! and be done with it. All thanks to Dave the "happy" singer

Faith By Any Other Name Is Just As Empty

thedarwinreport — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:04:13 +0000

In a Newsweek opinion peice from September 27th, writer Lisa Miller, "argues against the atheists". The column is called "Belief Watch", and Miller's apologetic scribblings do the vacuous nature of religious belief complete justice. She begins by arguing that atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are unfamiliar with real believers.

First, if 90-odd percent of Americans say they believe in God, it's unhelpful to dismiss them as silly. Second, when they check that "believe in God" box, a great many people are not talking about the God the atheists rail against—a supernatural being who intervenes in human affairs, who lays down inexplicable laws about sex and diet, punishes violators with the stinking fires of hell and raises the fleshly bodies of the dead.

When over fifty percent of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, what are we atheists supposed to think? If we include all Christians worldwide, particularly the ones in poorer Catholic and Eastern Orthodox nations, the percentage is probably much higher. This doesn't take into account the non-democratic Islamic nations, where Western ideas are spat upon, and where basic education is limited to males, and where people are threatened into believing in the all-powerful Allah. So, the actual number of believers in an angry, vengeful, and intervening god is probably much much higher than even Lisa Miller cares to imagine.

Apologetics is a form of faith; it's faith in faith. Miller finishes her paper-thin argument by hauling in the invisible sacred cow.

Submitting faith to proof is absurd. Reason defines one kind of reality (what we know); faith defines another (what we don't know). Reasonable believers can live with both at once.

Reasonable believers? Can reason and faith coexist? And how can faith define the unknown? Isn't the unknown, by its very definition, indefinable? Here, Miller's mental gymnastics are Olympic quality. And most believers would likely take great offense to her reducing their unshakable faith to an algebraic X. Personally, I prefer to think of all faith simply as a Y.

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One world, many views?

Faith By Any Other Name Is Just As Empty