Letters to the Editor
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Well, if you're gonna lie....
Similarly, Dawkins, in "The God Delusion," has stated that science has the right to deal with the question of God and other religious issues, and everything has to be settled according to the canons of the scientific method.
No. Dawkins would never say that science has the "right" to deal with anything. And, note, the author makes attributed quotation.
What Dawkins says is that if you are going to claim that you can explain how things came to be, then you need to present evidence, and make your case. And what the John Haught does not do is make any case whatsoever for his theological position. Dawkins says that the claim "There is a God" is one that has implications, necessary conditions that can be examined. In particular, does the God of Christ exist, does the Trinity exist, did Christ emerge from a Virgin birth, fully human, fully God has very clear implications that can be investigated. So, in the interest of open inquiry, let's do so.
He has, of course, found that Christian leaders are very unwilling to proceed on such a program. Because, of course, the Scripture that is the basis of the belief of even the most abstract Unitarian doesn't bear any kind of thoughtful scrutiny. So you get long-winded bafflegab like this.
Long story short, the fundamental tenet of Christianity--the Trinity--is clearly nonsense. It may not have been in 4AD, but it's very clear now. There's no mechanism for a Holy Spirit, A Virgin Birth of a fully human, fully divine Personage makes no sense at all. And the intermediate stages of the blastocyst lead to more complex, but unpersuasive, stages of divinity.
The idea that Dawkins is "ignorant" about religion is particularly amusing. He's not ignorant at all; he's right down the line in his Anglican schoolboy background.
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@ KiteFlyer
"Since you brought up the condom issue, here is my 2 cents on that: Point to millions of AIDS victims who weren’t using condoms because the Pope told them they shouldn’t. You can’t."
Huh? The graveyards in Africa are full of people who had no access to sex education except for the nonsense their preachers tell them. Religion is actively interfering in politics to prevent programs that would educate people in Africa about scientific knowledge about AIDS.
"I’d argue that not a single homosexual gives a rat’s ass what any theologian thinks about his sexual practices, and yet HIV infections still happening in the gay community in 2007."
Gay describes a sexual orientation, nothing else. To make assumptions about religious affiliation based on sexual orientation is prejudice and nonsense.
"We elitists can presume that the Pope and the Fundies in the US are getting in the way of condom use in Africa all we want, but if we’re honest, we know it’s not Benedict & GWB’s fault this time.
“Condoms are almost undiscussable within a marriage” in Africa, according to Lois B. Chingandu, director of Safaids, and anti-AIDS organization in Zimbabwe. “It is something associated with casual sex. If a wife uses a condom, the message is that you have been unfaithful. If she even initiates the discussion, it tips the power scale. Men resist quite a lot, and it can result in violence.” NYTIMES 11/13/2007"
So public perception in parts of Africa is tainted my macho culture and lack of proper knowledge of the dangers of AIDS. Welcome to what most people already knew a decade ago. Moral belief and culture are at the core of this problem and in Africa they are almost exclusively shaped by the churches. Only proper education about scientific fact will counteract the problem.
GWB has redirected money that should have gone to science based sex education but went instead to abstinence programs that have been shown to be ineffective. He is directly to blame for the deaths of those people who could but did not have access to scientific knowledge about the disease.
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Well ...
"I don’t think you really answer my question at all. Saying that you do good actions to make the world a better place only leads me to ask: why care, why not make it a worse place?"
Because I want to live in a world where people care and that's getting better, not worse.
If I jump one red light, it probably makes no difference in the scheme of things. If everyone did, there would be carnage. So I stop at red lights. Even when there's no one else around.
I don't believe in an afterlife. Even if I did, I still think I'd care more about posterity than how many brownie points I'd earned for myself. I want to die knowing my grandchildren will have the chance for a happy life in a better world.
We all make choices. Individually, those choices might not weigh very much, but we're not the only people making choices. If enough people push together, there's very little that it can't achieve.
So my duty has to be to ask questions, get informed, make the right choices, adjust course if it looks like I'm getting it wrong. Which is the opposite of faith.
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Coffee cup (ex)
"Okay, fair enough, and indeed, I do accept the 2nd law and do not expect to see the coffee cup reassembling itself. But I cannot prove that it won't."
Fine, and true.
Would you spend your life altering your behavior, eating certain things, performing rituals, praying, lobbying your school board to teach that the coffee cup will reassemble and flying planes into the skyscrapers of those who don't believe that it will reassemble. Would you live your entire life that way and indoctrinate your children? Would you blame hurricanes on lesbians who don't believe that hurricanes are caused by broken coffee cups that reassemble?
No.
But there is more evidence, more chance, of that happening than God existing. Almost exactly, mathematically none. It's like betting on a horse when the odds are a billion, trillion, squillion, gajillion to one. If that horse wins, you'll be rich ... but *that horse won't win*. It probably isn't even a horse, at those odds. However much 'faith' you have.