If you don't give your audience what they want, then you'll lose your audience. Dawkins knows this, he is actually pretty good at it. If he wasn't, he wouldn't be as successful as he is.
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Dawkins on Christian Inconsistency...
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
If you don't give your audience what they want, then you'll lose your audience. Dawkins knows this, he is actually pretty good at it. If he wasn't, he wouldn't be as successful as he is.
There's always going to be a balance. I think it's understandable for someone to choose to pay their taxes - even if it means funding less-than-ideal things - if the alternative would be for them to go to prison. OTOH, not tithing has no negative consequence. In many churches, it wouldn't even mean a reduction in standing in the church community - often these days, if other parishoners see you not put anything in the collection plate, they would just assume that you tithe by automatic withdrawal from your bank account.
I'm not necessarily faulting parishoners for funding activities that their churches do in secret (though I do think that it's responsible to look for reasonable oversight and transparency when donating to any cause). I'm talking about the things that are done out in the open, especially ones that are ongoing or repeated. For instance, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has campaigned for the "no" side on several same-sex marriage referendums. If another one comes up, it's reasonable to expect them to do the same again. This means that funding the USCCB (which is funded through tithes of American Catholics) is an action against the legalization of same-sex marriage.
... or to pick on someone other than the Catholics, the Southern Baptist Convention's encouragement of Uganda's "kill the gays" law has been public for so long that, IMO, any member of an SBC church ought to have heard about it. Giving money to an SBC church includes, in part, helping to fund the murder of gay and lesbian Ugandans. There's blood on the hands of every tithing Southern Baptist, including the so-called "moderate" believers.
Right... so when a person chooses to fund a religious organization, it's a voluntary choice and they're responsible for all the foreseeable effects that they enable with their donation.
Was this supposed to answer my question?
I think as I wrote my previous post I ended up mostly agreeing. As long as the assumption isn't that all religious folks give no consideration to the religious organization they fund.
No, it's not. My point is that even when someone claims to have personal beliefs that are "moderate" or "liberal", I'll consider the full effects of their religious belief and practice (including any unsavoury things they choose to fund and support) when deciding whether their religion is positive or negative.
The question I thought your were asking in the context of the OP and my response. I would think the speaker knew the nuance would be of no interest to the person they are speaking to. Why would you expect people to listen to something they have no interest in? Haven't you ever seen people who continue to speak after they've loss the interest of the person they are speaking to? Pretty pointless if you are not saying something interesting to the other fellow.
That's a pretty generalizing view. The church my Grandmother went had a Gay female pastor. She thought it was great. My experience with religious folks has been much different then the one you seem to take for granted.
Why would you assume that someone who goes to Bible study every week isn't interested in the nuances of the Bible?
If you think I'm generalizing, then you're not paying attention.
What, pray tell, do you think I'm taking for granted?
Same reason you'd assume they would. Lack of knowledge about the audience. It'd be up to the speaker to gauge that. Not you are me on the forums.
However the point is I often do exactly that. I understand not every one makes an attempt to be interesting when they speak. However assuming what Dawkins says is true I'd think this would be a likely reason for the behavior he saw.
Yes, I'm paying attention now and see you ain't offering any real response to anything I post, so have a nice year.
That's seems a sort of curious statement to me, as if it wasn't why is there so much energy being spent to debunk the belief? If it's viewed as harmless, than what is the point of all the antitheist rhetoric in our world today?
I've never claimed that people as a whole believe in God because of personal experience. In fact I would very much argue against that as being true. Belief in God is not just for some simply identifiable short list of reasons. It's an enormously complex affair, and why such reductionist views will never go far enough to a truly comprehensive understanding. I think what they have to say is important and contribute to the whole, but it's not something that can be reduced to a simple equation.
I will offer my thoughts though that religions may begin by a mystical realization of a founding figure, but what it becomes after that is due to a huge list of reasons and motivations from the general population. This is where cultural and social factors begin to weigh in. I'm a fan of Burton Mack's approach in understanding how these things can evolve as social movements. But it's more that just that too.
Well, a big part of why I dislike that approach is because it starts with that very premise that does not understand the role of how "real evidence outside our minds" is a fallacy. How we see and interpret "the real world" is completely meditated by what is inside our minds. Again, to what I said before about the myth of the pregiven world, just laying around waiting to tell us about itself, like reading the pages of the Bible as the "authoritative source" of objective reality.
That's a naive view of how these things work, naive realism I believe is the term, and when we proclaim with certitudes our 'knowing reality' we are completely overlooking the fact that we are looking through the lenses of our own current mind's abilities to see and recognize things. Even our highest sciences are not able to overcome this. The five year old for instance, cannot "see" what the adult sees even if they are looking at the same thing, because his mind cannot interpret reality at that level. How it mediates reality is through a different set of filters. So is the five year old "delusional"?
That's my point. So a "Dawkins delusion" is recognizing that this certitude of "seeing reality" is itself a fallacy. It is as much a delusion of belief as those he says are deluded. As the finger points out at another, three are pointing back.I have a great deal I can contribute to discussion here, and it does go to my point. The use of drugs like LSD, Mushrooms, or DMT have the effect of expanding ones perception of the self and reality. I'm a meditator myself and enter into altered states of consciousness (ASC) through the practice. It's not some recreational thing or about "feeling good", but rather to clear the debris of our discursive chattered minds trapped within this domain of reality created by these frameworks of mental models through culture, personality, language, value structures, etc, etc, etc.
You begin to see that those are not "reality" at all, because you can actually SEE them, rather than them being the eyes through which you are looking out of all the time! If you can see them, quietly observing them, then who is that doing the observing? You begin to see reality beyond them, and come to a "larger" view of truth and all our realities. It is not that "thing" that "object" we are looking at that is the truth, but the mind that sees that object and how it understands it. I can go a lot deeper here, but perhaps later.
That's the real impact of someone taking these mind altering drugs is that it can assist them in those initial steps of freeing ourselves from this box of our minds embedded within all of these models of reality we see the world through and call "reality", including the very best of our models through the sciences. They are still models, and if we are stuck looking at them, and to them, as the teller of truth to us, we are still stuck in another box. It's not until you can see all the boxes we live in do you begin to really understand the nature of truth and reality. That's the real beauty of these sorts of mystical practices and insights. It illuminates the whole, not reveals just another 'fact' about the world. It's not a competition to science and reason, but a complement to all understandings of truth and reality, liberating us from being bound to them as reality itself.
I think belief in God can be a whole lot more than just providing comfort and solace, even though that certainly can be part of some people's experience. Actually, I'm thinking I would enjoy a separate conversation with you in these areas as I don't want to stray to far off from the central topic of this thread. Would you enjoy that?
I just wish to reiterate that belief is God is not just one or two things, but lots of reasons for it. Some quite powerful and useful, others culturally significant, others emotional, others spirituality, others politically, others dysfunctionally, and so on and so forth. You really have to evaluate the context and not extrapolate from one view to the whole as being just that. It's way more nuanced and integral than that.
You have made some very good points here that has provoked my thinking and is helping me in how I look at the whole, and myself not pigeonholing it based upon limited and specific contexts. Yes, the online community is where I believe you see this, and there are lots of reasons behind that. But it certainly doesn't speak for the whole, where the average person self-identifies as atheist. And that same thing can be said of the religious, that the most vocal and evangelizing of them are not the definers of God belief of the average person outside that segment.
Boy oh boy, our stories sound similar.
My many years of doing forum posting has been part of my own process of sorting things out for myself, a place as a sounding board to explore where my thoughts are going through debating them. I'm actually at the point where the debating trying to "prove my point", is wearisome to me. I don't consider our discussion here that, and I'm only interested in thoughtful dialog, though I do catch myself falling into that habit of debating like before. It doesn't set right with me anymore. It's not productive for myself, or others really. So I'll just limit myself to our discussion for the time. I disagree with this, for the reasons I've stated above where it overlooks the subjective filters which are the set of eyes we are looking at all of these "objective" truths through. I have a book I would recommend if you were so inclined to look further into this that is by Ken Wilber called Eye to Eye. He goes into these different modes of knowing and how the analytic-empiric view is only one valid way of knowing reality, certainly not the only or most reliable! That's is the "eye of flesh", looking at the world through the eye of mind. Then there is the eye of mind, in a mind to mind understanding of truth and reality through the tools of interview and hermeneutics. Then there is the eye of spirit, where the eye of mind investigates the spiritual and uses the tools of mandelic and soteriological symbolism. Then there is spirit to spirit using the tool of method of gnosis (what I practice).
In other words its a highly complex method of valid and useful knowledge to the whole through an epistemological pluralism. It is equally as much an error for the eye of mind or the eye of spirit to make pronouncements on the natural world, as it is for our analytic-empiric eye of flesh to attempt to make pronouncements on the domains of psychology and culture or the domains of spirituality. I am not arguing for a pure non-overlapping magisteria as Gould proposed, but that the tools we use must be domain appropriate. Without that, it's like trying to paint a landscape or write music with a microscope.
I'm going to leave it here for now, and If you'd like a separate discussion with me, please let me know. I would enjoy that.
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Monk Of Reason
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Dunno what I was typing when I posted that bit. What I meant to say was I don't believe that the cultural impact affected by the belief in god is actually from a deity but rather from our own minds. Sorry about that.
How would you explain cults that go into these crazy beliefs and actions with no basis except a charismatic leader? Do you feel they too are motivated by "something else" in addition to the social structure?
evidence outside our minds" is a fallacy. How we see and interpret "the real world" is completely meditated by what is inside our minds. Again, to what I said before about the myth of the pregiven world, just laying around waiting to tell us about itself, like reading the pages of the Bible as the "authoritative source" of objective reality.
That's a naive view of how these things work, naive realism I believe is the term, and when we proclaim with certitudes our 'knowing reality' we are completely overlooking the fact that we are looking through the lenses of our own current mind's abilities to see and recognize things. Even our highest sciences are not able to overcome this. The five year old for instance, cannot "see" what the adult sees even if they are looking at the same thing, because his mind cannot interpret reality at that level. How it mediates reality is through a different set of filters. So is the five year old "delusional"?
I get where you are coming from but I have to disagree. If we have history proven effective ways of obtaining information and then we ought to go with that system. Being able to remove the human element of error as much as possible with reason and objective facts that we are able to derive in proven methods.
So he isn't actually suffering from any "delusion" but rather basing his beliefs on what we can know. There is no shortage of mystics and spiritual individuals who claim that there is this subjective reality above and behind but so far there is no evidence to back it up. And there lay the problem. If you simply believe that your opinion on the matter is the "next level" and what is under you is a delusion then you miss the point.
A delusion functions as a belief based upon a premise that usually is false. To care what is true requires the basis of evidence. Delusions are often defined as beliefs held even with contrary evidence (usually overwhelming contrary evidence). Dawkins has promoted the idea of evidence based belief and reasoning which would be by definition non-delusional. If there is evidence of something then there is basis to believe. Otherwise it could or would be a delusion.
So rather than thinking of Atheism as a step up from theism it is simply a shift in the basis of beliefs from cultural, psychological or otherwise unsupported claims to evidence based claims.
Not to dis-satisfy but I don't have an argument against this except that I totally disagree. I think the bio-chemical understanding of what these drugs do to the human brain is well enough understood to say with an apt degree of certitude that it is not a spiritual experience but a chemical one. I would simply state that it is an altered sense of consciousness for sure but not in any expansive or revealing way. Much as someone who is drunk feel's they are smarter than they are but in reality they have been bogged down significantly in many important areas.
Sure. PM me if you just want discussion based talk or if you are more interested in debate we can do a 1v1 debate. Pm might just be easier.
Yes. This is true of many many things. For example Theism isn't a religion. One could state that they are a theist but all that tells me is that they believe in a higher power of some sort. Could it be a pantheistic diety that is all invasive and all encompassing? Is it deistic? Polytheistic? And this is just a the most basic nature of the deity and tells me nothing about their actual belief system or what they are as a person. But then we could narrow it down and say they are a "christian". So we at some point must accept that Jesus Christ is the son of god and believe some iteration of his message. We can assume some Christian values but I am sure as you have seen in your daily lives that there are many Christians that don't share the same values or even beliefs. But then you can go and say that they are a Roman Catholic Christian. This would mean that they believe or uphold at least the deposit of faith required by the RCC. We know they don't believe in contraceptive, that homosexuality is a sin, you must confess your sins, the sacraments, ect. We now know a lot more about what you believe and can make inferences that may be necessary or common by those in your belief system. But even then it doesn't tell me a whole lot about who you are as a person.
But then we have Atheism. The term itself meas to simply not believe in god. And that is even more vague than theism as it could be a positive belief or a negative response to the question of belief. So to say that Atheism is a religion or that there are core beliefs seems silly. I could say I am an Agnostic Atheist secular humanist. This is pretty specific. You know I believe in god but don't claim to "know for a fact" and my beliefs are for the good of humanity as a priority but to be done so by humans for humans without the divine or at least without need for the divine.
But EVEN THIS doesn't scratch the surface of who I am. What I believe. So I warn anyone to base any assumptions off of a label of religion or non-religion except in specific cases. A specific case where it would be useful would be the good vs harm of religion and someone says they are an Ant-theist. Then we can make some safe assumptions about where they will be in this debate. But it won't tell me if they are intelligent, courteous, scientific, pluralistic, or anything beyond the single view on religion.
Boy oh boy, our stories sound similar.
I can respect that. Discussion can be more fruitful than debate anyway in expressing and learning.
I think you missed what I was saying. There are many reasons why people join religions, and many reasons why they are started. But typically, when it comes to major religious movements, I do see some spiritual core to them that becomes morphed into this giant dirty snowball. Yes, of course some religions have no bases in anything spiritual, such as cults of personality or military warlords.
I think you've completely missed my point about how we know things. Systems of knowing are not removed from the way our brains process information. I'm trying to communicate something that you seem unaware of in postmodernist research, and it doesn't register to you. Which somewhat makes my point.
On how we currently perceive reality, is more appropriate to say. What we can know, based on what our current modes of perceptual awareness will allow, is better stated. But when you understand that that mode of knowing is in fact just a different mode of knowing than what he criticizes, it becomes a bit ridiculous, like the pot calling the kettle black. To the mythic thinker, Dawkins is delusional. To the rationalist thinker, the mythic thinker is delusion. To the mystic, everyone is delusional, in that they believe they have the single, peak way of knowing truth and reality. The mystic doesn't even claim that! He recognizes the illusory nature of mind in claiming truths.
Are you familiar with semiotics? That might help further our discussion along these lines. Briefly, it has to with how language shapes how we are able to perceive reality, and where something falls outside that system of symbolic representation, the mind is actually unable to see that thing at all. This is what I am talking about.
I think there is a gross misunderstanding of what is being claimed by most mystics I am aware of. It's not claiming some other reality. It's claiming THIS reality. It's not some supernatural realm of woo-land stuff. It's like what the Zen master answered to his students on his deathbed when asked to tell of the true nature of reality. At that moment a squirrel made a sound, he pointed to it and said, "It's just this". That is what the mystic claims. Both the student and the master see and hear the same thing, but how it is understood is 'just this'. Yet, that understanding is experienced in radically different ways. In other words, it can't be told you. You have to see it yourself, like the Matrix.
As far as evidence to back it up, that's a misguided request. I have all the evidence I need. I live it. It's the set of eyes through which I understand the world and myself. It's like asking for evidence of how I think. And that would in fact be more appropriate, as it's not something other than what you are seeing, yet not. Listen to the words and see if they express something beyond just the ordinary. But if you want to know what it looks like, have the experience. Then you have your evidence. Still the stream, stop the discursive reality and tell me what you see? Prior to that, how can there be discussion of it?
It's not an opinion. It a lived reality. It's not a concept or idea of truth, it's a perception and experience of the nature of truth. It's not a propositional truth that one can look at "objectively" and come to some sort of consensus agreement on as an idea, but it involves the active participation of the individual in subjective relationship to all of reality. How on earth, can that be shown? You have to participate in it. You have to do the experiment, not read about it.
I can tell you from personal experience, there is no way, any amount of discussion or argument about it can inform you of it. At best you have these little two-dimensional stick figures on a flat surface that you try to 'wrap your mind around', and that is all good and fine, but cannot and does not convince anyone of anything really, nor really says much about it. But the actual experience of it is the multidimensional reality full of subtle textures and colors, sounds and smells, touch and taste, all of which was there the whole time, but not perceived. And it is none other that this reality we all live in, but don't see or know because we live inside a modeled reality in our minds, full of stick figures, representations as reality. THAT is the mystical experience. Stepping outside that illusion and see what was there the whole time. How can that be proved? Touch the rock. What do you feel, what do you see, what does it tell you? Same rock, different minds.
I'll have to pick up my response further at a later time, but I think most of what I'll address will come back to this for most of it. In the meantime, you can consider the points I'm making here to bring us together in how we're talking about these things, if that's possible.
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Depends on the argument. The process of working through frameworks, doctrines, beliefs, and opinions seems to be one of self realization in my case, depending on how much effort I put into it. If you think of Theology as your own understanding and experience of God then whatever you think or communicate, or pray about becomes a process to understand and experience God. So if you have some failed arguments then what's the big deal as long as you go further on your path. In my opinion, there's all kinds of odd theology out there, and I get cranky when I have to sort through it. But isn't that part of the human condition? Some people are wonderful people and don't understand much about theology at all. Maybe even God gives it a miss most of the time.
John
leibowde84
Veteran Member
I would argue that this is not an inconsistancy per se, but, instead, is merely an expample of shaping a discussion to the one hearing it. This is a common practice in the secular world as well ... just look at politics. Some can understand nuanced concepts, and some aren't ready. The speaker has the responsiblity to decipher who he is speaking to if he or she is interested in clarity.