Dawkins - 'The God Delusion'

I can't speak to that. Like I said I've never read Harris' books. For all I know Harris only appears more willing to dialogue because I'm only reading him in a dialogue, but from what I've seen of Dawkins' public appearances he's more than willing to field questions from believers, etc.Again I can't say that Harris is more willing to dialogue than Dawkins. And I guess I can't think of what it would look like in a book, except maybe as an afterword - "Hey, email me and dialogue with me!"Maybe I'll get the Harris book and see if I can detect what you're talking about. I'm not trying to be obtuse, and God knows Dawkins doesn't need to be defended by the likes of me. I think he just gets a bad rap for being "confrontational" when really, he's just being less deferential than others.But maybe I feel that way because that's how I'm recieved, in a lot of these debates. (Also I'm somewhat pissed that blogger Amanda "Pandagon" Marcotte was forced out of John Edwards' campaign today for the exact same thing.) Maybe I just couldn't read the exchange without the knowledge of what Haggard had been doing, but when you posted that exchange, Haggard's criticism just fell flat for me. And Harris has certainly been accused of arrogance and the like by Sullivan, so from where I'm sitting spurious accusations of arrogance are pretty much par for the course for these sorts of discussions, so maybe they don't get an traction with me.Different perspective, I guess. Bill Donahue? Jerry Falwell? James Dobson? These are just off the top of my head. You mentioned Haggard already. Maybe I'm just not sure what you're talking about but it seems like every major fundamentalist Christian organization has one or two chairmen each that are falling all over themselves to look like arrogant, hypocritical, panty-sniffing asses. Now that we're in agreement. But I think a lot of those arguments will be fresh to much of his audience, even if to us they're just retreads of ground we've been covering for years.Or, maybe they won't. For my own part I'm a lot more excited by the prospect of another Harris entry in his blogalogue with Sullivan than the idea of sitting down with a chapter of "The God Delusion." His last entry really resonated with me.

I find myself disagreeing with you, but it's possible that I'm not the average viewer. I mean perhaps you're not familiar with Falwell's incendiary remarks, but it seems like if you put a mic on Jerry Falwell you don't have to wait very long before he's insulted something a lot of people hold most dear.Dawkins comes off as a sassy-but-endearing British grandfather, like a kind of atheist Father Christmas.Your mileage my vary, I guess. I see these personalities completely opposite to the way you do.AbE: I'm sorry, Percy, I don't mean to be combative, and I'm largely in agreement with you. It's just my experience that I perceive these personalities in the completely opposite way that you style them, and I don't think I'm alone. On the other hand I can't think of a single way that we could test the appeal of these two men without cherry-picking their "best" and "worst" public appearances or statements, and I don't see what that would prove. Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Well said.

Time for a bump, two "God Delusion" mentions in the past ten minutes: These are certainly some passionate condemnations, but they don't really seem to explain what it is, exactly, that Dawkins is supposed to be so ignorant about.It's true that Dawkins didn't investigate literally every single interpretation of the Bible, which means it's really easy for writers like professional Dawkins coat-chaser Alister McGrath (The Dawkins Delusion) to present some interpretation Dawkins didn't mention like it undermines the argument of the God Delusion, but people like McGrath seem completely oblivious to the fact that the Bible can be read in any one of a nearly-infinite number of ways rather undermines any claim one might make that the Bible communicates timeless, universal truths.A reviewer on Amazon made the same point I was about to:

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If he seriously imagines that most of his readers, let alone Dawkins's, are so expert in biblical scholarship that they know who is believed to have written each book then he is even more out of touch with reality than the rest of his book suggests. More generally, does he seriously imagine that most (or even many) Christians base their beliefs on the conclusions of theologians?

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This example illustrates the emptiness of the whole case of Christian apologists such as McGrath, because he wants to pick and choose which parts of the Church's teaching to believe, so that any example of horrors, whether from the Old Testament (easy!) or the New (not as difficult as one might think) can just be dismissed as something that is no longer part of the teaching of McGrath's particular sort of Christianity. The fact that vast numbers of fundamentalist Christians believe every word of the Bible to be literally true, and that the overwhelming majority of them know much less about academic theology than Dawkins does, is nowhere addressed in this books. Just as Christian biologists who want to retain a role for God in evolution find themselves drawn into postulating a "God of the gaps" to explain smaller and smaller gaps in knowledge, so McGrath imagines a world in which Christians believe only in those bits of Christian doctrine that are not obviously distasteful.

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People tend to believe what everybody around them believes. That can be seen in things like the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment. In the latter, subjects became so convinced that they were actually in a prison that:

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when offered "parole" in exchange for forfeiture of all of their pay, most prisoners accepted the deal. Then, when their parole was nonetheless "rejected", none left the experiment. Zimbardo argues that there was no reason for them to continue participating if they would have given up the material compensation in order to leave.

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They could have walked out the doors at any time; they could not have been physically restrained by the guards nor secured on the premises. The prison was in their minds - because they looked around and saw other people acting like they were in a prison.I think that's truly astounding, and it speaks to the capacity of the human mind to be influenced by what others assert to be true. I'd put more stock in the lessons that can be learned from thinking about these two experiments than in the holy texts of any religion. I don't know. I think I'm more sensitive than most when it comes to mental prisons. I don't think I would have gotten very far in the Stanford experiment and I doubt I would have gone all the way to the Milgram experiment - of course, no one does. But I flatter myself that my knowledge of how these situations operate immunizes me, somewhat, from being inured by them.Of course, a whole bunch of unanswered prayers did kind of add up to a suspicion that what my church was telling me was wrong.

Hrm, funny, I don't see where I said that at all.I guess I don't find it surprising that you still insist on replying to legitimate arguments with personal insults. No, I had the life-changing experience. I still remember it clearly - along with the sense of absolute conviction that I was seeing a battle for my very soul play out. No, not at all. I knew God as strongly as any other I knew.Then I came to the understanding that what I knew as "God" was actually me talking to myself.But, you know, keep on making hilariously inaccurate characterizations about what you think you know about me. None of it is correct, of course. I guess it's really impossible for you to imagine that someone could believe as strongly as you, and yet still realize the truth of atheism eventually.Your failure, I guess, since that's exactly what happened.

Truly breathtaking idiocy. You're saying that the fact that religion is a delusion is proof that there actually is a God?Can I trust that this is so obviously stupid that no explicit rebuttal is required? Why don't you post the definition of "delusion" - perhaps from a relevant psychological material, like the DSM IV - and see if "divine origin" is the current consensus view on the origin of delusional states of mind. The complete lack of any objective, compelling evidence for the existence of any deity. The extensive evidence that no such deity exists or has ever existed. Suggestion - read the damn book. This game where you play 20 questions and we tell you if you're right or wrong about what it says is more than just a little ridiculous.

I don't see why that would be more plausible. It's less plausible than the existence of a deity altogether - since it's contingent on it - and the existence of deities is astronomically implausible.You don't seem to be able to defend your view, either. Gosh, I guess if I was making up a book full of bullshit that I wanted people to believe, that's exactly one of the things I would say - "well, actually, God wants you to believe this stuff. I know it sounds stupid, but let me tell you - what's stupid is not believing."It's not really a surprise to me that the Bible says those things. You basically have to say those things to get otherwise reasonable people to swallow ridiculous claims. But that's exactly the reverse timeline for how it happened to me. I was still a believer when the evidence convinced me that there was no God. If what you say is true, God revoked my "God-sense" when I still believed in him.Why on Earth would he do that? It's pretty stupid, isn't it?