Richard Dawkins & God Delusion

I'm not so sure about that (though I agree with the 'militant athiest' bit). I see religion as working in a similar way to nationalism. When you get lots of anti-immigration shite in the media, it's going to fuel nationalism. At present there is lots of anti-Islam stuff, largely due to the clash-of-cultures explanation for terrorism, so beloved by politicians and the media. I think it quite possible that if this continues or intensifies, it could drive people to Christian fundamentalism (considered the opposite of Islam by those running the show). And there are laws already in place that could be used should this happen (as I showed above).

Judging by the US, the religious right are much better at organising than modern fascists. And a lot of people didn't take it seriously until they started causing trouble (stickers in biology books, teaching ID alongside evolution, etc).

Yes but when labour pass anti union laws it is normally done with a degree of cover, and likewise their faith based schools bullshit is cover for defacto privitisation. But what it's not enough to just say "ah it's all just camoflague for privitisation and outsourcing" but rather we need to ask "what does the choice of camoflague tell us", basically, what is the truth of the illusion? and how does this link back to the "essence" (for want of a better word).

So we know it's about privitisation and outsourcing, which is then passed off as choice, but what does the nature of this choice tell us about the privitisation and outsourcing? The choice is one in which they are apparently all equal, faith schools, secular schools, whatever schools. Not only is education commodified, but religion and principles themselves are reduced to just another franchise. Namely the very things that are suppoused to frame our choices, to give them cogency, have become just another choice, no more meaningful than Pepsi or Coke, mars or snickers, our very choices become commodities. Therefore what seems to be the illusion, "choice", to mask the reality of "privitisation" actually brings us to the reality of the commodity.

autocritique?

I genuinely don't see athiesm as positive actually, i know most people on here would disagree with me on this and fair do's to them, but i genuinely think 'promoting athiesm' is as much a part of bourgeois ideology as organised religion.

Sure i might not take that view if i lived in iran, but then if i lived in china i would probably take an entirely different view of it, so its all swings and roundabouts. In the Uk at least its fair to say that religious fundamentalism is confined to weird fringe groups and the somewhat less extreme established state church are a bunch of irritating and increasingly irrelevant liberal cream puffs whose idea of a fiery sermon is sitting stroking their chins and wondering if theres such a thing as a just war.

Yes i know, what i meant is that 'western' capitalism has no need to accomodate a shift towards fundamentalist religion. Why would it do so? Its not like fundamentalism is profitable, you can't sell much to a miserable snivelling bunch of ascetics anyway. Sure you can keep people submissive for a bit, but religious totalitarianism doesn't exactly offer a great long term model of economic wealth and regime stability does it.
Organised religion divides the working class, that point is indisputable but athiesm functions in exactly the same way. In all honesty the arrogant attitudes of liberalism are just as divisive and the secular liberal brand of athiesm and religion are both part of the same double edged sword anyway. People join religious gropups because capitalism treats them like shit, so going around calling them ignorant fools who should embrace liberal secularism as the lesser of two evils or some other gobshite is hardly likey to win them over is it, if anything it understandably entrenches them deeper into the position they've taken.

Canto it's not so much about "promoting atheism" as it is about rejection irrationality as a basis for understanding the world. You may object to the method that some people use but actually trying to think rationally about the world IS a positive thing.

The only reason I identify as an atheist is because of the strength and power various religious narratives have over people. Were we to live in a world where no-one believed irratioanl shite about gods, or it was confined to a few accepted cranks, the term atheist would be fairly superfluous. Like I don't call myself an "A-nessie-ist", because it doesn't reall matter whether you believe in Nessie or not, and lets face it, only whackos do.

18 years in a christian brothers school having this shite rammed down my throat (not literally, phew!), while never actually taking it seriosuly ('cept when I was really wee, like primary school), I actually found it pretty positive to reject that balls and say, "actually this is a loada crap, I don't believe in any of this superstitious nonsense".

Religion is not a capitalist entity in and of itself, BUT it certainly promotes it.
Religion definitely enforces the hierarchy necessary to make a capitalist structure work (as some of you have already pointed out)
and it also provides the opportunity for people to capitalize on the IDEA...if you don't believe that, look at the thousands of sites on the Web where you can buy Christian paraphernalia, and all the Christian book stores on every corner. Do you think that the people who sell the little plastic cross keyrings and Bibles and Jesus fish for your car REALLY believe in it, or do they see it as an opportunity to make a quick buck from people who do?

But JDMF its a problem coz you have a reactionary pro-market liberal appropriating the debate. (Don't forget Dawkins and his acolytes pretty much see market behavior as hard-wired into our genes, if not put in exactly so crude a manner). Take the analogy of ecology, do you support Al Gore?

it's funny watching cantdo try and give rationale to his latent theism.

As i've said before it doesn't really bother me on a political level but on a personal level (oh look he's seperated the political and personal! castrate him!) i find it really annoying when people lack the intellectual honesty to give up their childish beliefs.

Well actually it does bother me on a political level that the anarchist movement seems to think that bourgeois athiesm offers the proletariat anything other than misery and boredom. No offence meant here but if you go down that road you're only a few steps away from squawking 'no gods no masters' like bunch of collectivist parrots.

On a personal level i don't happen to have any beleifs, i wouldn't claim to be sure of everything. I find problems with relying simply on the stale determinist rationality of mainstream athiesm as much as i find some problems with the irrationality of beleif. Fair enough if you disagree with that, seems a bit over the top to claim it really gets to you on a personal level though but whatever. I wouldn't have thought it was that important.

Also while i know the debate has spread out a bit this thread was originally about richard dawkins, who has been descried as being 'to rationality what george galloway is to the anti-war movement' or something similar. Your not seriously suggesting he should be applauded? You don't wish to join ''the brights'' do you

I think Dawkins is abit of a tit, but i'd hardly describe his atheism as dull, half his books have been about showing how much more amazing and awe inspiring it is that we came about without a creator, and how reducing the universe to a childish fable is actually far meaner spirited and dull.

I also applaud him for atleast having the guts to say that certain beliefs are just "wrong", instead of pissing around with alot of relativist bullshit.

Of course he misses alot in his ranting and his theory of memes is possibly the worst conceptual model for understanding culture ever knocked up but he is not a dull, grey rationalist, rather he thinks that a rational enquiry into the universe gives us access to a much more complex and multifaceted world.

Isn't anarchism about finding room for diversity in society? So why are anarchists so keen to heap insults on those who think differently from them?

I gotta say I'm mainly with CantDo.

I don't care one iota about a person's religious belief, it dosn't dictate their politics. (Most criticisms of religion are actually a conflation of history, culture and religion. As if the super oppressive Arabic/S. Asian Islam is in any way comparable to S.E. Asian Islam, where the religion is pretty casual.) Of course I understand completely that we should attack certain practices.

I totally disagree. I find Dawkins' mean spirited and dull spin on biology more socially pernicious than creationism, possibly though only coz its more widely accepted in secular societies.

what's dull and mean-spirited about Dawkin's approach to truth and understanding the world? As Revol said he talks about how looking at the world rationally is a far more illuminating experience than believing in fairy tales.
See "Unweaving the Rainbow" for this type of thing.

As far as Dawkins being a liberal new-labour type. That's fair enough. It's also the reason I don't look to him to help understand the economics of capitalism or a critique of exploitative social relations. However for a critique of irrationality and the value of truth I'm more than happy to take what's useful from him.

As I said, there's so much on this thread which is basically intended to either parade one's atheism or denigrate people who believe in a god. What's the point? Is it insecurity: the need to define who you are by shouting out what you don't believe in? Or is it something more sinister: the knowledge that "we are right" and a belittling of the others?

I am an atheist. I can see the attraction of the world's religions, but in the same way I can see the attraction in lots of ancient stories. I recognise that religion provides peace and order for many people. I know people whose relationship with their religion is perfectly in keeping with principles that many anarchists hold. I know people whose religion has moved them to do a great many more things than many of the people posting here, I should imagine. One Muslim friend heard about the recent slaughter in Lebanon and, out of a feeling of Islamic duty, got on her mobile to friends around her country. Within weeks, she had a warehouse full of food and necessities and was organising transportation of it all to Lebanon to help her Muslim brothers and sisters. Many anarchists (not necessarily anyone here, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't true of some) limit themsevles to sit around navel-gazing, arguing the toss with others and basically doing shag all other than to go on the occasional demo or churn out pamphlets that are never going to achieve anything because pamphleteering without action never won anyone over.

Who deserves the slagging: the muslim or the anarchist?

I find the absolutism with which many atheists speak somewhat authoritarian. The world's religions might well be right. The scientists might well be wrong. We have no way of knowing and, in the absence of proof, the rationalist will choose to believe in what he or she can accept as the most probable. In that event, the existence of gods is obviously not the most convincing argument. But even if a divine force were behind it all, I don't see how that should be incompatible with anarchism. Anarchism is surely about defending ourselves from power and hierarchy. But it's surely wrong to consider that religion HAS to be based on power or hierarchy. In a power-based, hierarchical society, it obviously manifests itself that way, but that doesn't make it inevitable.

I think anarchists would be better putting forward the alternative case to theism in a less arrogant and less authoritarian manner, remembering that many of the world's religious people are the very same people who are trying to build a new society alongside us. We have no more proof that we are right than they do. Our beliefs are therefore equal in validity. What we can and do object to are the ways in which the views of the religious are then used to enslave and manipulate people.

Not all religion necessarily implies hierarchy I'd agree. However it does require the suspension of the sort of critical thought necessary to recognising our material conditions and ways to improve them.

Abandoning rationality and placing agency in the hands of any sort of supernatural power necessarily dilutes our power to change our material conditions here and now. And if it doesn't have any affect, then what exactly is the point of a religion to those who believe in it?

Your post oozes the sort of relativist sentiment Revol was on about earlier. No one said all religious people are bad, or even came close to implying that; we all know that there are plenty, even a vast majority of religious people who are well-meaning decent, socially-conscious people.
That has no bearing on whether their god actually exists though - and there is absolutely zero reason to suppose that the world is anything other than material.

It's possible that well-meaning, good people can still believe utter tripe.

Dawkins dosn't give a fig about truth or understanding. Dawkins falsely uses biology to bolster his preconcieved notions of human nature and society. He is only a short step from the people who believe things like, say, IQ is genetic. For someone who twists biology for ideological purposes, it is quite hypocritical of him to criticise creationists - he is just as bad. This isn't just a problem of reactionaries. I'm not a big fan of Kropotinesque natural parables either.

(Incidentally xConorx I remember ages ago you were interested in the beginings of life. I'm currently reading Stephen Rose's "The 21st Century Brain" (2005) and there's a chapter in there about the beginnings. Its the first such chapter that I've liked for ages. The rest of the book too is a really good dialectical approach to brain science.)

Quite. My main point is that anarchists are also "well-meaning, good people". What I'd like to see is less anatgonistic language used to talk about religious people and their beliefs. I find that quite consistent with anarchist principles. Labelling ym argument "relativist sentiment" merely serves to lump it together with other /similar/ arguments and denying its validity. Not what I would expect from an anarchist (in theory, of course! In practice, it's JUST what I would expect from an anarchist!)

How can you not be antagonistic to beliefs that you think are wrong? The idea that one belief is just as good as another naturalizes away the material basis of ideological conflict, reducing ontology to nothing more than a set of consumer choices - the definition of relativist sentiment, as far as I can see. In any case, such a position just conceals rather than eradicating its own basis in power relationships - i.e. the idea that this and only this area of discourse is (or should be) somehow politically hermetic is inescapably a coercive judgement in itself.

I have to confess I'm also completely unable to see why neurology needs dialectics.