Quote of the Day (plus an argument against said quote, because Richard Dawkins is an ASS)

[edenfalling]

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
---Richard Dawkins



I resent some man who doesn't know me from Adam coming down from on high and telling me what my religious beliefs are, as if he knows them better than I do!

I am not atheistic about any god. I am agnostic about all of them. In fact, I have been known to swear thusly: "By all the gods that anyone ever held holy..." which tells you something about my attitude toward all views of the divine.

This is not to say that I believe in such gods in the way Dawkins means (and may I say he has a horrifically reductive view of religion? he's as bad as fundamentalists, just in the other direction!), but I am open to the possibility that they might exist -- it is, after all, impossible to prove a negative -- and I do believe that they were real to their adherents, in the same way that I believe all currently worshipped deities are real to their adherents.

(We can debate subjective vs. objective reality some other day.)

Anyway, I do try to respect everyone's religion or lack thereof, but holy fuck, sometimes people get my back up!

*spits in Dawkins's general direction*

Comments

[grikmeer.livejournal.com]

It's actually not that limiting, I find it liberating. The universe is AWESOME and INCREDIBLE in all the various meanings of those words. I find that it's even more so because one day, if we try hard enough and we ask the right questions, we'll know how things work. Things do not have to be unexplained to be wonderful. For example, thanks to scientific investigation I know (roughly, I'm not a high level physicist/chemist) how the sun works, how the light reaches my eyes and why it gets split into all the colours I can see. I still love to see a beautiful sunset over a cliff in the evening. (rather embarrassingly typed morning first time. A sunset in the morning would be pretty miraculous)

[edenfalling]

Clearly I have been letting my annoyance get in the way of clarity. Bad Liz, no biscuit!

What I meant was that -- and I don't know if this is what Dawkins is trying to say, but it is how he has come off to me, so it is not what he means, he has also failed at clarity -- if you deny the possibility of other ways of experiencing and making sense of the world, you are limiting yourself. And while science can show us all sorts of connections and the scope of the universe, science cannot tell us how to react to that knowledge. Science is not a moral system. So what you are doing when you react to the amazingness of the universe is having a religious response. Granted, it's not a deistic response -- I would call it pantheist or animist, actually; a reverence and respect for all things around you, as if they are all important and all connected, whether you couch that connection in terms of spirits or atoms -- but it is still a religious response.

Dawkins seems (to me) to miss that completely. He talks about religion in terms of God-or-no-God and religion-as-authority, which is, to my mind, utterly missing the point.

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Dawkins seems (to me) to miss that completely. He talks about religion in terms of God-or-no-God and religion-as-authority, which is, to my mind, utterly missing the point.

This. That whole black vs white, authoritarian structure to religion is why I'm not a Christian. I cannot believe a Power great enough to create the universe in all its complexity is also small-minded enough to give a shit whether we eat fish or beef on Fridays, who we choose to love, or how (or if) we get dressed to go to church on the Sabbath.

But I pray, I worship my Goddesses, I have a religion (which, btw, teaches respect for all religions and acknowledges that there is a core of truth to just about every serious religion). This does not make me anti-science, anti-evolution or anti-logic. And for Dawkins to dismiss all religion because the one that he's most familiar with dislikes the field of science that he studies is rather irritating.