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edenfallingWe 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*
---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*
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-28 07:37 pm (UTC)According to its summary, The Blind Watchmaker is an argument for evolution and against intelligent design. I do not need to be convinced that evolution is science or that 'intelligent design/creation science' is non-scientific (and also false). My father is a historian of science and technology and used to teach college courses on the history of evolution vs. non-science in America. I have known that stuff since I was a little kid.
I do not object to Dawkins's science. I object to his denunciation of religion in general on the basis of certain highly specific views of certain members of highly specific religious traditions, and on the basis of an apparent reduction of the vastness and variety of religious experience to the two issues of belief-in-god and disbelief-in-evolution. Therefore, I am going to read The God Delusion, since it is the book I am upset about, to see if he is, in fact, more nuanced and sane in his views than I am given to understand on the basis of what people have told me about him and the short excerpts of his writing that I have read.