"Dawkins and Pinker are jerks."

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"Dawkins and Pinker are jerks."

I like the 180-degree turn from the bottom of your page to the top. Wasn't something I said...? Blush.gif

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)17:19, 12 February 2012

Well, i always thought dawkins was a jerk. arrogant, pompous, antireligion freak

but you trashed my love of pinker.

Know this, my friend, if you TOUCH my crush on brian cox, i shall seek you out and kill you.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina18:04, 12 February 2012

I'm on the phone with the physics department to change my degree. Be back in a few years to tell you how Cox is totally wrong about everything.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)18:06, 12 February 2012

Crap crap crap.

-)
Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina18:18, 12 February 2012

Anyone else I should queue up? One doctorate shouldn't take me that long.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)18:34, 12 February 2012
 
 

No, that's what the media and the anti-atheism religious like to make him out to be. He's none of those things.

F18:20, 12 February 2012

dawkins? no, he does a good job of it on his own. he is very anti-religion, and everyone knows his views of women. ;-)

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina18:32, 12 February 2012

Since when is it a fucking bad thing to be anti-religion, and how does that make him pompous and arrogant?

F18:42, 12 February 2012

It can be a bad thing if you act like a complete prick about beiong anti religion

il'Dictator Mikal18:46, 12 February 2012

In the minds of these people, being 'anti-religion' automatically makes you a complete prick.

F19:00, 12 February 2012

It does. What is your reason, your actual reason for disliking "all religions/all religious people", without 1)knowing them individually, or 2) knowing the religion?

most people who are anti-religion, know very little about religion, beyond their own personal experiences and that of the straw man "Fundimentalist" religion which we ALL have reason to truly dislike.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina19:03, 12 February 2012

Being fucking 'anti-religion' does not automatically mean 'anti-all_religious_people' -- Jesus, how do you not know that?

While religions do have differences, they're all based upon believing things on faith.

F19:07, 12 February 2012

Most are. Not all. Every single person believes things on faith. Until you have learned science, you can only trust (faith) that science is correct. You have faith that the legal system works or does not work; you have faith that your spouse loves you, etc.

this idea that we have "proof" is mostly a feel good BS position. SOME PEOPLE have proof, but those people are few and far between. most of us just trust that the proof that science has, is real. There are (made up number) 100 people in the world who understand the math behind the big bang - the rest of us just trust them. That is, no matter how much you couch it in "but it's science, it's different", still faith.

That said, it's a faith I trust, cause they do things that most religions cannot do, which is make accurate predictions about the world.

"Anti religion" is a tenant that RELIGION (and as you say, faith) IS BAD. there is no support for this, and infact, significant support that religion, while at times horrific, is also good for people. When you look at the whole picture, it is no better or worse than any other human invention.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina19:31, 12 February 2012

I have to respectfully disagree on the "but everyone takes things on faith" trope. Label it whatever you like, I've used "faith" and "trust" there, but my attitude towards science and even less rigorous things like my relationships and attitude to the law is certainly not the same as what religion professes.

Scarlet A.pngpostate19:35, 12 February 2012

Again, *some* religions. Abrahamic religions, by and large. But they do not represent religions.

And while I respect that you disagree, and while maybe teh issue is semantics, the fact that I know nothing about ACTUAL physics, yet believe the univers is 13.7 million years old, is based only on the fact that some TV shows told me so. Until I can do the math, it is a matter of trust/faith, and not a matter of "logically understanding the facts, and analyzing them" the way people who are "pro rationality" like to describe themselves.

But now we are back at the same point we always are. Do you make a decision first, then justify it with ration, or use ration to make your decisions. and i think you and I have never really agreed on this point, and science has (so far) little to offer, though we will prove one of us right sooner or later, cause we are just learning so much more about the mind each day.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina19:42, 12 February 2012

i think you meant billion? :P

il'Dictator Mikal19:44, 12 February 2012
 

Which religions don't have you accept things on faith? I don't know much about Eastern religions, but I do know that you have to accept based on faith that karma exists, or cows are divine, or whatever kind of supernatural bullshit you want to claim exists. Religion, by my definition, is an ideology based on a claim of knowledge on the supposedly supernatural, so I don't see how you could have one without accepting things on faith.

F19:50, 12 February 2012

buddhism isnt really focused on the SN...

il'Dictator Mikal19:52, 12 February 2012
 
 
 

Yes, you have to make some reasonable assumptions about things, like science, where you normally have to accept that the peer review process generally means that scientific studies aren't lying; I wouldn't call this faith, but a reasonable trust based on past experience, probabilities, and logic that allows us make sense and understand the world around us. Religion just makes up a lot of bullshit and wants you to accept it for no good reason -- this is an aspect of all religions, not just ones that explicitly say 'faith' is a good thing.

""Anti religion" is a tenant that RELIGION (and as you say, faith) IS BAD. there is no support for this, and infact, significant support that religion, while at times horrific, is also good for people. When you look at the whole picture, it is no better or worse than any other human invention." 1. Faith (or, depending on your definition of 'faith', unreasonable faith) is what makes them bad, in my opinion -- that's one of the reasons. 2. Like I said previously, there's nothing uniquely good about religion. Then again, it's not really uniquely bad either, so that really just makes it one more stupid, wholly unnecessary aspect of humanity.

F19:47, 12 February 2012
 
 
 
 
 

There is no justification to be "anti religious"; it is as sterotypical and biggoted as what the fundimentalists do to atheists. Though he is better read than Hitchens, they both paint all religion with single broad strokes, without any real distinction between varieties of religion. He is generally far more polite than hitchens about his views, but they are no less biggoted.

What makes him arrogant? Listen to his conversation with DeGrasse Tyson. Everything you want to know about him is in that amusing hour. Tyson lives in the real world, with real people, many views, and a world where people are often wrong. Dawkins isn't part of that world - he's elite, aloof, and it shows.

the women comment was mostly a joke because of something that (I think) got blown out of context.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina18:48, 12 February 2012
il'Dictator Mikal18:55, 12 February 2012

Yup. i thought it was a stupid ass comment, but people do that in interviews. Doesn't mean he actually thinks that way about women and rape, etc.

but at the same time, i've no reason to think he doesn't. I put lots of motivation on what people say, even when they don't really intend it. to me it shows underlineing views - but there's not evidence. just "I suspect when you slipped, you think otherwise..."

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina18:58, 12 February 2012
 

Ah, the 'if you're against religion you're just as bad as those fundamentalists'. Really, I expected better from you, Godot. That is so fucking stupid. (All) Religion is based upon irrationally believing things with faith instead of reason; it can be and very often is used to rationalize and justify all sorts of horrible things, and what good it can provide is not unique.

F19:04, 12 February 2012

so because some people have used religion as a means of control all religion is bad?

il'Dictator Mikal19:18, 12 February 2012

Read what I said again.

F19:21, 12 February 2012

There is actually nothing irrational about belief in most religions. Let's look at the rain dance. You are starving, there is no rain. You don't know where rain comes from, cause you are primitive. One day you are out dancing, cause you are trying hard to do something other than think of your starving kids. Rain starts. Your mind, being a human mind that is biologically driven to make connections between events (cause and effect) assumes quite naturally and logically that what you did made the rain. Cause you did it, and rain started.

We do that with everything in life - from sports superstitions to science. we say "x was the status, I did Y, X changed to a new status". That is the ground work for most religious actions.

But beyond that, there is a host of religions and religious beliefs not nestled in the blatantly irrational like "god sent jesus to cure all ills". We have no idea what might have started the big bang. any theory we have is just a guess, and really we can never know. Saying "goddidit", when you define god as "something bigger than what we know" is as rational as saying to membranes touched and the contact point was the big bang.

Surveys suggest the slight majority of people who are religious, do not think of a personal god like Fundamentalists do. They think, at best, of something merely "bigger than what I can know". Their monotheist god has grown up, to be "beyond" a guy worrying about who sleeps with whom. But those people aren't out talking to you, trying to change your views, trying to make you worship their way - so most of us don't even realize that's what they think. What we here is loud fundimentlists changing laws, screaming at "others', and even bombing people to get their way. But that is not what most religion in the world suggests.

your own view of religion as bad, is itself irrational. especially when you are doing it from a position where you (likely) don't know what most religions actually teach.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina19:38, 12 February 2012

and not all fundamentalists want to make you act like them either: Case in point is me.

il'Dictator Mikal19:46, 12 February 2012
 

And yet religion persists as we have answers on orders of magnitude better than anything primitive assumptions about cause and effect could have provided.

F19:57, 12 February 2012

Religion persists because it gives human important things they do not get anywhere else. not "cannot" get - just "do not get". A sense of purpose; a meaning to life; a reason why "life sucks" or why there is "suffering". "I just want to know that all of these deaths meant something".

Religion persists because of the sense of community, shared moral and social values, shared sense of exploring the universe.

Science, especially the really deep science can be "like" a religion in those ways. It can awe, inspire, give you a sense of meaning and reason, etc. People who spend their lives staring at the "Wonders of the Universe" often talk with teh language of mystics. But - most people cannot or will not have that relationship to things like how vastly huge the universe is, and how incredibly tiny an electron and it's sub parts are.

Religion persists because it is a wonderful way to control people. But that's why Rational Wiki, Facebook, chocolate, hot baths, and other human diversions persist. We are, by and large, sheep most of our lives. We only really get a voice some percentage of our day, or year. If we as humans were not controllable, not only would we not be big things, like the 99%, we woudln't go to work, or listen to our stupid boss who really does know less than we do. WE would not take our parent's griping about our dates, or our children's whining about the new ipad.

Perhaps it's "one more stupid humanity thing", but as a 20 something yourself (well, actually, i think you said you're still in highschoo - which blows me away), much of your disgust still comes from that space of "teen rebellion" for want of a better word. But for every one stupid thing you change, another will grow. It's so much better, in my life, anyhow, to understand why humans want and need religion, than to disparage it, or attack it, or wish it gone.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina14:36, 13 February 2012