The Virus of Faith - Richard Dawkins. This is a documentary which shows how damaging blind faith is?

Question

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol5OWI7ZJZA

Those of you interested, please watch all the 5 parts and comment.

Answer 1

Mr. Religion, there is an error in your above comment. You state: "Time has always existed or it started at the big bang?" However, this is simply a misunderstanding of the nature of time. if something "always existed", that literally means that it has existed for all time. Time, necessarily, has existed for all time (and no more or less than that long), which means that time has existed forever--time always has existed, and always will, for the very simple reason that words like "always" and "forever" necessarily describe the relationships of temporal things, and cannot be extended outside of time. Dawkins is fully aware of this, as are most Big Bang physics, who similarly use the two interchangeably (although generally taking the time to acknowledge such semantic issues; Dawkins obviously didn't feel the need here). To say that "time has existed forever" is as trivially true as saying "space exists everywhere". It's simply the case that although time has existed "for all time", time itself is not eternal or everlasting: it began at the Big Bang, and anything that has existed since the Big Bang (including time and space) can be said to have existed "forever", in the only meaningful and non-figurative sense that anything at all can be said to have existed forever. If by "forever" we mean "for all time", then it is true for time itself; if by "forever", on the other hand, we mean "for an infinite length of time", then it is true for nothing whatsoever, and the word "forever" becomes useless. For practical purposes, the former seems more sensible.

You also seem to be equivocating between different senses of "atheism" in this comment: "Dawkins finds atheism incapable of malevolent intent--why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief? Yet there has been continual violence against religion". Here you switch from discussing whether atheism (an absence of belief) can support violence, to discussing whether anti-religious sentiment can support violence. The "French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and in China" in no way sought to create an "absence of belief"; rather, they sought to establish their own specific political ideologies and dogmas. Whether those views involved belief in God or not, and also whether those views involved opposition to religion or not (and no, the two are not the same: not only do many atheists not oppose religion, but you also don't have to be an atheist in order to be anti-religious), is of secondary importance at best. Conflating Communism and State Atheism and the like with simple nontheism (which is what Dawkins means when he is discussing "atheism" here) is confusing two different issues.

By the way, if you are interested in discussing these issues in more depth, feel free to send me a message. I agree that the level of discourse here is not always very satisfying or engaging.

Answer 2

I have not idea what bats_fanfilm is even talking about. Does this person realize that atheism isn't based on facts? Atheism is based on a lack of belief. Facts might support the atheist's lack of belief, or become an alternative to the God theory (which is just a theory, BTW). So, atheism isn't blind faith. Atheism isn't any faith, it's a lack of. Get out the dictionary bats.

I have read some Richard Dawkins, and I do find his work compelling. However, it is merely supportive suggestions relating to my lack of faith/belief that a God exists. Even if they proved wrong everything that he ever said, I would still not have faith/belief in God.

Answer 3

i've got not seen the documentary yet, yet I actually think of faith has no place interior the lecture room (or the different area of a school). like the debate approximately whether to show creationism or evolution. If somebody needs to study creationism they ought to bypass study the bible, quite than forcing any non-non secular scholars to study approximately it. and whether a Christian student does no longer have faith in evolution, it ought to nonetheless benefit them to understand the thought. a minimum of that's my perspectives ^^ non secular faculties motivate discrimination in keeping with a persons' ideals. Discrimination in keeping with dermis shade isn't suited, so why is non secular discrimination ok?

Answer 4

Atheism is blind faith too, just so you know. Whatever "facts" you think you have are only theories.


EDIT: Can't even make a point without insulting other users, eastchic2001? Atheism IS faith, just not in the conventional sense. Their belief is that no Higher Diety exists, and it will always BE a belief since they have no way of proving it right or wrong, same with Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and every other religion on this planet. That doesn't sound like a faith to you?

Answer 5

I hear you! blind faith can be very limiting indeed! But there are always two sides to every story!

Answer 6

scientists have allways had that
its called professor envey , you profess to believe hoping in time to get the same level of envey

its much like wow this dude is smarter than god and hes asking me ,its like a drug
dawkins has people fawning over every word
our greatest living egsample

you just cant help falling in love with your teacher
must be with peer to duplicate the works of thier faulse idols
peer to peer are the high priests

Answer 7

Watched that, and read a lot of the man's stuff. I became a Christian a little over three months ago after reading his stuff and a whole lots of other stuff too.

Thank you for your concern, I don't need to be 'saved' from Christ.

Answer 8

Yes it is a documentary. Quite a shocking one.

Answer 9

Will look at it and provide comments later :D.

Answer 10

I have watched Dawkins' videos and read many of Dawkins’ books and liked most of them. But in the God Delusion he seems to have left the scientific reservation and landed up in theology's back yard. He comes into the yard with no knowledge of the philosophical arguments needed to play with other theologians. Instead in his latest book he offers up nothing new, only the same rhetoric you would find, say in this forum. I would have expected a man of Dawkins’ stature to have spent some time studying philosophy and logic before writing a book that seems to resemble the same high school debates on religion vs. atheism that I experienced 30 years ago! Dawkins’ atheism often seems to be tacked onto his evolutionary biology with intellectual Velcro. His most recent books just recycle the same tired old arguments that he developed in the 1970s and 1980s.

Dawkins states in The God Delusion, quote

"I need to call attention to one particularly unpalatable aspect of its [the Bible’s] ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy neighbor’ [Leviticus 19:18] didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew. As for the New Testament interpretation of the text, Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs" end quote.

Pigs being, of course, Gentiles. Here Dawkins just demonstrates extremely bad hermeneutics, ignoring Leviticus 19:33-34 or Christ's gloss on Leviticus 19:18 in the parable of the Good Samaritan. That the question would be posed to Jesus, or by Luke, is evidence to me that the meaning of the law was not obvious or settled in antiquity. Dawkins’s air of genteel familiarity with Scripture, quickly evaporates under the slightest scrutiny by the learned.

In the same book Dawkins will argue that evolution of complex things like a God requires time therefore God could not have existed outside of time. This is the same Dawkins who in his earlier book, "Unweaving the Rainbow", remarks that, quote

"further developments of the [big bang] theory, supported by all available evidence, suggest that time itself began in this mother of all cataclysms. You probably don’t understand, and I certainly don’t, what it can possibly mean to say that time itself began at a particular moment. But once again that is a limitation of our minds..." end quote.

So which is it Dr. Dawkins? Time has always existed or it started at the big bang?

Then there is the matter of atheism in The God Delusion. Dawkins finds atheism incapable of malevolent intent--why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief? Yet there has been continual violence against religion--In the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and in China. In three of these events the eradication of religion was part of a program to reshape societies by excluding certain forms of thought, by creating an absence of belief. Neither sanity nor happiness appears to have been accomplished by these efforts. The kindest conclusion one can draw is that Dawkins has not acquainted himself with the salient history of modern authoritarianism.

Not satisfied, Dawkins even picks on the Amish, quote

"There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of ‘diversity’ and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture" end quote.

Here Dawkins ignores the fact that the Amish are pacifists whose way of life burdens our troubled planet as little as any to be found in the Western world and merits not even a mention. Just how strained must Dawkins' arguments become before we are forced to exclaim, "methinks [he] protesteth too much"!

Surely anyone with a rational bone in their body can see through the naiveté of these schoolyard arguments and inconsistencies. In the end we find that Dawkins' atheism is not a rational decision, but rather a moral one. Atheism's key focus is to remove external constraints so that one can live as one wishes, without true regard to an authority. Dawkins imagines himself as a liberator. In reality, Dawkins is a proponent of the first lie told in Eden.

I urge you review what other minds have to say about Dawkins’ arguments. One of the best critiques of the God Delusion is at the link below. Dr. McGrath's lecture is reasoned and rational; two things that Dawkins leaves behind at the opening flap of his book and never looks back. Furthermore, Dr. McGrath's lecture is a model of the type of discussions I had hoped to find in the Yahoo R&S Forum: logical, cogent, articulate, recognizing the good and flawed points of a position, all while making reasoned arguments to support a personal worldview.

I encourage anyone, believer or not, to review the lecture in the link below, if for nothing else just to imagine what is possible for Yahoo R&S. The question of whether there is a God, and what that God might be like, has not despite the predictions of overconfident Darwinians gone away since Darwin, and remains of major intellectual and personal importance. Some minds may be closed; the evidence and the debate, however, are not.

http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/mcgrath/lecture.html