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CNN anchors taken to school over bill mahers commentary

heropsycho says...

That's not what he's saying at all.

The bible, or the Quran, or many other texts, just like historical events as they were, or works of literature, or other even historical texts as complex as this often have contradictory ideas. The US constitution is founded on a set of beliefs and ideas that almost all of us subscribe to, yet there are Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Socialists, pragmatists, etc. all deriving very different ideas from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and more. The reason this is true is because those values often come into conflict, and can outright contradict each other. Freedom vs security, equality vs prosperity, I could go on and on.

With the Bible, you have Catholics, Protestants, subdivided into a plethora of different religions in their own right under the umbrella of Christianity. You have the running joke even within Catholicism that American Catholics aren't really Catholics at all. Not only do different Christians interpret the bible differently, the amount they count on the bible varies between fundamentalists like Jehovah's Witnesses who take the bible extremely literally to extremely secular Christians who have absolutely no problem discarding any part of Christian doctrines when scientific evidence proves otherwise.

You have Christians who act as saintly as Mother Theresa to mobsters.

That's just Christianity. There are extremist Islamic groups that sound more like the Westboro Baptist Church than other Muslims.

But within Christianity, there's "honor thy mother and thy father" and "thou shall not kill". What if your parents are murderers?

That's a crude, and obvious example of conflicting values, but the 10 commandments are simple rules that don't completely resolve every situation.

What's stupid is to believe that you can know about a person's specific ideology just by their religion. Does their religion play a role in their ideology? Absolutely, but how it impacted their ideology has much more to do with their experiences, their natural tendancies, etc. than necessarily their religion. If you grew up in a mob family, honor thy mother and father was more likely the lesson you took from the Bible than thou shall not kill.

And if you look around you, this is plainly obvious. Even look within yourself. We're all a melting pot of lessons and ideas we've learned from school, personal life experiences, our religious beliefs, our parents, our socio-economic backgrounds, our friends, etc. That's why you are different from everyone of your religion, your friends, who you went to school with, your socioeconomic class, etc.

gorillaman said:

What he's claiming is that religions are not ideologies; that their doctrines don't influence the behavior of their followers or the cultures where they're adopted. Because, hey, "it depends on what you bring to it; if you're a violent person your islam, your judaism, your christianity, your hinduism is going to be violent."

That is frankly, and I use this word seriously, stupid.

Democracy Now! - Domestic Spying in the 70s

artician says...

Yeah, my italics didn't come across readable, and I should have checked sarcasm. I don't think understanding people and a moral compass come from schooling. They can come from schooling, but life will give you those one way or another regardless.
It's just trite that they keep attacking him on such lame points. They really *should* be saying "look at his education! How could you hire someone our educational system failed to conform to our political beliefs?".

Yogi said:

I've been in college for the last 10 years, still don't have a degree, barely graduated high school. However I can operate pretty well given the circumstances of my low education level. I imagine he did quite well as there are a lot of people that don't like how school is structured and learn on their own best.

Maybe he's not a genius but he doesn't need to be to do the right thing.

Atheism 2.0 - TED talk by Alain de Botton

hpqp says...

This guy is full of false dichotomies and pretension. First, the whole "ritual" and "community" things are not specific to religion. Look at the art world, school, family life: all full of ritual. And the point about community has already been made above. Second, no one will look down on an atheist who likes aspects of culture and human thought/production linked to religion, be they architectural, textual or other.

He starts with the premise that it's the norm to know that believing in deities is non-sense and no-one does, and those who do do no harm. Well bullocks. The reason people are loud about arguing against superstitious beliefs is because they have dire consequences, especially when they are indoctrinated into vulnerable child minds who cannot oppose them (because not testable nor evidence-based). And that is a danger to humanity, period.

As for thinking about things, as it said above, education should take the place of giving people knowledge and material to be in awe of (e.g. anything by Carl Sagan) and philosophise about. The only reason the evangelicals/pentacostalists are convincing is because they are preaching to a crowd of indoctrinated sheep, making a conscious effort to bypass any critical thought. I think it would be terrible to "preach" that Shakespeare is wonderful. No. Live it. Learn to appreciate it critically. Or dislike it, but know why. And no, propaganda is never good. It is trying to imprint a message onto you without you questioning. No matter how "good" a message is, it should be up to the receiver to critically receive it, and accept/reject it based on their critical appraisal thereof.

Ugh, this guy annoyed me.

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