I'm not sure I'd say that anyone at a university cannot be a child. In many cases, 18-20 year olds -are- children...especially if they've been subject to such conditioning as she appears to have had. Yes, she should be challenging the dogma she was taught, but I've no personal idea how difficult that is do conceive of, much less to do. Do you? That's not an accusation, but an honest question. My parent's raised me to question everything and to make decisions based on evidence. I've got no way to even estimate how difficult it would be to break out of the opposite sort of training. I can't imagine it would take less than an extreme effort.

Fully agree on the last point...I'd love to think she'll start thinking for herself, and that this might even have been the turning point. The prof was far kinder and gentler than I could have been (my frustration would have shown quite clearly), and it'd be nice to think that will pay off in the long run.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/conversion-via-twitter-westboro-baptist-church-megan-phelps-roper?

Fascinating read into how one of the Westboro daughters came to leave the church. Not that I wish to equate Westboro to Mormonism quite, it just gave me greater sympathy for those trapped inside, and an insight into how even the most hardened dogma can be eroded if given enough time and compassion.

@newtboy

Wishful thinking on your part, Newt Dear. You both dearly want people to not want religion.

Billions of people choose religion. Some fake it. Some leave. Some hate it.

My brother grew up in a secular household and has been a devout Mormon for 40 years. I grew up in the same household, and find the idea of organized religion intellectually embarrassing.

Both of you are railing against the preponderance of evidence you are surrounded by. SOME people are drawn to religion. This is just a part of human existence.

I find it so odd that both of you want this fact to be incorrect. Humans create religions, which lead to churches. They have done it for millennia. How you can look at the evidence that surrounds you and say it isn't so baffles me.

It's all good. Just like my brother, you want to believe what you want to believe.

I don't try to argue my brother out of his dogma. So I'm going to stop trying to argue you guys out of your dogma.

Dogma vs experimentation.

Not to resurrect an extremely old thread, but I happened to stumble upon this old clip, and after having read some of the comments, felt compelled to say this about Hell: that it basically invalidates its own existence insofar as 'nothingness' can be a place.

First, we recall that the Bible makes numerous references to God being omnipresent and omnibenevolent.
Second, as discussed above, we see that Christian dogma says Hell is the absence of God (and His love, since for all intents and purposes they're the same thing, being all-good and everywhere).
So, that means that Hell is a place where God isn't, and God is in every possible place simultaneously, the old throwbacks to pantheism. Therefore, Hell is nothingness.

As an atheist, I think that when I die, my consciousness goes into 'nothingness' anyway- so there's essentially no difference for me in dying and going to Hell and dying in a universe without God.

Presuming that I don't think it was completely stage managed (I do) or that Russia isn't trying to score cheap points at America's expense (it is).

But again, that doesn't make him wrong. The west, headed by the US, has been putting it's sticky fingers in to the middle east for over 50 years, and it's only gotten worse and worse. How much western equipment now rests in IS hands? How many WMD's did the US find in Iraq? How many innocent people have died in the decades of war waged in the name of what exactly?

You can gussy it up as much as you like, but the US has been preaching the dogma of the greatest nation on earth/leaders of the world for years. Leaders set examples, so I guess it's not a massive surprise that the world is in such a god awful state...

I have little regard for Putin but for most of this dog and pony show, he's pretty much on the money.

@newtboy

I don't think I'm much in danger of contradiction in suggesting that you yourself have yet to crack a book of feminist theory or engage with a feminist activist making no more extravagant sex/gender claims that the one you quote from that unimpeachable source, dictionary.com (and when did dictionaries move from being an aid to understanding obscure words to the ultimate arbiters of political thought?).

There is no separating the movement from the ideology; this is an ancient truism. Without the movement, the idea dies. Without the idea, the movement doesn't exist. My unfollowable second paragraph comprises only examples of actual, nasty feminist doctrine which I have encountered in the real world, and could probably even document with a few google searches. I can hardly be blamed that this group is so dissolute, so indiscriminately inclusive of maniacs and criminal fanatics that no single representative feminist can be found, no central text can answer for the whole.

But for the sake of increasingly and inexplicably divisive argument, let's attempt to isolate just that 'small-f' feminism in the definition you give: "feminism: noun: the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men", which I will unconditionally repudiate and abjure, for the following reasons.

i) Let's be boring and start with the name. A name that has rightly attracted much criticism, and which Virginia Woolf - not a feminist, merely a devastatingly intelligent and talented woman - called "a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete".* Anyone can see the defect here, an implicitly sexist term that apparently calls for the advancement of one sex at the expense of - whom? Well, whom do you think? A special politics for women only and exclusionary of those other incidental members of the human species, once allies and comrades and now relegated to the other side of what has become a literally unending antagonism.

You may say, "it's only a name", but how little else your dictionary leaves me to examine. No, were there no other social or intellectual harm in feminism, I would reject it on the ground of its name alone.

ii, sailor) Would that there were a known equivalent for the term 'racialism' that could relate to the cultural fiction of gender. The demand for women's rights necessarily requires that such a category 'women' exists, and is in need of special protection. Well what virtue is there in any woman that exists in no man? What mannish fault that finds no womanly echo? Then how is this distinction maintained except through supernatural thinking?

There are no women; and if there are no women, then there is nothing for feminism to accomplish. You may sign me up at any time for the doctrine of 'anti-sexism' or of 'individualism', but I will spit on anyone who advocates for 'women's rights'.

iii) This has been touched on before, and praise satan for that time saving mercy, but I reject the implicit assumption that there is a natural societal opposition to the principle of sex equality and that those who fail to declare for this, again, historically very recent dogma fall by default into that opposing force.



*The quote is worth taking in its fuller context, written in a time when the word 'feminist' was a slur on those heroes whose suffering and idealism has been so ghoulishly plundered for the tawdry use of @bareboards2 and her cohort:

"What more fitting than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated. That word, according to the dictionary, means ‘one who champions the rights of women’. Since the only right, the right to earn a living, has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word. Let us therefore celebrate this occasion by cremating the corpse. Let us write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper. Look, how it burns! What a light dances over the world! Now let us bray the ashes in a mortar with a goose-feather pen, and declare in unison singing together that anyone who uses that word in future is a ring-the-bell-and-run-away-man, a mischief maker, a groper among old bones, the proof of whose defilement is written in a smudge of dirty water upon his face. The smoke has died down; the word is destroyed. Observe, Sir, what has happened as the result of our celebration. The word ‘feminist’ is destroyed; the air is cleared; and in that clearer air what do we see? Men and women working together for the same cause. The cloud has lifted from the past too. What were they working for in the nineteenth century — those queer dead women in their poke bonnets and shawls? The very same cause for which we are working now. ‘Our claim was no claim of women’s rights only;’— it is Josephine Butler who speaks —‘it was larger and deeper; it was a claim for the rights of all — all men and women — to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.’"

*shrugs*

Surely they must be true believers, there are ways of supporting Germany which don't imply such total acceptance of the Neolib dogma.

This is a very interesting question that I've thought quite a lot about during my life (to myself, not in any sort of professional capacity).

The conclusions that I have come to (so far) are:
I think that, yes, religion in general terms IS a significant (but it is a stretch to say the ONLY) restraint on a pretty large number of people. Which is a prospect that I personally have a negative and pessimistic reaction to, similar to what it sounds like you do.

However, I think that there are lots of mitigating circumstances. First, many different religions currently provide that restraint to people. And in the past, many many more religions provided it to even more people. Many of those different religions have been very very different. Some have been near polar opposites. That proves that if your goal is restraining people from being utterly evil, and someone suggests that religion has made or is making a noble effort towards that (like your uncle), the positive aspects they are cheering for are not unique to any single religion, or dogma, or whatever.

If one accepts that many many diverse and completely different religions can potentially have the positive effects that we're looking for, then the actual source of those effects can not be something specific to any one religion. Instead, it has to be something that is held in common by all such religions.

Religions are so diverse and different, it might be hard to imagine something that they have in common. No specific god is held in common, even though all the Abrahamic religions might arguably share that aspect. Not even the simple idea of a god or gods or creator is far from universal; Buddhists revere no god.

Yet I believe that there is one easily overlooked thing that all religions DO have in common. Humanity. They all come from flawed but usually well-meaning people.

However, atheists hold that humanity in common with religions as well. And that makes me believe that if we understand humanity better, either through psychology, or empathy, or whatever, we can achieve the positive effects of religions without the religions themselves. Certainly without the stone-age dogmatic nonsense -- which tends to have arguably as many if not more BAD effects as good. This actually gives me great hope for humanity; rather the opposite to the conclusion that I came to originally when pondering the question.

There may always be people who have no empathy, and for whom nothing would serve to restrain them from what humanity at large would easily identify as great evil. No religion will handle such individuals any better than no religion ... so I guess I don't lose any sleep over that.

I already did read through your straw man arguments and classic feminist dogma, but I must admit that one bit caught me up. I get the feeling, from your posts in this thread, that you don't even know what you meant by that either. So keep deflecting...

A simple "no" would also work.
This is all NOMA nonsense. Religion tells me HOW to go to heaven? Really does it now? What heaven? how? Whats religion´s method? if two competing religions has different ways of getting to heaven, or even outright contradictory hows(Such as Islam (No heaven for you if you believe in Jesus) and Christianity (No heaven for you if you dont believe in Jesus)), how the fuck is that a "how" at all? It isnt. Its superstitious bullshit from A to Z.

Religion has never in the history of humanity told anyone anything worthwhile new, or interesting on any subject. Thats because it relies on faith, revelations and dogma. While science does this on a weekly basis because the entire concept relies on rejection of all forms faith, dogma and revelation, in favor of evidence-based reasoning. Thats the truth.

i ran a metaphysical shop for a few years with my ex-girlfriend and this is what the majority of our customers acted like.

this had me laughing so hard i think i peed a little.

this man has it spot on in regards to switching one dogma for another and these people are fucking oblivious to that fact.

just as a fundamentalist is constrained by his own dogmatic absolutist thinking,these people are just as imprisoned by their own lack of imagination,rigid thinking and an over abundance of incuriosity.

the seeker..no matter what flavor..be you religious,agnostic,atheist or spiritual..will always push the bounderies and always ask questions.

we know that we dont know and that is why we seek.
we ask the hard questions and do not rely on others to give us the answers.

these kind of people always had me giggling.usually white and over-privileged but i rarely found a seeker in any of them.they always wanted you to hold their hand and tell them what to do.

and they didnt take bad news well,because they all watched "the secret" and we all know...just like joel olsteen and his bullshit "prosperity gospel" that god/universe wants you to be rich and happy.

bad things happen to other people...not them.
bunch of incurious dipshits.

*promote

I think we agree completely with Sam Harris in that Islam is in desperate need of a reformation. I won't bring Reza Aslan into this as I haven't read him, and it seems to be tangential at best.

But, acknowledge what you just said when you said that Islam is in need of reformation. You are saying what Sam is saying: That Islam contains some horrible ideas, and people are acting on those ideas, and we need to find a way to marginalize those ideas within the canon of Islam.

We could end the disagreement right there, except for where we stand in history at this point. If Christianity had undergone its reformation in a post nuclear arsenals world, who knows where we would be. It is because of this that it behooves everyone to encourage this reformation of Islam, and potentially to limit their access to apocalyptic weaponry until such a reformation has taken place. That's a different discussion though.

I think Sam's position is that one of the potential motivations behind suicide bombing is martyrdom and jihad. Real belief in those particular dogma alone is sufficient to justify suicide attacks. There are definitely plenty of terrorist actions that take place for completely non-religious reasons, and I bet that the bulk of them combine the two. But that doesn't refute Sam's point.

As for your last bit about literal interpretations, I don't agree there either, at least not entirely. How could you possibly explain the inquisition without resorting to what one would now consider to be fundamentalist readings of the texts? The same fundamentals you're saying weren't in vogue until 100 years ago is the very propaganda used to recruit soldiers to the caliphate's armies centuries ago. In any case it seems unrelated to the discussion when scriptural literalism came about, the fact is that it exists, making it more important that some books contain really bad ideas.

@billpayer
i do not think it is fair to judge so harshly based on so little.@RedSky and @gwiz665 are far from dumb,quite the opposite.they are just expressing their opinions,which you are free to disagree but to dismiss them so readily removes the opportunity to discuss WHY you may disagree.(ok,you did but the tone was a tad..harsh)

i quite enjoy sparring with both of them.they bring perspective and a sharp insight to many discussions and im glad your post brought qwiz out of retirement.

i think @RedSky made an excellent point that the argument by harris lacked the inclusion of socio-economic factors (i would add historical context as well).while your disagreement with @gwiz665 is that he made the argument that jews do not proselytize,which while true,is a highly reductionist way to condense a religion.there are soo many factors which contribute to a religion,sacred texts being only one,single factor.

the real fight is absolutist thinking,a rigid adherence to doctrine and dogma that is the true enemy of humanity.be it for a religion or nationalism,both should be questioned and criticized.

which is exactly what we are doing here yes?

and just a side note,because i think you may not be aware:i am not an atheist

He's explained several times why he tends to focus on Muslim fundamentalist failings when arguing about good and bad with westerners. That's because if he were to bring up an example of a perhaps damaging dogma from Catholicism, there would be an argument if it were really bad, and that isn't the argument he wants to have. Instead, he talks about something absurd like the death penalty for apostasy, which we can usually accept as 'bad' and move on to the meat of his discussion.

If you consider him a racist, you're likely part of the left's overly active auto-immune disorder regarding racism, or you really haven't listened to or understood him. Criticising a world view is not exactly the same as racism. Especially if that world view is shared by several different races!