As if Abrahamic monotheisms are the Only religion.

You're saying the creators of the video are monotheists?

In reply to this comment by marinara:
since this is a monotheism video, not an atheist video i can downvote this for being ignorant

since this is a monotheism video, not an atheist video i can downvote this for being ignorant

I don't want to be presumptuous, but I'm gonna go with, no, she does not know.
>> ^jwray:

What an ignoramus. Does she even know that the bible advocates the death penalty for disobedient children, homosexuals, people who work on the sabbath, adulterers, etc?
Does she know that God and Jesus were deliberately not mentioned in the Constitution?
Does she know that Jefferson, who wrote the declaration of independence, denied the divinity of Jesus and published his own version of the bible with all the supernatural bullshit excised from it? Does she know that Jefferson also wrote that the Bill of Rights had erected "A wall of separation between church and state?"
Does she know that Thomas Paine, who wrote the most influential propaganda pamphlet for the American side of the revolutionary war (Common Sense) also wrote The Age of Reason?
The Pledge of Allegiance and the official currency didn't even have any mention of God before McCarythyist scum got to it in the 1950s.
That, together with an official day of prayer, is equivalent to the establishment of Theism as the state religion of the United States government, which is explicitly forbidden by the first amendment.
The establishment clause precludes the US Government from promoting a particular religion or category of religions in its official capacity. People who work for the government can say whatever they want about religion on their free time, but can't use their government authority to promote monotheism.

What an ignoramus. Does she even know that the bible advocates the death penalty for disobedient children, homosexuals, people who work on the sabbath, adulterers, etc?

Does she know that God and Jesus were deliberately not mentioned in the Constitution?

Does she know that Jefferson, who wrote the declaration of independence, denied the divinity of Jesus and published his own version of the bible with all the supernatural bullshit excised from it? Does she know that Jefferson also wrote that the Bill of Rights had erected "A wall of separation between church and state?"

Does she know that Thomas Paine, who wrote the most influential propaganda pamphlet for the American side of the revolutionary war (Common Sense) also wrote The Age of Reason?

The Pledge of Allegiance and the official currency didn't even have any mention of God before McCarythyist scum got to it in the 1950s.

That, together with an official day of prayer, is equivalent to the establishment of Theism as the state religion of the United States government, which is explicitly forbidden by the first amendment.

The establishment clause precludes the US Government from promoting a particular religion or category of religions in its official capacity. People who work for the government can say whatever they want about religion on their free time, but can't use their government authority to promote monotheism.

You know what, fuck you. You are a fucking racist.
You're saying that it's possible that some races are less intelligent than others, and that there isn't any evidence to disprove that.
You aren't clever and your attempt to disguise your racism is pathetic.

>> ^jwray:

Good video, but I'll have to quibble:
1. Universality of belief in a supreme being is an outdated canard. Monotheism was not even in the majority until the ascendancy of Christianity and Islam.
2. There is insufficient evidence to confirm or deny a difference in average mental capability between races, because of confounding cultural and translation issues for any sort of standardized test.
If you want to succeed, you can't afford to be sloppy with the facts.

Good video, but I'll have to quibble:

1. Universality of belief in a supreme being is an outdated canard. Monotheism was not even in the majority until the ascendancy of Christianity and Islam.

2. There is insufficient evidence to confirm or deny a difference in average mental capability between races, because of confounding cultural and translation issues for any sort of standardized test.

If you want to succeed, you can't afford to be sloppy with the facts.

^But again, depending on your definition of the words, they are either non-believers, atheist, agnostics etc.. Just because they don't label themselves does not mean they don't fit the labels.

I agree that there are people who go about and just don't care - like I don't care about Fairies. But the problem is, that there are few of the (ahem) "other side" that go about it in this way, religion demands quite a few things of its believes, some beliefs decree that you must go out and convert (most of them do), and all of them have some sort of divine punishment for those who do not follow that particular religion, so it is essentially seen as a good thing to get people converted to your own religion, even if it is only in-directly implied in the holy texts. This is a problem! It warps peoples thoughts of right and wrong and in the end it undermines human progress.

Religion is a way to destroy human individuality and make us travel in herds again, this is why it has been so successful in the past (and still is). People are inherently pack animals, so if a leader says "we're all walking to the right" everyone does it - this can, and is, abused by wicked men and movements.

Atheists (or whatever label you want to use) are often very much individualists and this makes it hard to make a coherent group against the religions (like herding cats, as it's been put). When atheists finally come together under a banner, it is rarely frivolous, it's usually an informed choice (there is of course the bandwagon effect too, atheists because it's hip).

And I think it's hilariously underhanded for a believer to cry foul when we focus the atheist movement in this way.

Could be fun to have seen this said about 2000 years ago:

wow. what you people have done to simple monotheism is beyond me.
making monotheism an ideology is the dumbest fucking idea ever. ever.
Idiots.

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>> ^xxovercastxx:
^ That's been proposed as a possible function but it's a bit early to say anything definitive. Either way, it's still better at killing us than saving our lives.


QFT, every christian I know has taken the new theory on the function of the appendix as proof of god. But it makes no sense as it hasn't been proven to be true yet and even if it is, far more people are killed by a burst appendix every year than are saved by the proposed 'clean' bacteria it contains.


On topic, fantastic video.

He's wrong on one point. You don't HAVE to believe this if you believe in monotheism. If you wanted to, you could be a complete idiot and think that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.

Your video, Christopher Hitchens explains monotheism (Hilarious), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

There are a few things about this video that I feel I should comment on.

1) It's a bit erroneous for QualiaSoup to claim that the spiritual or supernatural realms proposed by various religions are conceived as realms we have no connection to or ability to contact or explore. If that were the case, then all religion would be a non-starter. Rather, the claim is that there are points of contact--specifically, those central to the particular religion, such as the temples and oracles of ancient Greece, or the revelation of Holy Scripture in Christianity. These give us an "in" for something like an empirical analysis.

2) Skeptics treating God concepts as scientific hypotheses is getting a little tiring. It's not intended as a scientific statement; why should we expect it to conform to the standards of a scientific epistemology? It is, in fact, the primacy of such an epistemology which is under contention.

3) QualiaSoup's point about the inconclusiveness of miracles is well-received--but it is on the same continuum as arguments that we can't know if we are just brains in vats being fed stimuli by mad scientists. If an image of the Japanese Sun goddess Amaterasu were to materialize and defuse all our nuclear weapons, I don't think it would be unreasonable to take as our starting hypothesis that Amaterasu really did just finally prevent a nuclear holocaust. To be sure, scientific investigation may then question that claim and open it to further scrutiny which may or may not confirm the hypothesis, but that does not mean that, prior to such disconfirmation, we do not have at least some good reason to believe in Amaterasu.

All empirical judgments must be made in terms of our background knowledge. Part of that background knowledge is our knowledge of popular religious beliefs. If we have an independently verifiable experience which matches well with the religious beliefs of our--or perhaps another--culture, then we would have grounds to at least provisionally accept at least some of those beliefs--if only in modified form.

4) Finally, it is certainly the case that the kind of demanding pushiness that Soup criticizes is thoroughly unpleasant and unreasonable. Private reasons to believe in a God or gods do not justify that sort of behavior. His words on the problems with that particular attitude toward faith are perfectly appropriate. I worry a bit that the problems with the video will make it difficult for reasonable Christians and Muslims (since those are the two groups I see engaging in that sort of "dialogue") to perceive where he does in fact hit the mark.

If he's not going to phrase things in a manner that such people will respond to, it would be nice if he could present a few comments on the aspects of those two particular religions that encourage such attitudes and behavior. It seems to be strongly linked to monotheism--Judaism has less of such problematic attitudes, but they are still present, and seem to have been much more present in ancient Judaism. In polytheistic traditions, one tends to find a much higher respect for debate and diversity of thought. One need only look at the vigorous debates between Greek philosophers, who could agree on the subject of the gods no more than in any other areas, or the staggering profusion of religious practices and beliefs to be found in India. It is misleading to speak of such traditions as "tolerant;" the word implies that it takes some effort of will to maintain civility, when in fact polytheists tend to accept such diversity as a matter of fact.

I get that this guy is doing satire, but there's a line between satire and a pure straw man--and NonStampCollector took a flying leap over that line in this video.

In the first place, any halfway competent theist using those arguments will of course make it clear that these argument do not necessarily support any one religion over the others. This is how Aquinas used similar arguments in the 13th century, and it's how theistic thinkers deploy them today. They are only intended to weaken the atheist position generally. NonStampCollector doesn't even attempt to address them on this level.

In the second place, it's asinine to assume that every religion is the same--either with regard to how well they are supported by the cosmological, teleological and moral arguments, or how much or little they incline their followers to religious violence. As it happens, the Hindu has a much better case than the Christian or Muslim for saying that these arguments support his religion. Brahma, unlike the God of Abraham, does not have a seemingly petty concern with particular tribes of humans or become angry or feel wronged because of sin. Brahma is described as illimitable, all-embracing. Brahma is a more cosmic God, better supported by the discovery of the age and vast distances of the universe.

Other Gods or divine realities so supported include Plato's Form of the Good, the Logos of the Stoics, the God of Leibniz or Spinoza, and even the God of A. N. Whitehead (co-author of the Principia Mathematica with acclaimed atheist Bertrand Russel) and Charles Hartshorne.

Tendencies toward violence differ considerably between religions. The Hindu and the worshiper of Amun have no reason to get into a fight about religion. Hinduism is not a single religion, but thousands of intertwined religions which have co-existed peacefully for thousands of years. A plurality of religious beliefs and practices--including atheism--has long been not fought by Hindus, but embraced. Only when aggressive evangelistic monotheisms actively attack Hinduism does anything like an instinct to violence come into play--and even then it tends to arise mainly in extreme circumstances. (As in Orissa in 2008, when the assassination of a Hindu leader by Christian Maoist extremists sparked a riot and violence by members of both religions, or the year before, in 20007, when Christians deliberately provoked Hindus by .) Likewise, there is no reason anyone would go to war over Amun. It would not be appropriate to describe the religions of Egypt as tolerant--the word implies a perception of annoyance or burden in allowing others to co-exist, when co-existence was assumed as a daily fact of life. In fact, the priests of Amun welcomed Zeus-worshiping Greeks to the oracle of Amun at Siwa, which once declared Alexander the Great to be the son of Amun.

But, of course, NonStampCollector doesn't actually know any of this. He just assumes, like nearly all the New Atheists, that all the other religions in the world are more or less just like the ones he's most familiar with. Makes it easier that way; you don't have to do as much studying or thinking.

>> ^stephenfryftw:
do you ever listen to yourself talk? really listen to yourself? because you have truly perfected the echo-chamber art of apologetic religious self delusion. endless weak pathetic excuses, laughably transparent logical fallacies, a total inability to objectively view your own irrational superstitions, a general unfamiliarity with self-consistent intellectual honesty. you gots it all baby. your filthy religion is bursting at the seams with the most ghoulish incitements to gratuitous violence on offer and it's all you can do to jump to its defense whenever this is noticed. the other monotheisms are just as guilty of the same but fortunately their most wacky adherents have been mostly contained in a box by science, law and reason over the past 500 years. the same can't be said if your brand of insecure, ignorant juju though, now can it.


And yet, you provide a bunch of hot air with little to none sound argumentation. Only numerous 'premises' elongated by the implementation of jargon-filled sentences. (I love the tone of your entire post with the fact you dare to use the word 'objectively' )

The real question here is, do YOU listen to yourself talk?