i've yet to watch this but am wondering if the others disagree with Harris' buddhism, and Hitchens being a neo-con.

can it be just coincidence that they've all become popular in the media around the same time?

Harris' so-called "buddhism" is over-hyped and exaggerated IMO, he is interested in what our brains perceive to be "spiritual" experiences and wants to take it out of religion and superstitions "monopoly" on the subject, and instead examine it scientifically.

Hitchens neo-con'ism, if you want to call it that, is also brought up, more in the second hour, posted here:http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Four-Horsemen-DawkinsDennettHarris-Hitchens-Part-2

And to my disappointment, I thought the other 3 handled it rather poorly, and I mean that they should have confronted him more on the issue. If I had a chance to talk to him, I'd repeat my claim that there are more, and more effective ways to "kill" a jihadist than to literally kill him. And more importantly, preventing a jihadist from being "born" in the first place.

Stronger education, shutting down faith-schools, dropping aid instead of bombs, are just a few of the measures.

I've gotten so distracted with the upcoming election that I've forgotten the wonderment of Richard Dawkins' videos. Great post.

I find it odd that they wonder at the origin of the taboo on criticizing religion. To me, it's clear where this came from: thousands of years of wars started by religions being unable to co-exist. The solution, discovered independently in many times and places, was to make criticizing someone else's religion off limits. If we were just emerging from thousands of years of fighting over football, you could be fairly sure that criticizing a football team would be a bit touchy.

That's not to say that religion shouldn't be criticized, I'm only saying that it seems odd they don't seem to acknowledge the origin and purpose of the taboo they're breaking.

"dropping aid instead of bombs" - very easy to say, and ignorantly covers a huge, huge amount of things that are either out of anyone's control, or in the control of the people that are causing the need for aid in the first place..

Sorry - i won't start or write half a debate, but that's a poor comment, it means literally nothing, when you think about it..

This article (http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html) fairly well sums up my frustrations with these gentlemen. Anti-theism is poor PR for athiesm, just as televangelists are poor PR for Christianity, and Osama is poor PR for Islam.

The thing about Dalrymples article is that its full of unfounded criticisms and deliberate misrepresentations of the various books. Take the following quote of a quote.

Richard Dawkins quotes with approval a new set of Ten Commandments for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist website, without considering odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely ten of them; nor does their metaphysical status seem to worry him. The last of the atheist’s Ten Commandments ends with the following: “Question everything.” Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so on ad infinitum?

Here Dalrymple presents the "commandment" "Question Everything" as if it is something Dawkins forces upon us. The whole point about Dawkins use of those "atheist commandments" was that he took them of a random website just to show that its not really difficult to come up with a counterpart to the Old Testament commandments that's just as good or better.. Its an anecdote to support an argument, not meant as a serious suggestion for replacement of the commandments..

Then theres this:
Yet with the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14

Good for you, Dalrymple, and what Madrassah did you attend? What megachurch did your parents drag you along to to have 40 year old virgins scare you shitless about hellfire?

And how does your early teen dissection of these myths speak for the need to step gently around those who claim them as if they were true? If you made all these points at 14, isnt it about time 9/10ths of the worlds population wake the fuck up? No lets cuddle some more with these twats, lets leave them alone as they insulate another generation from common sense. Thatll work. Let them bang on with their apocalyptic bronze-age myths next to the enriched uranium.

I don't think anti-theism is the answer regardless. Dawkins and co have raised the profile of atheism but many "converts" are people who already doubted the existance of a god, they just couldn't articulate it because of the environment we live in. We need more people like Attenbourgh who extole the virtues of rational atheism and science, not the faults of religion. We need the Dawkins types but not exclusively. Christianity would have faltered long ago if Pat Robertson was representitive of all preachers.

We need the Dawkins types but not exclusively

I've never said exclusively, I love Attenboroughs works as much as anyone, and Dawkins points out the same thing at every opportunity. The thing is that people have a completely distorted view of what Dawkins and the others ACTUALLY says, they continually misconstrue him, read his books by the title alone and generally misunderstand his statements completely.

"All religious people are delusional"
"All religious education is child abuse"
"Natural selection means we are all selfish and should stay that way"

People who think these things are accurate representations of anything Dawkins has ever written, simply havent read a single sentence of any of his books. If you actually read some of his work, you'll see how precicely and deliberately shows respect to other peoples positions, how he deconstructs arguments and fallacies, and how much care he actually puts into his statements precisely so he will not be misconstrued as offensive or shrill. that people STILL manage to do so, is to me a bit of a miracle.

Christianity would have faltered long ago if Pat Robertson was representitive of all preachers.

Dawkins may look like an arrogant bigot from his book-titles alone, that will of course change when you figure out what he really stands for.

Pat Robertsen may NOT look like an arrogant bigot from his book-titles alone, that will of course change when you figure out what he really stands for.

It's great to see them all together. Hitchens is probably the odd-man-out in that setting. Dennett and Dawkins are more scientists, while Harris is a philosopher and Hitchens is a historian.

I like all four, but for different qualities. Dawkins is a great scientific mind, because he seems to have that inquisitive stance towards most things. Dennett is very knowledgeable and seems like a great thinker. Harris is very reasonable and down to earth, and able to cut through the crap. Hitchens bases his arguments in history and from the "dictatorship" angle.

I'm gonna promote this as soon as I have a power point.

>> ^jmzero:
I find it odd that they wonder at the origin of the taboo on criticizing religion. To me, it's clear where this came from: thousands of years of wars started by religions being unable to co-exist.

A couple points. First, there wouldn't be wars started by religion unless it was already taboo to criticize religion.

Second, it's not really true that there have been thousands of years of religious wars. The phenomenon of the holy war is really only found in monotheistic faiths. The Romans certainly didn't start wars with people because of religion (though they certainly found all sorts of other reasons). The Greeks didn't. Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains have peacefully coexisted for thousands of years. Buddhism spread peacefully into China, Japan, and Korea.

Monotheistic faiths haven't really had the political power to engage in religious wars until about 1500 years ago, when Christians really locked up rule of the dying Roman Empire--and they really started ratcheting up as the Catholic Church took political control of Europe and Islam unified the Middle East.

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*talks

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I don't understand Hitchens' argument about ot wishing the argument to end... It seems like he sees binary opposition as being the wellspring of the value of a thing.
I'm interested in this, because it's an argument I run into often - "how could we know pleasure, if there was no pain" and so on.

Anyone?

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pity that even the title of this conversation is cast through a religious lens

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*documentaries

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