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>> ^snoozedoctor:
I'm impressed by the amount of vitriol against religion on the Sift. I guess many of you haven't had the good fortune to be involved in moderate, religious activism.

Actually, I was raised in a rather moderate/liberal branch of UCC.

People here act as if the two are mutually exclusive, whereas they most certainly are not, Einstein being a notable example (not necessarily ascribing to an organized faith, but rather belief in a supreme diety.)

Read the first chapter of the God Delusion. Einstein did not beleive in a personal god. Maybe you could describe his beliefs as pantheism, which definitely does not include the idea of prayer. As Carl Sagan said, it makes no sense to pray to the law of gravity.


Same with Brian Greene of string theory.

String Theory should be regarded as a pseudoscience until such time as it actually makes a testable prediction that differs from the standard model. String Theory reminds me of taking a beautiful formula and splitting it up into a fourier series.

Greene is a demagogue, getting so enthusiastic about popularizing an idea before there's actually any evidence for it.

The people I worship with wear blue jeans, we play loud rock and roll music and we actively provide charity to Rwanda.

I'll bet that a lot of members of the Flat Earth Society do too. If a larger percentage of Flat Earth Society members help Rwanda than the general public, does that justify promoting the belief that the Earth is flat? No. You have to distinguish between the sugar-coating and the bullshit at the core.

When you lump Christians, Muslims, Buddists, etc. into the same mold you display all the prejudice you rail against. Sorry, but true.

Buddhism is an agnostic philosophy, not really a religion.

The core problem that all religions posess is a reliance on faith, which is an epistemological vulnerability.

The core teachings of Buddhism recognize (even exaggerate) tentativeness of all knowledge, unlike the dogmas of almost every other religion.

I come from an upper-middle-class liberal suburban place pronounced Missour-EE within a red state called Missour-UH in the United States of Jesus. My high school had a very high percentage of children of professors at Washington University, and if you added up all the jews, blacks, asians, and mixed people, that was probably over 50%. My mother hails from UCC, which is probably the second most welcoming and nondogmatic of sect of Christianity behind Unitarian Universalism (Barack Obama is in UCC). My father was a woowoo evangelical. Some of my recollections on the subject of religion during childhood are:

1. In third grade, some kid started going around asking everybody, with a dichotomous intonation, "Are you Catholic, or Christian"? I suspect he was an evangelical. I don't recall giving any reply, but even at the time I had doubts due to the lack of any fulfillment of prayer. I had grown to distrust all adults and authority figures as a reasonable extension of my discovery, as a five or six year old, of Santa Claus, the first thanksgiving, Pocahontas, and many other lies. I had also grown to suspect something was terribly rotten in our society due to the cruelty of many homophobic bullies who called me names that weren't even true and the teachers who didn't care. Because of my alienation, I was not inclined to presuppose that the majority opinion was more likely to be correct.

2. Around this time, my (divorced remarried noncustodial) father also took me to see a faith-healer. I don't recall what he was trying to cure me of. He attended some crackpot semirural megachurch, and his business was "no money down" real-estate, another religion.

3. Within two years afterward my father was involuntarily committed to a mental institution for schizophrenia because he believed he could communicate directly with the spirits of Joan of Arc, Jesus, and other saints, and they told him to fight demons by committing arson. He later said the charges were trumped-up and unsuccessfully tried to get out with a religious freedom argument.

4. Teachers from sixth through twelfth grade stressed the importance of critical thinking and incorporated it into the curriculum.

5. In seventh grade, I recall being asked of my religious affiliation, and replying that I was sitting on the fence between agnosticism and atheism. There was no retribution or suprise or stigma. I was already an outcast and had nothing socially to lose, anyway. About a year prior I first acquired persistent unsupervised access to the internet, which I have had ever since. In the following two years I did quite a lot of research online and debating in online bulletin boards. This drew me closer to atheism by gaining a greater understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, etc. In other words, a greater understanding of how the world came to be the way it is. However, I would still call myself a teapot-agnostic.

6. In high school, I found a clique of atheists and agnostics. Shortly after 9/11, when the Missouri legislature enacted a bill that compelled schools to recite the pledge of allegiance at least once a week, some of my classmates and I openly expressed our disapproval on the grounds of separation of church and state. No gasps were heard. This was long before the Newdow case. When the Bible As/In Literature was taught in English class, several of my classmates and I expressed our disapproval again on the same grounds. In classroom discussions on that book, I recall many viewpoints being expressed with no great gasps of shock. I, the nerd, said openly that I thought the bible was a collection of fairy tales, poems, and forgeries, while the big football jock next to me expressed a predilection for biblical literalism in not so many words. I recall a very hot semi-orthodox Jewish girl who told me she would only date Jews.

I agreed with, or even said openly online, much of what is contained in the God Delusion, before the book was published. I suspect some others have had similar experiences. Not every consensus is a flock.


The ID movement, and the fact that every single suicide hijacker/bomber is faith-based, and the loosening of taboos by (e.g.) the Daily Show, have probably been three of the most important factors that led to the books of Dawkins and Hitchens. In Dawkins' case, the ID movement alone may have been the most important factor because of his biological profession. Hitchens tends to write books extremely quickly (averaging a book a year for the past 24 years), and it's very plausible that he began writing his after, and because of, the success of The God Delusion.

Most nonatheist people's comments on the Sift about Dawkins accuse him of being too shrill. Accusing one's opponent of too much enthusiasm (stridency, shrillness) is irrelevant to the subject matter of the debate. I personally find nothing unpleasant about Dawkins' manner of speech except his affinity for hooptedoodle. His grotesque description of the god of the old testament is spot-on. A book only appears strident in relation to one's perception of orthodoxy, and neither the orthodoxy nor one's perception of orthodoxy are necessarily correct. Rather, debate the substance of the issue. Neither Dawkins nor any of his followers is advocating curtailing the religious freedom of believers, so his opponents have nothing to fear but the holes in their theories.

My parents are in UCC, one of the most liberal protestant denominations, and they basically made me go to church until confirmation. They didn't ask whether I wanted to be confirmed. They just sent me there every week. I went to church but didn't utter most of the things we were instructed to utter together because I didn't see any good reason to do so. I kept my mouth shut during the songs etc. After a few years of that I think they took the hint.