How dare this Dawkins character speak ill of God, or Buddha, or any of his noodly underlings! Religion and blind faith have brought humanity its greatest achievements. Do you really think a godless society could have the strength, conviction, and determination to carry out a really effective genocide? I think not. That takes a real leader, someone god-like, I would think, and we owe it to our children (well, the non-gay ones, at least) to ensure that God and other delusions are there to provide guidance for our future wars and conquests. - Germain Q. Stemme

This guy is my hero.

the guys a ma ma moron. ill give you guys your futile life perspective that has no room for wonder or hope or any of the other touchstones that have propelled human will and built character all thru history. ya lets just forget that now in our feverish haste to become more technological as we destroy our planet or fall victim to MAD or turn in to medicated/repaired/engineered robots with no regard for the numinous.

So all you who dont believe in God, have a good rest of your life deluding yourself and never realizing Why you are alive. Spend the rest of your lives caw cawing like bitter babies about what is really Life, and meanwhile I’ll find goodness and strength in my faith, and if you don’t understand that yet hopefully you’ll be open enough as to be able to understand it when you’re ready.

@8:48,

Whatever gets you through the day, dude, keep doing it. Life is what it is. You choose to believe in the flying spaghetti monster and others don’t.

The proposition Dawkins espouses can be applied to itself. Here I am, an imperfect human being, with imperfect information, and imperfect powers of reasoning. How can I know that the proposition Dawkins presents is accurate and true? Like me, Dawkins will live a short time on this small planet. Given the expanse of the universe, and the billions of years that have passed since its beginning, Dawkins, like me, will have personally observed little of all that has transpired. Like me, he likely would stare at a blackboard filled with equations relating to cosmology, and not be equipped to understand or criticize them. Like me, then, he must rely on other imperfect human beings, having imperfect and limited knowledge, and imperfect reasoning powers to construct, criticize, and refine such equations, philsophies, concepts, etc. In other words Dawkins, like me, must, at some point, have faith in the truth of what he believes. I too have faith. I have faith that one mode of existence of a Trinitarian God died in the form of a man 2000 years ago; that this man was resurrected; that by virtue of this death on a cross there is a Way, a different Way, to live. That the power to live in this way is through the work of Jesus Christ, and through the power of another mode of existence of this Trinitarian God, the Holy Spirit.
I can give some evidence of this belief. Ultimately, however, my belief, like Dawkins’ belief, rests on faith. But my faith is bolstered, over time, by the fact that God, through Christ, and in the Power of the Holy Spirit, is changing me, so that I’m more and more willing to deny myself in order to love others. I’m more and more willing to seek to be a better steward of what I have in time and material, and of this planet’s resources generally. I would like to have an internal character where I would be willing to die so that another, even an enemy, might live. I know who I am, and I believe that this change is coming from without—and so is evidence, for me, of the transformational power of God’s love, through the work of Christ, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. My job is to pray, to read and understand the teachings of Christ—to be, in effect, his apprentice in the world today. Is this supernatural? Absolutely. And I believe it to be true. I wish Mr. Dawkins all the best, but hope and pray that he sees more clearly the limitations of human reasoning, science, and the fact that he, like me, has observed and understands very little of all of that has transpired since the beginning of time. And so, like me, like all of us, must step out in faith … but into what?

8:48…

I’m not sure of what faith you are referring to when you posted, however, I’ll assume it is of Abrahamic origins.

You stated, “ya lets just forget that now in our feverish haste to become more technological as we destroy our planet.”

How quickly do you forget that it isn’t our strive to become more and more technological that is destroying our earth, in fact technology is one of those things that made use realize what, in fact, we ARE doing to the earth and how we can fix it.

And, how soon you forget god’s intentions…

Genesis 1:26-28

“26 Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’ “

I dont blame technology for the destroying of the earth, i blame the ideologies that stem from faith that put man on a falsified hierarchy above all other living organisms on this earth for its destruction.

I’ll assume that you have never taken a course on evolution because for you to state, “ill give you guys your futile life perspective that has no room for wonder or hope or any of the other touchstones that have propelled human will and built character all thru history,” means that you fail to recognize the sheer amount of wonder that is encapsulated within evolution. I urge you to research mimicry and coevolution and try to comprehend the sheer amazement and wonder that is within each of these aspects of evolution.

I’ll paraphrase an anecdote Dawkins used in his lecture last night:

Theory ‘A’ has lots of evidence Theory ‘B’ has no evidence Theory ‘A’ can not explain ‘X’ at this time Therefore, theory ‘B’ must be correct.

With this I beg to ask you, who is actually deluding themselves? You, a person who simplistic arguments like “god did it” and dedicates your life to the hope that there is a man sitting in the clouds—looking over your every action, passing judgment on the way in which you think and act; as you wish, hope and pray that if you live your life with the goodness of your faith that you will live forever in a gated community in the clouds after your death.

Or is it a person like me, who realizes the absolute complexity of this world and universe in which we live and doesn’t solve its existence with a simple-minded argument like “god did it” and doesn’t need giant men in clouds to live a happy life and finds goodness and strength in the sheer fact of just being ALIVE.

The time you waste congregating and trying to figure out how to make this invisible person in the clouds happy, I spend living my life to the fullest wishing for not a selfish ending in a community in the clouds, but an ending that is just that—an ending. However, I will end my life with the full knowledge that I lived a good life, and the nutrients that make up my body will aid the survival of another organism and give back to the earth—of which I owe everything.

I never understood how religion is supposed to add meaning to life. When in fact it does the opposite. When you think that this time on Earth is all you have, you appreciate it and want to make a difference while you can. Believing in an eternal afterlife makes this time so irrelevant why should we care about it? Anyone who believes in an eternal afterlife clearly has no understanding of eternal and should take a calculus class.

I find it interesting after reading the God Delusion that Dawkins encourages students to think critically and look at the evidence in order to make their decisions about God and about what is true, because the element that is conspicuously lacking in the God Delusion is scientific evidence that takes into account all of the evidence and not merely the evidence that supports his perspective. For a good look at the holes in Dawkin’s logic and “scientific” reasoning towards the non-existence of God Google Alister McGrath or better yet check out his book “The Dawkins Delusion.” If you look into Dawkins further I think you will find that many who would agree with Dawkins that there is no god, would disagree with his methodology and use of science to come to the conclusions that he does.

Dawkins co-stars in a major motion picture with Dawkins and Ben Stein that releases this spring. It’s called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.”

Dawkins makes a fool of himself in that movie.

Christians like Darwin are responsible for all scientific discovery due to their dedication to science for thousands of years. Slamming Christians is a foolish way to attract media attention and sell books.

As an atheist, I don’t particularly care for Dawkins’ smug scientific positivism - nor Christians who try to empirically locate proof of the existence of a god. It’s called faith for a reason, and saying it should be replaced with “objective” science is like someone insulting a cupcake because it’s not a cheeseburger.

…And somewhere on the internet, an idiot makes their mark in an online discussion, for everyone to see.

to the “ma ma moron” above.

you must be a literary master of irony. i mean, speaking of being delusional? open enough to understand “it” when you’re ready? hilarious.

sorry you can’t take things with a grain of salt. so relax.

He just believes in one less god than you do.

PS. I don’t find much goodness in a superstitious mythology which uses an instrument of torture as the main symbol and an act of symbolic cannibalism as the main ritual.

8:48 -

Allow me to pick apart your ‘argument’.

‘ill give you guys your futile life perspective’ First: the age-old argument that atheists are nihilists. This is not so. One can counter that religious people are nihilists, since they seem to need religion to think their life has any sort of purpose. Your life is what you make it. The touchstones that have propelled human will are ambition, compassion, and drive, not some imaginary friend.

‘ya lets just forget that now in our feverish haste to become more technological as we destroy our planet or fall victim to MAD or turn in to medicated/repaired/engineered robots with no regard for the numinous.’ Numinous does NOT equal any sort of deity. The numinous doesn’t even exist, as far as I am aware.

‘So all you who dont believe in God, have a good rest of your life deluding yourself and never realizing Why you are alive. Spend the rest of your lives caw cawing like bitter babies about what is really Life, and meanwhile I’ll find goodness and strength in my faith, and if you don’t understand that yet hopefully you’ll be open enough as to be able to understand it when you’re ready.’

LOL. I know why I’m alive - because I want to make people smarter and I’m not dead and because my parents had unprotected sex. That’s why I’m alive, not because of your joke of an imaginary friend. I find goodness and strength in knowledge - there is no way to understand why the fuck you seem to get your jollies on holding tightly in your insecure way to something that doesn’t even stand the test of examination.

@1:38

Expelled has only been shown to specially selected groups of highly religious people (pastors and such) who are made to sign non-disclosure forms in advance. The movie is made by creationist propagandists who have a history of grossly distorting the truth. Check here to read what I’m talking about. It should also be known that by no means is Dawkins “starring” in this movie. From my understanding he may be interviewed as part of it or quoted or something of that sort (they’re very tight lipped about it, seems strange for producers of a movie to not want people to know what’s in it, unless they’ve got something to hide) but he is certainly not “starring.” And however he is displayed he is likely taken out of context (never trust an ellipsis in creationist writing), because anyone who has read any of his books knows that he is incredibly bright and anyone who saw him speak last night would know just how brilliant this man is.

“Christians like Darwin are responsible for all scientific discovery due to their dedication to science for thousands of years.”

Right, because Muslims, Chinese, Japonese, Inkas, Mayans, Scandinavians, European pagans, and Africans never ever discovered anything in the history of the world. IDIOT. If anything, Christians were responsible for appropriating and conquering the scientific discoveries of others for their own use.

Thank God For intelligent people like Dawkins.

The problem is, I believe, that ethics and moral values have been developed in religious contexts for centuries… but also obscurantism, fanaticism, fundamentalism, intolerance. It´s a contradiction. Time has come for science to address moral issues and neurosciences have a loto to deliver!!!

“Thank goodness” for Dawkins.(Not God !)t’s time to ban that word! Suggest we change our vocab and say instead:

God = “You mean your imaginary friend?”

Religion = “Which belief system (there are so many) are you refering to?”