When he says tricks, does he mean everything is a ruse? Religion is just another excuse to suppress the mind. Without religion their is no war, no racism, no reason to be scared about what others think.
He does not mean that everything is a deliberate scheme. He is just comparing religion’s mechanisms for affecting us to the ways that music acts upon us in physiologically explicable ways or that magic plays on our perceptive tendencies in certain ways.
He is arguing essentially that religion has such powerful hold on people not because it actually reveals God to them but due to other ways that it affects them which are misinterpreted as divine.
Dan Fincke has his PhD in philosophy from Fordham University and is an adjunct philosophy professor at five universities this semester (Fordham, Fairfield, Hofstra, William Paterson, and Hunter College). Hear him overview his ideas about the blog's main topics (ethics, religion, atheism, and the atheist movement) in this definitive half hour interview (given to the podcast "Whatever Whatever Amen"). You can also watch him introduce some of Nietzsche's ideas in a ten minute video. Dan was a devout evangelical Christian until he grappled with The Portable Nietzsche while enrolled at one of America's most conservative Christian undergraduate institutions (Grove City College). He went on to write his dissertation on Nietzsche. Learn more about his deconversion and his views on how (and why) to have civil dialogue with religious people in his hour long interview with the Angry Atheist podcast. Also read his article Apostasy As A Religious Act (Or "Why A Camel Hammers The Idols Of Faith"), which explains why those who want to respect religious people and their experiences should stop trying to silence former believers for speaking out against their former religions. (This article also contains the key to understanding why this blog is named "Camels With Hammers".)
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO CAMELS WITH HAMMERS. And---don't be shy---feel free to friend Dan on Facebook (especially if you don't have many atheist friends on Facebook (or at all!). You should also +1 Dan on Google Plus, follow him onTwitter, and/or or like Camels With Hammers'Facebook page. E-mail Dan at camelswithhammers at gmail . com. Among guest contributors the most frequent is Eric Steinhart, who is a metaphysician and philosopher of religion and Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University. He is the author of many scholarly articles and three books.
When he says tricks, does he mean everything is a ruse? Religion is just another excuse to suppress the mind. Without religion their is no war, no racism, no reason to be scared about what others think.
He does not mean that everything is a deliberate scheme. He is just comparing religion’s mechanisms for affecting us to the ways that music acts upon us in physiologically explicable ways or that magic plays on our perceptive tendencies in certain ways.
He is arguing essentially that religion has such powerful hold on people not because it actually reveals God to them but due to other ways that it affects them which are misinterpreted as divine.