Here’s a conflict in human thinking in general. It’s revealed in this old exchange between Mehdi Hasan and Richard Dawkins.
Hasan is a believing Muslim, and Dawkins asks if he believes that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse. Hasan says he does, that he believes in God and in miracles. Dawkins is incredulous.
My position, as a hard atheist, is that I agree that those are ridiculous beliefs that contradict reality and reason, and that it is very silly to believe in gods. I’m going to side with Dawkins a little bit on this one.
At the same time, though, I’m also going to side with Hasan a little bit…maybe a lot. He concedes that he could be wrong, which is a position I will always favor; he’s demonstrating tolerance for ideas that differ from those of his faith. I’ve never heard Hasan proselytize for Islam, and he says that he’s teaching his own child about Islam, which is fine with me as long as he’s also introducing that child to his principles of tolerance and a willingness to concede the possibility of error.
I also believe that everyone holds silly beliefs. Many people will go into the world of a movie or video game and suspend their strict adherence to the rules of reality for a while; I don’t think they go insane while doing that. Humans have an amazing capacity for stretching their minds out of congruence with nature, and that’s a good thing — we’d have no art, no music, no literature, if we didn’t have that ability. Some people might believe that the Minnesota Vikings are the greatest football team in the world, or that they’re a great cook, or that the sound of church bells is esthetically superior to the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. We don’t condemn them for that, as long as they’re willing to tolerate the existence of church bells and the muezzin. I’m comfortable with a Catholic church down the street from me as long as they aren’t trying to compel me to revere a cracker.
The big question in my mind is always going to be what are you going to do about it? You can disagree with me about evolution, for instance, and I’m going to think you are a very foolish person, but I’m not going to have you arrested or burn down your church. On the other hand, I don’t trust a religious fanatic to not try to make my university illegal, or censor the things we teach — we’re already seeing that happening. You can’t police a belief or an opinion!
I’m afraid I don’t trust Richard Dawkins to not be authoritarian. He has strongly held beliefs of his own, about how science is the only acceptable approach to understanding the world, or about how people’s perspective on gender should be tolerated, and I think he has already been abusing the respect he earned for his science and writing to advocate for oppression and intolerance. Don’t give him any more influence.
So far, Mehdi Hasan seems to be mainly advocating for human rights for all people, and is acting as a positive influence in the world.
I could be wrong. I hope I’m not.
Given how he has been responding to established gender science studies, I have serious doubt about his first belief.
He seems to have confused “science” with “dogma.”
Not to mention his insistence that gamete size is a “universal biological marker” for sex despite the existence of isogametic organisms, and even worse for his claims, organisms that make both large and small gametes and can self-fertilise. This should not be obscure knowledge to a professional biologist. It’s not even obscure to gardeners.
Hasan believes Muhammad ascended to Heaven.
Dawkins believes in White Supremacy and Toxic Masculinity.
I think Dawkins doesn’t have nearly as much edge over Hasan as he thinks when it comes to laughable beliefs.
@chrislawson: I don’t understand why these people say gamete size is the universal marker for sex. Indeed, it is pretty much the worst possible marker. Billions of people do not produce gametes, whether they have yet to reach puberty or they are post-menopausal or for some other reason. Furthermore, producing gametes is a very private activity, and hardly anybody can be sure what others produce or even what they themselves produce at the moment.
And PZ mentioning a cracker led me to find the wikipedia mention of one particular cracker…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_desecration#2008_controversy_in_the_US
Those were fun times, almost 17 years ago!
Dawkins has vaporized his credibility not so long ago.
He now calls himself a cultural xian and a xian Supremacist. He doesn’t use that word but claims xianity is the best religion in the world.
Just about every sentence is wrong.
.1. Xian culture doesn’t even exist.
There are 42,000 xian sects and they don’t agree on anything including the number of xian gods, from 1 to 5. A lot of sects hate each other and they used to fight wars until we took away their armies and heavy weapons.
.2. What xian ethos?
There are near countless varieties and some of the current larger ones such as US fundie xianity are very toxic and violent. The Southern Baptists got their start by defending slavery and they haven’t changed that much since the 1840s.
Dawkins seems to have forgotten that the attacks on the Theory of Evolution are mostly by fundie xians who claim the universe is 5,000 years old.
.3. Dawkins claims xianity is the superior religion in the world.
That is an opinion, not a fact.
The history of xianity is soaked in blood, from the Reformation wars to the genocides of Indigenous people during the European Colonial period.
You can easily argue that Buddhism is more humane.
The same goes for Wicca or some forms of Paganism.
What Dawkins did was cherry pick the form of xianity he grew up with, 21st century UK Anglican church, and ignored the other 99% of the religion and the 2,000 year history of the religion.
This would work for someone in an English village maybe but you could expect better from a Cambridge professor.
The difference is that an essential part of White Supremacy and Toxic Masculinity is acting in a misogynistic and racist way. AFAIK, believing that Muhammad ascended to Heaven doesn’t require doing anything antisocial.
Ever read the Quran? It is chocablock full of weird nonsense. Allah creates falling stars to chase eaves dropping djinns away from Allah’s throne in the seventh heaven. Allah sends a flock of birds to kill a war elephant by dropping pebbles on it. King Solomon understands the language of ants and birds. Bizarre tall tale about the Queen of Sheba follows. The sun sets and rises in a giant mud puddle at the ends of the world. And more It is truly a bizarre and silly book. Allah wills who he will lead right and who he leads astray. Say what? And then there are the hadiths. Which are also in many cases bizarre. The Quran obviously was not send to Mohammad by a super intelligent entity.
https://the-derafsh-kaviyani.com/english/mohammed-believe-it-or-else.pdf
The US Christian theocracy is now engaged in a religious war in the Middle East. Do we need more proof that it is not it is not a source of good?
@8 yeah that stuff is super weird, unlike turning a person into a pillar of salt or putting a bunch of animals on one big boat or eating a magic apple thus dooming humanity or
I have a bigger problem with the way most churches brainwash their members than with the beliefs themselves. Every aspect glorifies and protects their own doctrine while excluding and deprecating competing views. The message is delivered by exalted, highly trained salespeople accompanied by compelling music in inspiring spaces. Reverence is enforced, and questions are not allowed. Children are not taught about the diversity of religions and philosophies, but only what that church believes. They are taught to not trust their flawed minds, but rather to trust scripture and church leaders. Young adults are asked to vow to accept the church’s beliefs and never change their minds.
It’s the opposite of education, which should not only be as factual as possible, but also teach us how to separate fact from fiction and open our minds to new ideas. Believing as I do that education is good for people, it’s hard for me to be okay with institutions which are purpose-built to undermine it.
Secularism has problems defining lines on when a belief goes from tolerably weird to actively harmful, but I’ll still take that perpetual debate over any sectarian approach that assumes they already have the correct beliefs on everything.
So, yeah, Muhammad’s magic horse? Weird, but it neither breaks my arm or picks my pocket. I can choose whether or not it’s worth the frustration of debate to talk about it, but if it’s not causing me harm, I’ll happily focus on other, more important tasks. If they want to spend tax dollars researching how to make a horse fly, or start causing trouble for people who don’t believe in the horse, then I’ll be justifiably concerned. In my political circle, that kind of thing doesn’t happen very often with Muslim beliefs. Many Christians, however, will misbehave if given the chance because they have the political power and privilege here in the US.
Indoctrination is bad. Children are people and entitled to make their own choices as they grow up. It’s a parent’s duty to ready them for dealing with a messy and diverse world full of unknowns.
raven @6:
A nit and some additional details. “There are 42,000 xian sects …”
As of a few years ago, when I last checked, there were over 45,000 different Christian sects and that number was increasing by an average of 2.2 per day! Any one of those sects will proudly proclaim that they are the “One True Church”, and all the others are false. Lutherans have told me that Catholics are not really Christians. Catholics have told me that Mormons are not really Christians. Mormons have told me that they are the only “True Church” because they have received the most recent revelations, and those ancient people were superstitious (invisible golden plates and magic rocks are real?). Pentecostalists told me that all the others are not really Christians, while they are the only “True Church”. And this goes on and on, even closing to form a circular firing squad in their arguments! Dawson claiming that he is a Cultural Christian is quite meaningless, since there is no single Christian Church and they cannot even agree among themselves what being a Christian means. He is just putting gaudy paint on a terminally damaged and quite empty box, while pretending there is something specifically for him inside.
Bragging that your religion is the greatest is a tacit admission that you happen to belong to the greatest superstition. Just like the false claim, invented by religionists, that there are no atheists in foxholes. That is a tacit admission that their religion is based on ignorance and very large amounts of fear.
I used to examine evangelical publications like “Christianity Today” to see what new creationist arguments were being created and promoted. Some brain-dead topics at the time were:
1. Is evolution science’s sacred cow?
Showing that they have not even a tiny glimmer of understanding about what evidence actually means or how science works.
2. Why do scientists want the Earth to be so old?
Same comment as above.
3. You can prove anything. So science isn’t reliable.
Does not even understand logic, and confuses unevidenced religious apologetics with “proof” against evidentiary science. Of course science changes when new evidence or understanding warrant it, while self sealing belief systems admit no evidence that is against their loony cult claims. Religion tightly hangs onto its dogma instead, creating new apologetics to convince the masses that they remain correct in their counterfactual beliefs.
One of the most bizarre “debates” that occurred in that pulp publication was when two opposing groups started out by 100% agreeing that “the bible” [sic] (which one, there are over 100 variants?) is inerrant, and the debate was about what inerrancy means! This is their common, “heads I win, tales, you lose” tactic. And sane people define what words mean before using them, not after. Declaring biblical inerrancy is every bit as valid as declaring a random edition of MAD Magazine is inerrant, and even less defensible since the latter is far more contemporary. As Feynman pointed out in one of his books, they have had centuries to perfect their specific brand of obscurantism.
Critical reasoning is never allowed in these cults, since it invariably leads to unbelief. Since Dawkins has abandoned critical reasoning, has he had a stroke, or is this just some signs of his entering senility? Does he also believe in magic rocks now?
I believe that The Orange Menace will be riding the gold-colored escalator to Hell* one day soon.
Existence dubious
I also appear to develop into a regular complainer here.
So first, I do tend to agree that science (and of course logical thought) are the only ways to make sense of our universe.
Then, many religions actually do have postulates that are contrary to human rights (for instance many of the Ten Commandments). This only works out because the typical adherents to religion don’t really follow these postulates, but cherry-pick what they like.
Nonetheless, I’d strongly disagree with all teachings (including those of the mono-theistic religions) that are contrary to human rights, and in an ideal world, these would be more forbidden than they are right now (of course, we’ve also seen the failures of certain communist societies at inhibiting these kinds of ideologies, and their draconian punishments for belief, which is not what we want, and neither do we want to respond to Sharia law with mass murder).
If Islam was a newly formed sect, I think a country or two might be found where they get themselves banned pretty quickly. Free speech should have its limits where it’s about promoting crime, at least if crime is promoted effectively. That doesn’t mean to kill the speaker, but if (and only if) crime is being promoted, one might think about closing the venue down.
@13 zetopan wrote, “heads I win, tales, you lose.” That’s an interesting typo. If “heads” = rational thought and “tales” = fanciful stories, it’s kind of a neat distillation of the debate between science and religion. :)
Does Mohammad’s flying horse (Buraq) matter? Yes. Believing nonsense like this indicates gullibility and an utter lack of critical thinking ability. Once an entire religion abandons critical thinking to believe in wild and woolly nonsense, evil will follow. You end up with BS like Iran, Afghanistan,m Sudan, ISIS, et al.
In 1939, Germany held its last official census just before WW2 started in earnest. 95% of Germans claimed to be Christians. That did not stop the horrors of the holocaust. This demonstrates that the idea religion acts to civilize a population and is desirable even if false is not necessarily true.. We have the recent efforts to use the assassination of Charlie Kirk to cram Christian Nationalism down America’s throat. The guy commanding us and Christians to abhor the concept of empathy.
I can’t really choose between the Muezzin’s call and English change ringing, but the Muezzin’s is shorter.
drdr,
“I do tend to agree that science (and of course logical thought) are the only ways to make sense of our universe.”
Clearly there are others. Not limited to epistemology, but including meaning and empiricism and pragmatism.
You know the tens of thousands of years of continuous Aboriginal culture in Australia?
That’s an example.
(There is more than one form of logic, too)
… how science is the only acceptable approach to understanding the world…
Which reminds me of the plot of countless sitcoms and operas bouffe in which one protagonist or another decides to test whether their romantic partner really loves them…
Strong Dawkins on this one. Dawkins is lately a bigot and wrong about all sortsa stuff, let me concede that. But wrong in details. Important ones, sure, but, well let me give examples: About gametes, he’s wrong, Important for sex determination, yes, be all and end all, no. But about a common ancestor, that DNA is what carries info from one generation to the next, or that cells exist and do stuff, (I am NOT a biologist, forgive me) or many other larger facts about biology? Not wrong.
And that’s the difference here. The counter examples you provide, PZ, I find uncompelling. The Minnesota Vikings may be the greatest team ever or not by all sortsa subjective criteria. Winged horses fling to heaven or not is objective. And that difference, subjective or objective, is all important here. It’s why I would never trust anyone with such objectively silly, sincerely held, utterly wrong, beliefs anywhere near public office had I my druthers. Who knows what other things you might start basing public policy, ie the whaddya do about it part, on?
Not to say Dawkins is right about all objective things. As said above he aint, But at least he’s trying and would at least claim about himself that when presented with objective evidence to the contrary, his mind changes. Claims wrongly and bigotedly far too often, and I wouldn’t vote for him either in an ideal world. But he’s closer to right than the flighted equine enthusiast in the OP and given that binary choice vote 1 RD!
The difference between Dawkins and The Catholic Church down the road is power. Jesus was probably preaching end of days coming real soon now, go some followers who hated what Rome was doing to them wished the world was overturned. Paul exported that to all of the Roman Empire. Eventually though it became the state religion of the roman empire, and following states. . And it used that power ever since any way it wanted. Dawkins tried to create a cult around himself. Targeting rationalists. That failed, I would say obviously but it was not to him. So Dawkins cannot do the damage the Catholic Church still does and has done for centuries at this point, because he has no levers to pull, not because he is any more or less tolerant.
@JohnMorales: You would be right in asserting that there are other ways of perceiving the world, some of which might be useful. But all the activities that claim to really understand what’s going on should in my view be subsumed under a combination of rationalism (when the term is viewed broadly enough) and empiricism.
That’s the thing, drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler.
Understanding is not necessary.
Just going along with the flow works fine.
Empiricism and pragmatism, not the same as epistemology.
And experience, of course. We all start out naive.
There is no actual need to make sense of the world, unless one has a psychological need for it.
Just accepting it as it is and getting on with it works fine.
(That’s your hidden premise, that one supposedly needs to make sense of it, but it is not a needful one)
Does Mohammad’s flying horse (Buraq) matter? Yes. Believing nonsense like this indicates gullibility and an utter lack of critical thinking ability.
But the question is, to what extent, and how deeply or adamantly, do most Muslims really believe such tales? And how strongly do their beliefs in such tales affect important decisions? Just because a particular tale is told (Noah & the Flood or Mohammed’s flying horse) doesn’t mean everyone who hears it will treat it on the same level as their religion’s basic moral principles. A person can firmly believe Mohammed is God’s #1 prophet, without even giving a shit whether Mohammed really went to Heaven on a flying horse. And if his son starts questioning those silly beliefs, he might punish his son for it, or he might just as likely wave it all off and say “the important bit is that you follow these rules and be on your best behavior.”
So just because someone says they believe in a particular religion or pantheon, it does not inevitably follow that that person “lacks critical thinking ability.”
“He concedes that he could be wrong” doesn’t cut it for me. Nor is the note that “he’s teaching his own child about Islam”. Think you’ve got this one wrong PZ.
Hasan was a very vocal Islamist as a young man. I followed on Twitter long ago, before I deleted it for being a detestable cesspool. Even then, he was constantly harassed in disgusting racist terms, but the criticism of his provocative Islamist comments are certainly warranted. He’s disavowed those statements, and today is broadly a strong supporter of minorities, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community. I think it’s great that people can change and become better. I don’t know if Dawkins changed and became worse, or if we just never knew his regressive views when the whole focus of the community was opposing religion. I suspect the latter. In any case, today I am a huge fan of Hasan and think Dawkins has flushed himself down the toilet of history.
Re: charly @ #11…
Some time take a look at the Unitarian religious education program. The junior high school level (US grades, roughly, 7-9) is “The Church Across the Street.” The kids spend about a month leaning about some other religion and then go to one their services.
So while your objections to most church upbringing may well be valid, it isn’t universal.
Stepping aside from the (anti-) religious wars… In science fiction circles, setting aside criticizing the reality of what is in books (or movies) is termed “willing suspension of disbelief”. One author/editor once commented that “suspension of disbelief” does NOT mean “hanging it by the neck until dead”.
whheydt, liturgical trappings do not a Church make.
Unitarian Universalism is an extreme outlier in the religion-scape, about as religious as the Church of Satan.
Maybe more, actually; it’s almost like belief in belief itself.
Particularly pointless, but qualifies as religion and churchiness for record-keeping.
(Calling it a “church upbringing” is rather misleading)
Who’d want to eat Richard Dawkins’ cooking?
That depends…
what’s he cooking?
Big Boppa@#14:
I believe that The Orange Menace will be riding the gold-colored escalator to Hell
I misread that as escargot to hell and would like to adjust reality.
well of course accepting it as it is and getting on with it is all well and good but I thought that what science was trying to ascertain is, what is “the world” exactly? how does it really work. The roots of that quest lies in the hunter and gatherer’s search can I eat this plant part or no, what part of the stream will I find the good to eat fish, how shall I survive.
the mind of man has the ability and the desire to make up stories it is how we learn and communicate they can be factual or not it is better to know the difference however.
Dawkins is the product of a middle class British boarding (public) school education and all. that he is not free of it is understandable.
I just watched a video on YouTube in which Christopher Hitchens quoted David Hume and Thomas Paine on miracles. Seemed sensible to me.
I was also impressed with the Australian Aborigines. Kudos to them for managing to hang around for tens of thousands of years under pretty harsh conditions. But if all they’ve got to show for it is a bunch of fairy-tales and folklore, so what? No Enlightenment there, Not that there is anything wrong with that but let’s no make more out of it than we should like they’re doing with the Maori in New Zealand.
There seems to be an endless number of stories we can make up to explain the world but. hopefully at some point, somebody wonders if there isn’t a way to decide between them, work out which is more likely to be true, assuming you’re actually bothered about truth, of course. That’s where science begins.
Ahem. I have addressed this preemptively: Empiricism and pragmatism, not the same as epistemology.
And experience, of course. We all start out naive.
Nothing wrong with survival heuristics, but they are not science.
And things are not teleological or eschatological, that shit is shoehorned in.
@ 35 seversky
FYI, “aborigines” is deprecated and considered offensive.
Aboriginal Australians is cool.
seversky:
Well, how long has industrial culture been around? Not 300 years yet.
Kudos to us for FUCKING UP OUR VERY ENVIRONMENT GLOBALLY.
(Since that’s your take, I can echo it the sentiment with interest)
When teaching the Abrahamitic religions in ethics class, I always make one thing clear: There are facts and there is belief. The facts we can all agree on, like the general dates of the life of Muhammed. That’s the same for my atheist selt, the muslim students, the orthodox students, the Sikh students, …
If he’s a prophet of god, that’s religion and while we can discuss it, we must simply agree that it’s a matter of faith and different people have different beliefs.
sebersky
Wow, could you get a bit more condescendingt if you tried?
If you cared to investigate you would discover that those fairy tales and that folklore are the very tools that allowed them to hang around for tens of thousands of years with literally a handful of wooden implements and a thin belt made if their own hair.
Perhaps their enlightenment was their understanding that our bodies are the earth, and using the intellectual tools of folklore and mythology to maintain their presence here for so long was the fruit of that.
We value our ability to manipulate and subjugate nature to our will, and look where that is taking us.
Ridana @16:
“@13 zetopan wrote, “heads I win, tales, you lose.” That’s an interesting typo. If “heads” = rational thought and “tales” = fanciful stories, it’s kind of a neat distillation of the debate between science and religion. :)”
Thank you for catching that, it was a fairly obvious (in retrospect) Freudian slip. My proofreading skills are not what they used to be (or possibly just imagined).
@40 Nick Wrathall
Though it is true that most human societies are actively stupid, it is also true that there are some threats to persistance (if that is to given value on it own) from which where the pre-industrial tribes cant defend themselves even in principle. E.g. asteroids.
At the current rate, the best we can hope for is for a couple of such tribes to survive us until the next impact.
Science examines the universe to discover how it operates. Theistic religions dictate how they want the universe to operate, and no examination is tolerated, unless to only confirms their beliefs (also making such an examination redundant). And their entire enterprise is based on their unshakable and irrational opinion that if you believe something with enough conviction, it has to be true. When bible debates between Christians occur, the group with the most conviction is declared the winner. Wishful thinking taken to one of its illogical extremes. So evolution and actual evidence must be false, and the devil put fossils in place to deceive the non-believers, etc. Once you accept magic as an explanation, there are no guardrails on your thoughts. Hence, they invented the obvious oxymoron of “Supernatural Explanation”. In rational thought, “to explain” is to render unknowns in terms of knowns. Theists get this backwards and prefer rendering unknowns in terms of even greater unknowns, and even rendering knowns in terms of unknowns. They are quite hopeless, having designed a trap that they cannot ever escape from.
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” — Isaac Asimov
Some degree of superstition/unfounded belief is inevitable. I draw the line at letting a superstition be used as an excuse to treat other people badly.
. . . . .
Related (about diversity)
Even objectively horrible people like MTG and Tucker Carlson have come out in favor of truth on occasion.
MTG about the coverup of the Epstein files, TC about the crimes comitted by Israel.
.
A quality about non-fundie, progressive people is that they accept living in a cognitive ecosphere of many conflicting opinions while the far right (GOP / MAGA) think “the other’ are evil.
Personally I think ‘the other’ are poorly informed, rigid thinkers / “stupidity adjacent” people (except the corrupt politicians who accept “donations”- they are just common crooks).
But I have more in common with a modern progressive muslim like the mayor of London than with wossname despite him being an atheist.
I find it remarkable how fissile religion is whereas Science seems to me to be overall working to a consensus of understanding.
“St. Osoph’s is only Presbyterian in a special sense. It is, in fact, too Presbyterian to be any longer connected with any other body whatsoever. It seceded some forty years ago from the original body to which it belonged, and later on, with three other churches, it seceded from the group of seceding congregations. Still later it fell into a difference with the three other churches on the question of eternal punishment, the word “eternal” not appearing to the elders of St. Osoph’s to designate a sufficiently long period. The dispute ended in a secession which left the church of St. Osoph practically isolated in a world of sin whose approaching fate it neither denied nor deplored.”
From Leacock’s Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich.
@43: “Once you accept magic as an explanation, there are no guardrails on your thoughts.”
And yet somehow most Christian sects accept evolution (apart from quibbles about whether God subtly nudges it in certain directions). The guardrails are there, they just aren’t what you think they are, and one irrational belief does not open the floodgates. E.g. God commands me to slay unbelievers? What, you mean like my nice neighbours who lend me garden tools? That can’t be right! I should just pray for my sick kid? OK, I’ll pray, but I’d feel happier if I also take them to the doctor and follow medical advice. Some believers will make the bad choice in those situations, but most, observably, don’t.
Humans are very good at rationalization and compartmentalization, and the results of that can be good or bad.
I’m kind of on the fence about the original post here…..long disquisition deleted, because why bother….but it comes down to, yes, I think Hasan’s faith is nonsense, but Dawkins isn’t arguing about how it affects his interaction with the world or what good or evil he does. He’s just arguing about faith itself, and being a dick about it.
About diversity: Candace Owens reveals corruption.
While I would not normally listen to her, her claims seem eminently plausible in this context.
So even batshit crazy religious people can once in a while have a clear understanding of right and wrong.
I make this point because Dawkins don’t get it.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1ATJEsxpY7/
@28 whheydt
I totally agree about the UU and that my generalizations don’t apply to all churches.
@30 John
UU congregations are communities devoted to a set of values rather than beliefs about the supernatural. They are active in their communities supporting democracy and social and environmental causes. They are far from pointless.