Scruton fires back:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9708

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1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

Before and after (ala wheel of fortune)

Shot across the bow your heads


missing in his critique is that organized religion does more to squelch the natural seeking of the sacred (by telling you exactly what it is and why) than does atheism. No atheist would deny that birth death and copulation are moments of extreme emotional connection- rather they'd seek to understand and explore... not memorize and parrot.

Free (not dogmatized), reasonable, open, critical inquiry into all sorts of crap is great!! but, we've got to be able to admit when things/ideas are PROVEN to be hooey. Really. Santa Clause anyone? Great story, worth knowing, not literally true. (sorry kids) How do adults fail to see the parallel? And, those who do finally say that Santa is a fable should not be socially ostracized.

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Santa does have a power that no 'reality' can posess. He can bring, even in his dispelled visage, a pure uncorupted giving love that no flawed mother or father can ever provide a child. His lack of reality dose not diminish his reality.

Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy - Ben Franklin

There may not be proof of any thing. But we can still be happy.

When people are suffering and powerless they will find a place a way they will deal with resolved to conclusion to different degrees togther. What works best depends on so much more than what is real. Real dosen't matter to a process. If it's daughter is happy and is not outcast...a baby laughs with a full belly, what does anything else matter
My grandma had no grasp of so many things. I hope some day I might equal her.

__________________
-Marty

1986 300E 220,000 miles+ transmission impossible
(Now waiting under a bridge in order to become one)

Reading your M103 duty cycle:
http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/831799-post13.html
http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/831807-post14.html

I don't think that is precisely accurate -- to say that an unbeliever of a particular system is an atheist of that system. At least as I understand the term, it is absolute: a-theism = without a theism. That doesn't allow room for selection or preferences.

Just as the opposite of atheism -- theism -- does not allow for unbelief.

I believe there are plenty of terms other than atheism to describe the various states of non-belief that a believer may have. These maybe heresy, apostasy, etc all of the way to antidiestablishmentarianism.

Are Dawkins, Hitchens and other atheists all of the same quality or measure of unbelief? I don't think so. My Dad (for example) was an atheist but I'd call him a sort of laissez-faire atheist. I have a sister who is a casual or unfaithful atheist -- dabbles in religious exercise every decade or so. In my own peculiar case, I step over the line into superstitious agnosticism -- Proof would set me free from a belief that tehre is more to life and death, than life and death.

I think I disagree with your main point. For instance, I think a person can be a theist, but not a believer. Epicurus (the great enemy of early Christianity) was not an atheist, but he was also not a believer. He thought gods existed but would have nothing to do with us, since we would disturb the god's tranquility, so he refused to have anything to do with the gods. He's a theistic unbeliever. Similarly, I think a person today might be convinced by many of the arguments that theistic believers use to prove God's existence (holding that there is Supreme Being, or Uncaused Cause or Prime Mover) but reject all institutional religion and think that God is irrelevant to human life on the whole.

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

What is "belief" if one does not act upon it. It's just mental ascent. Faith or belief requires some sort of action by definition. If one lives their life in a certain way because of things they believe to be true, they have faith in those things. Conversely, agreeing with a certain range of ideas, theological or otherwise, without having them impact one's behavior is really unbelief.

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How was Epicurius (why do I desperately want to spell that, "Epicurious"?) different from an agnostic?

See, I think believing in a deity -- whether one believes that deity is active, passive, or moribund -- is a belief in a deity.

He was different because he claimed to know that there were gods. As I recall, he argued that since people talk about encountering them, they must exist. Don't know if he was just trying to save his skin when writing that or if the took it seriously. In any case, he argues quite clearly that we are better off ignoring the gods and trying to get control of our own desires.

I get asked quite frequently whether I am a theist or an atheist. I find it a difficult question to answer. Some people who know me call me an atheist because I don't mimic the behaviors of christian believers in God. On the other hand, I find the ontological argument for God's existence compelling at one level. I also don't think there is an afterlife which seems to be almost universally associated with belief in God.
The local Episcopal priest tells me that one of my theology professors is an atheist. She clearly doesn't believe that a supernatural prayer answering miracle working God exists and that most ideas of God are really bad patriarchal constuctions designed to keep women in their place. However, she thinks religion is good. What does this make her?

__________________
1977 300d 70k--sold 08
1985 300TD 185k+
1984 307d 126k--sold 8/03
1985 409d 65k--sold 06
1984 300SD 315k--daughter's car
1979 300SD 122k--sold 2/11
1999 Fuso FG Expedition Camper
1993 GMC Sierra 6.5 TD 4x4
1982 Bluebird Wanderlodge CAT 3208--Sold 2/13

A life long athiest friend of mine going through a bitter pre marital break up with his fiance (a born again religionist), proposed a relationship in the trinity to me one night over a drink.

He saw Jesus or 'love' as a necessary sanctifing process, that connected the spirit or 'consciousness' to the father which he saw as 'the material world'.

It seemed to be somthing he was able to grasp onto quite firmly in his despair (due to the tortured nature of his parting with his 'life love' the religionist). It also seemed a position he had siezed upon as a result of his relationship with his 'life love', who's view the world was inured with thoughts of Jesus and his message.

From the perspective of this friend of mine and of Girard's writings I can apreciate how religion might be a usefull tool for a consciouness to address the relationship gap between ego and other. But I less sure the process can be objective, unless 'scientific methods' are applied to the transaction. I tend to the opinion that religious practices, proprely applied, are invaluable to the human condition.

__________________
-Marty

1986 300E 220,000 miles+ transmission impossible
(Now waiting under a bridge in order to become one)

Reading your M103 duty cycle:
http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/831799-post13.html
http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/831807-post14.html

Root and Branch

by IAN HACKING

[from the October 8, 2007 issue]

First the bright side. The anti-Darwin movement has racked up one astounding achievement. It has made a significant proportion of American parents care about what their children are taught in school. And this is not a question of sex or salacious novels; the parents want their children to be taught the truth. None of your fancy literary high jinks here, with truth being "relative." No, this is about the real McCoy.

According to a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted this year, more than half of Americans believe God created the first human beings less than 10,000 years ago. Why should they pay for schools that teach the opposite? These people have a definite and distinct idea in mind. Most of the other half of the population would be hard-pressed to say anything clear or coherent about the idea of evolution that they support, but they do want children to learn what biologists have found out about life on earth. Both sides want children to learn the truth, as best as it is known today.

The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum. Democracy, as Plato keenly observed, is a pain for those who know better. The public debate about evolution itself, as opposed to whether to teach it, is something else. It is boring, demeaning and insufferably dull.

The arguments that Darwin painstakingly presented in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) were revolutionary in their day. They continue to astonish and perplex; never take them for granted. Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life. Many scientists who are upset by the ongoing lobbying insist that it is bad science or pseudo-science. Living With Darwin, Philip Kitcher's brief and cogent manifesto, very rightly disagrees. Anti-Darwinism is, he says, dead science, recapitulating old stuff long abandoned. I prefer to call it degenerating.

I take the word from Imre Lakatos, a philosopher of science who liked to flaunt the aphorisms "Every theory is born refuted" and "Every theory wallows in a sea of anomalies." Both exaggerations have been true of evolutionary theories from the word go, but evolution has gone from strength to strength. Lakatos was a great rationalist, but following his hero Karl Popper, he did not think that theories are good when they are established as true. His unit of evaluation was the research program rather than the theory. A rational program is, he said, "progressive" in that it constantly reacts to counterexamples and difficulties by producing new theories that overcome old hurdles. When challenged it does not withdraw into some safe corner but explains new difficulties with an even riskier, richer and bolder story about nature. Degenerate programs paint themselves into smaller and smaller corners, skirting problems they'd prefer not to face. They seldom or never have a new, positive explanation of anything. In short, they teach us nothing.

There is no one philosophy of science that fully accounts for the evolving body of practices we call the sciences. I would not want to apply Lakatos's model indiscriminately. It is a colorful way to point to the difference between the history of evolutionary biology since Darwin and anti-Darwin posturing that explains nothing. Anti-Darwinism is not pseudo-science or even dead science so much as degenerate science--and that, in pretty much the explicit sense, I owe to Lakatos.

more at: http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071008&s=hacking