Religions are myths. I no more respect ANY religion than I would any other myth such as Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Norse myths. I may find the "Christian" myths SLIGHTLY interesting, perhaps a little quaint but in the end they are group psychosis and entertaining then is dangerous to society.

I think the problem with your last point, in my experience at least, is that most religious people define their self image through their religion. So, any attack on those people's beliefs is also an attack on them personally. Thus making it impossible to respect someone and not their religion, at least from the religious person's viewpoint.

This is similar to the "love the sinner hate the sin" argument Christians love to throw around. Take homosexuality for example, how can you love someone if you think their lifestyle is disgusting? How can a religious person think you respect them if you disrespect their religion?

It's funny because when I tell Christians it's not them I dislike, it's just their beliefs and their actions I find objectionable, they get all bent out of shape. They never quite seem to catch on that I'm "loving the sinner but not the sin."

This is why Muslims take videos and cartoons personally. The majority cannot even read the Koran yet identify strongly enough to riot and kill for the image they hold of themselves.

So, in other words, if they feel offended by having their religion critiqued you could turn the "love the sinner" non-argument on then, right?

Apart from the direct references to religion, especially in the pictures, I found this blog post to be something of a blank template. Anyone could use it, just fill in the names of the "other guys" so that they're not you, whoever you happens to be. It no more makes any point against religious people than against anyone else.

That's because the article is about using "respect" to win an argument. The author isn't trying to make any specific point against religious people here.

They aren't stupid people, but they have stupid ideas. Mock the piss out of those stupid ideas, but since you want them to re-evaluate these ideas too, remember not to call them as stupid as the crap which they've been handed!

They aren't at heart monsters, but they do monsterous things to children, society, and our habitat. Condemn the evil which they do so that they will see it for what it is, with the presumption that they would do better if they knew how.

Generally when Christians demand respect (in the context of an argument), they are requesting you accurately portray their stance, and not some caricature of their stance, for the sake of a reasoned discussion. I don't know a single informed or even pseudo-informed Christian who dismisses atheist arguments because those *arguments* ridicule their position. Ridicule just comes with the package of rendering an opponent's argument's absurd. The prevalent problem of "New Atheism" is that it skips the conclusion and pumps the premise full of question begging caricatures.

So if you insist on referring to the Christian premise as a "belief in a sky fairy", of course they aren't going to entertain your argument. The majority will dismiss it as blatant ridicule, and rightfully take it personally, as they would never refer to their belief as a belief in a "sky fairy". You would have to first show them how their belief simply *amounts* to a belief in a sky fairy, but opening a discussion with "here's your belief [insert caricature], and this is what I think of it" is blatantly ignorant, and of course doesn't do any party involved any good. It builds another callous on your ignorance, turns the ears of your opponent off, and does nothing else but give your patronized audience giggles and jeers.

While crotchety and over-serious atheist apologists like Richard Dawkins reportedly go by the mantra of "respect people, not their beliefs", they simply don't live by it (or they have a different understanding of what that means in the common tongue). In reference to Christians, Dawkins announced to a crowd of 10,000 non-believers to "Mock them, ridicule them in public..." I could list off a grocery list of other remarks, which encourage anything *but* dialogue and simply brand Christians and other religious as idiots and socio-paths. That is simply not respect, nor is it mature, nor should it be the behavior expected of any adult.

This "New Atheism" is simply an ideological culture of atheism that is completely separate from the other forms and expressions of it. It drives wedges, creates and fuels contempt, and eschews any sort of reasonable dialogue about the ideas at hand. It usually comes from an unhealthy dosage of immersion in the physical sciences and a complete disrespect for myth and culture, of which we are all, insofar as we are human beings, susceptible to, and, in various ways, indebted to. Call Christianity, Islam primitive, whatever. It doesn't matter. To assume you've somehow evolved above it, think again. I'm an admirer of Hitchens, but "shun the transcendent"? That's a laughable remark. If you're human, you can't do it. Abolish religion and you'll fill it with some other metaphysical garbage, however shrouded in materialistic terms. All that is to say that once you recognize this, you come to respect how much superstition (healthy and unhealthy) we are apart of, and *there's nothing wrong with it.*

I'll risk being a pedant here...

>> "...once you recognize this, you come to respect how much superstition (healthy and unhealthy) we are apart of, and *there's nothing wrong with it.*"

I'm confused about the "there's nothing wrong with it" part. I'm sure I engage in all kinds of superstitious behavior, but I want to root them out and try to give my behaviors a more sound footing. Am I missing something here? Thx!

Kinda sloppy wording I used... "There's nothing wrong with it" should have been said as "it's all very human."

What a fatuous statement.

Everything done by humans is, definitionally

"all very human."

Okay, fatuous, whatever... Not the way that was intended to be taken. I was hoping this conversation would die. I don't consider medical disorders very human, since that is why they are diagnosed as "disorders", nor do I consider much criminal activity very human.
The simple point is that there are healthy and unhealthy superstitions, and the discussion ought to be around whether religion is unhealthy, or maybe some of it, and, if so, which one (instead of classifying religious people as idiots).

When I use "human" in its adjectival form, I do so to describe things "of, relating to, or characteristic of people or human beings, and by that definition both medical disorders and criminal activity are very human.

But fine, okay. For the purposes of this discussion, you want to redefine the adjective "human*" to be "of or relating to the 'best' or 'most desirable' characteristics of people or human beings."

You say that some of our unevidenced beliefs are true/useful, and some aren't...which would imply that by your definition some are human* and some aren't?

What a stunningly deep** sentiment.

---

"instead of classifying religious people as idiots"

Who says that all religious people are idiots? I certainly don't. I think they all have flawed espistemologies, but that's not the same thing as stupid.

Of course, some religious people are unintelligent; ie. Mormons.

** By "deep" here, I mean shallow.

Eh, really, what's wrong with Mormons? Sure, their origins are a bit dodgier than most, but that's because they had the ill fortune to get their religion made when after we already invented history. They're usually pretty good people.

that's quite a generalization. Are they?

??? No, I said nothing about anything being "true" or "useful". Healthy or unhealthy. That was my terminology. Give it a rest, Paul. I'm done.

I tend to use healthy and unhealthy behavior myself.

Wait wait wait.

Out of my whole reply, the only thing you could thing to challenge was my equating "healthy superstition" to "unevidenced beliefs which are true/useful"?

Eg. "All red mushrooms kill people" <-- sounds like a useful unevidenced belief to me. While some red mushrooms might not kill, this superstition will keep you from eating those that will.

....

Not only do I not see the problem you apparently have with my paraphrasing, you totally ignored everything else!

Edit: Maaaybe you're one of those unintelligent religious people I was talking about earlier...

"The only thing you could think" - don't mix your would's and could's. It makes for bad logic. For all you know, I simply wouldn't challenge anything else (and that could be for a variety of reasons).

But, Paul, if you sincerely believe that "useful" is just a more effective way of phrasing healthy, and it's faithful to my statement, then I'll grant it. It initially appeared as if you were saying I'm interchanging true and useful, and I'm doing no such thing.

And let's not play the "maybe" game. Maybe you have sexual relations with your cat, but that has nothing to do with the discussion. No need to get girly personal because you're upset I didn't respond to everything you wrote. I like to respond to simple points and keep it at that. See ya.

Mixing up would/could might well make for poor formal logic, but in the ebb and flow of discussion and debate much is learned from what is not said.

I'm not *upset* that you didn't respond to my point, I just thought it worth while to point that you couldn't (apparently).

If, as you say, you are only capable of interacting with ELI5 levels of simplicity, let's break it down:

You decided to stand up for superstition by successively retreating to worse and worse levels of English comprehension.

Some superstitions might contain a grain of truth/usefulness in them, and to that extent I'd stipulate that they were healthier than a null belief.

That said, the majority of superstitions are simply misfires of human pattern-recognition and, like random genetic mutations, confer no or negative value to the host, and are thus unhealthy.

Yes, I might have retreated to worse and worse levels of English comprehension because I stopped giving a shit after my 2nd comment. Read it, scrutinize it, criticize it however you would like, Paul. I'm not going to get butt hurt over it.

" I'm not going to get butt hurt over it."

How did you know I was having intestinal troubles today?!

Two words:
Crab
Cakes

---

In any case, I don't care how much a fool you look, so by all means keep posting replies trying to convince yourself and everyone else that you're too cool for school and you don't care.

The fact is that you tried to argue for the necessity of superstition and, when pressed for an argument (or even a coherent description of what you meant); you fell apart.

It's okay to start down a thought-tangent, only to realize it's a dead-end.

The important thing is to acknowledge it and move on.

Oh brother. Never argued for the necessity of superstition, either. I simply stated a very basic and well recognized reality that human beings entertain superstitions for living out their lives with meaning. It's really not a controversial remark, Paul. That part of my statement had little to nothing to do with the overall point, which was that the New Atheism lacks the decency to recognize the humaneness of subscribing to transcendent principles, as if they don't do it themselves. That's it. There's no argument I was making about the fact that it is part of our everyday life to entertain superstitions. It's just a fact.

"Never argued for the necessity of superstition"
Oh, my bad.

I thought that's what you meant when you said:
"To assume you've somehow evolved above [superstition], think again."

And when you said:
"If you're human, you can't do it."(be above superstition)

And then again when you said:
"Abolish religion and you'll fill it with some other metaphysical garbage, however shrouded in materialistic terms."

---

As it happens, I think you're correct that the human race will carry a mental-virus disease load of superstition for a very long time to come. I just don't think you are capable of making a cogent argument for that proposition.

---

"New Atheism lacks the decency to recognize the humaneness of subscribing to transcendent principles"
That's just...false?

I mean, listen to Hitchens talk about religion/superstition. He's not deriding them entirely, nor saying that we don't owe them a debt.

You've fudnamentally misunderstood him and his position. (Go figure)

I won't say much more, except that one of the other "original" 4 horsemen, Sam Harris, is about as far from being disrespectful of spirituality as is possible for a materialist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

You've stepped in it too re: Dawkins and Dennett, but I'll leave that for another time when I have more energy to assault your invincible ignorance.

This discussion has been going on for 2 weeks now. It's time to let it drop. Move on. Find a friend.

"Find a friend."

They've all left me.

No one wants to hang out with a cat-fucker who can't control his bowels.

You need waiders to navigate my apartment through the effluence, and earplugs for the yowling.

You may be right, Mars. I haven't had in-person discussions on the premise of religion with many others since undergrad. It seems most of the degrading noise comes from social media, as we tend to act like clowns when we're hiding behind a screen.

Nevertheless, organizing "reason rallies", billboard marketing and the four horseman sit-around-and-share-insults in front of a crowd events are a low road technique. They also treat atheism as if it's some unified ideology. It isn't.

And as they show little-to-no professionalism in public (except for a couple), I have hardly any doubt they show a significant lack of it in their classrooms.

"sit-around-and-share-insults in front of a crowd events are a low road technique" - I disagree...unless you meant to say that they help bring rational discourse back down to the ground.

In which case I completely agree.

https://www.youtube.com/wat...

I won't go through the whole thing, but that's not the one I'm talking about. Hitchens was great at lawyering people into excluding other variables and using ingenious rhetoric. I'm an admirer, but I don't know how he brought anything "to the ground". Just lawyered and shouted people down with "tripe", "rubbish" and "shame, shame". And at the end of the day, it was a clever-off for him.

I would not have become an atheist if it had not been for the New Atheism -- for people saying that the religion that scared me to my core was a cruel joke, a fraud, and the height of being offensive and ridiculous. And they're working; many are leaving Christianity because of their arguments, which is why, I suspect, Christians talk about them incessantly. I'm not saying that they're perfect. But to say that it's ineffective is ridiculous when Dawkins's The God Delusion STILL takes up about 4-5 places on the Amazon "atheists" bestseller's list. If religion is hogwash, it's hogwash. As a Christian I appreciated this honesty, and I appeal to others who do, as well. Far from being patronizing, I see it as respecting the person enough to tell them where I really, actually stand.

Yes, I DO think Christians have an imaginary friend, or fairy sky daddy. And they think I'm going to hell if I don't repent, most of them. Fine. Let's not have any of this half-assed patronizing nonsense where we put on gloves, and let's bring it out in the open and see which view makes more sense. And then let's go with it.

Whatever Christians are doing is not working. People are leaving the church and coming into non-religion and atheism in droves. So let the church keep doing what it's doing, and we'll keep doing what we're doing, not pulling punches ideologically, and being honest and straightforward in our criticisms and encouragement of doubt. I'm fine with the current trend continuing, if that's what you're getting at. And if some people who are determined to hang on to their fairy sky daddy object -- ah well. You can't force individuals to ride the train of progress, but I'm not going to lie to people and say their views are respectable when they are anything but. Sorry, not sorry, but no.

Peter to T Off:
Yes, I DO think Christians have an imaginary friend, or fairy sky daddy. And they think I'm going to hell if I don't repent, most of them. Fine. Let's not have any of this half-assed patronizing nonsense where we put on gloves, and let's bring it out in the open and see which view makes more sense. And then let's go with it.

Ronny to Peter:
Good to see you saying,that not all Christians believe you're going to hell.

The majority of outspoken atheists have called religion "a cruel joke, a fraud, and the height of being offensive and ridiculous" since the early 20th century. That's not new to the New Atheism. What's new is the "Mock them. Ridicule them in public..." lingo. And of course Dawkins doesn't show any restraint in that area. He doesn't encourage *or* live by the mantra "respect the person, not the belief". He simply lacks basic human civility.

And the apparent "be nice, have respect" retort doesn't come from any public religious voices, either. No one worth noting dismisses the New Atheism because "it's mean". That's a narrative they made up to avoid addressing what the real criticism was, and that's human decency - fair acknowledgment of both premises.

Treat religion as absurd - anyone worth their salt in the religious sphere doesn't care enough to lose sleep over it. But it's an entirely other thing to brand vulnerable Christians as idiots or sociopaths simply because they are attune to their primal human need to entertain the divine.

The New Atheism could be effective for a variety of reasons, and it doesn't mean it's the right ones. People get scared into viewpoints all the time (not simply because of hell); maybe they want to feel part of the club or don't want to feel stupid or under-evolved. Perhaps that has something to do with it. They also do a great job of bringing in Muslim and Christian fundamentalists, as they seem to be the only immediate antidote a fundamentalist will accept. Fundamentalists typically have never read western classics, are taught to shun culture and aesthetics, are typically uninformed that it's possible to have orthodox views of their religious texts that aren't literalist, and they don't do well with nuances of any kind.

As for atheists, whenever I visit Patheos I can be sure to read some borrowed lines from some Dawkins fan in an attempt to insult someone else or make them feel small. Dawkins is a junk food diet for atheists, and we all know the West loves its junk food. That wouldn't shock me as a reason why he hangs in there on the atheist bestseller list.

I think you're misunderstanding occasional calculated efforts to fight soundbites with soundbites, with an overall lack of substance.

Do the New Atheists occasionally throw out zingers and well-packaged anti-religious memes? Yes. They do it because the old methods of pure, restrained, scholarly discussion didn't reach the masses.

The masses who are so easily swayed by Jenny McCarthy, or fad diets; you know? The sort of people who attend "Church" in multi-million dollar theaters with giant projection screens and flashy preachers.

Everyday, normal, Americans; people who don't like to think too hard.

Of course when they aren't making the easily promulgated, spicy quips which so enrage you, the "New Atheists" are disseminating well researched, organized, and written/spoken ideas about how we should reason and be moral without the shackles of superstition.

I'm not enraged by the New Atheists. I'm disenchanted and annoyed, as are multitudes of other non-religious and religious alike.

And as far as this statement is concerned: "They do it because the old methods of pure, restrained, scholarly discussion didn't reach the masses."

- I suppose I'm an elitist, in the sense that I don't care what the masses think, as propaganda and short-circuited intellectual concepts only create new problems and fuels the contempt of idiots and zealots. I'm not interested in directly reaching the masses, as it converts minds on false pretenses and false dichotomies. Let them learn from academics in the universities and form their own opinions.

I am more concerned about the academic and intellectual integrity of the universities, especially the ones who employ Bible-thumping professors and people like PZ Myers, who literally sounds like a middle-school child when voicing public remarks about any religious expression. Leave the garbage for Patheos bloggers. We don't need it from academics. It's a waste of time, a waste of money, and a waste of energy.

I would imagine the public remarks by professors who are off-the-clock, so to speak, are not a waste of any one's money.

Whether or not they're a waste of time or energy is for those professors, as it is for you and me with regard to our own free expression in the public sphere, to decide.

I would say: respect the people, not the arguments. Show disrespect to religions in general in excuse that this is done by "religious" is a "tu quoque" fallacy.

NAMBLA: beliefs: pedophilia is A-OK, Result: absolute pariah status
Islam: beliefs: pedophilia is A-OK, oppression of women, murder of homosexuals and apostates, pork is evil, GOD, Result: respect and deference.
What is wrong with this picture?

You make a valid point.

What is wrong with this picture is the inability of religion to critically judge what is ethical and unethical using criteria that ACTUALLY matter in a realistic, tangible, rational way.

We have enough historical hindsight, thanks to our obsessive need to record all our human actions, thoughts, conclusions and events to make intelligent connections and deductions in our 21st Century of what works towards humans and the planet thriving together in peace and happiness and respect for the human rights of others and what does not work.

Clearly not all beliefs pass muster when weighed on that criteria. Pedophilia requires a child to be sexually exploited in a one-sided relationship all to satisfy the paraphilia of an adult who has an arrested sexual development and/or can only get satisfiaction if they have complete sadistic physical, emotional and sexual control of another person and since adults are harder to do that with, they turn to children. We know that children who are sexually molested are seriously harmed because of it, which affects their ability to be happy, productive individuals.

Since religion is based on absolutes and blind protection of traditions formed at a very unenlightened time in human history, it cannot be trusted to deliver sound assessment of what is good in its OWN merit and what is bad in its OWN merit.

Color of skin and background are immutable characteristics. Religion is not. It's a choice, one that reveals your priorities and allegiances.

I hate ISIS for what they do AND what they believe. What they believe drives what they do. Their religion drives them, just like it drove Scott Roeder.

What drove Calles was anticlericalism, and he was precisely correct. It's a shame he wasn't able to completely destroy the church and all its followers. I would definitely support such a movement in the United States.

Well, calling themselves ISIS kind of backfired on FB. I had Archer as avatar. Alla sudden I'm getting all these friend requests from people with weird names, most of which included Mohammad in them somewhere. No idea what was up until I realized my Archer ISIS i.d. card was attracting the wrong sort of ISIS.

The above statement is mostly factually wrong. It takes a "blank slate" approach to human nature and completely ignores our evolution as tribal animals. Even when we live in societies that recognize the primacy of the individual over the tribe, we form tribes just for the fun of it (professional sports teams, anyone?). We don't have to learn to be suspicious of someone who is different or even be outright xenophobic, it comes with being human. Watch small children sometime as they pick on any member of their group who is "different". There are plenty of instincts that we have to overcome to be civilized.

OK, but picking on someone because they look or "are" different might be behaviorally appropriate for a child on the playground, but upon reaching adulthood, we're supposed to be able to look beyond the superficial. Too many adults stop at things like race or religious affiliation without examining the character of the individual.

"Respect people, not beliefs."

Right on the money! I respect individual religious people because there are some really cool individual religious people. I respect everyone's right to believe whatever they want because I strongly believe in personal choice. However, if your beliefs don't hold any water--or worse, hurt people--that's when I become Mx. Angry Atheist!

It's kind of guns. I hate guns, but I respect everyone's right to own a gun of they choose. The problem is, though, guns are used to hurt people WAY more than they should!

"Respect people, not beliefs."

Isn't this just the atheist version of 'love the sinner, hate the sin?'

Guns are used in ways that hurt no one magnitudes more than they hurt. I teach 11 yr olds to shoot shotguns. It's a sport that you can compete in into your 80's.