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Post by Los leandros on Nov 15, 2011 12:36:05 GMT
People may be interested to know that there are increasing signs that the neo atheists game may be up & their intellectual fraudulance finally revealed - not via the sychophantic media of course. I have always viewed the likes of Dawkins & co. as being akin to psychics, who prey on the intellectually gullible : & with the weakness of cathecesis in schools, there are a lot of them about. However recently it has been reporte that the likes of Dawkins & Polly Toynbee have chickened out of debates with Christian apologists. The latter primarily represented by Dinesh D'Souza & Prof. William Lane Craig. It's also reported that PZ Myers would'nt debate with Vox Day. Fair play to the American Evangelicals, they're certainly up for it !.
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Post by Los Leandros on Nov 15, 2011 14:06:06 GMT
Addendum to above. I should say that my criticism is directed at intolerant atheists like those mentioned. I don't wish to offend " ordinary/decent" atheists. I was that soldier in my adolescent years.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 15, 2011 18:40:41 GMT
Yes, Hitchens mentioned this on the 27th October in the Daily Fail;
This is a light-hearted diversion for the God-hating adherents to this site (to whom I occasionally fling hunks of bleeding flesh, so that I can watch them come flapping from afar to feast on it).
Maybe it will also be a rest from the tedium of responding (yet again) to the various lame and exploded ‘arguments’ of the drug lobby, for making their selfish habit even more legal than it already is. If just one of them ever paid any attention, or engaged seriously, it would make it seem worthwhile. But they never do. It’s all mechanical, destructive rhetoric they’ve got off the telly, or learned in PSHE classes.
Now, serious engagement was exactly what we got in the uplifting surroundings of Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre (named after Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon, since you ask, and one of the great buildings of Europe, superb inside and outside but perhaps most astonishing of all up in the mighty roof-beams that make it possible) in Oxford on Tuesday night. The Sheldonian is one of a group of buildings which in largely embody English history, as well as expressing the Royal grandeur of the restored Stuarts. They look pretty startling now, but set amid the small and muddy town that was Oxford at the end of the 17th century, they must have seemed almost impossibly majestic.
Next to it is Bodley’s Great Library, and beyond that Radcliffe Square dominated by The College of All Souls, a monument to the dead of the Hundred Years’ War, and the soaring church of St Mary the Virgin, scene of Thomas Cranmer’s great trial and renunciation of the Pope. Next to the Sheldonian is the Clarendon Building, once the headquarters of the University Press, and built thanks to the profits of the ‘History of the Great Rebellion’, the first great account of the English Civil War, written by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Sheldon, a courageous Anglican who had to be ejected bodily from All Souls, by the Cromwellians, was a close ally of Clarendon, so it is fitting that buildings named after both of them stand next to each other. Three hundred yards away is the spot where Cranmer, (and before him Latimer and Ridley) were burned to death for their Protestant beliefs. But I digress. The American philosopher William Lane Craig had offered to debate Richard Dawkins’s book ‘The God Delusion’ with its author, in his home town (and mine) . Dawkins is around, because he has his own event in another Oxford location on Friday. But despite being in the midst of promoting a new book, Dawkins refused to come. He came up with a series of silly excuses, none of which holds water. And an empty chair was provided for him at the Sheldonian on Tuesday evening, in case he changed his mind and – yes – to mock him for his absence. Details of this controversy are all over the web, and I was impressed by the behaviour of another Oxford atheist, Daniel Came, who said Dawkins should have turned up, and had the guts to be there himself . I might say that I thought his contribution was serious, thoughtful and properly modest about the limits of what we can know. The bumptiousness and raillery of Dawkins and some other anti-God preachers was entirely absent from his discourse, and it was all the better for it.
I have to confess here that I don’t find Craig’s debating style or manner very attractive. It is too smooth and American for me – and his best moment (again, for me) came when he dropped his salesman’s manner and said, in effect, that he was sorry if he seemed too certain, and that his fundamental claims were modest ones – that the Theist position was scientifically tenable.
The most moving – and most enjoyable – contribution of the evening came from the marvellous Dr Stephen Priest, simultaneously diffident and extremely powerful. I won’t try to summarise it because I’m sure I’d fail. I hope it will eventually make it on to the web. It reminded me of why I had once wanted to study philosophy, a desire which faded rapidly when I was exposed to English Linguistic Philosophy and various other strands of that discipline which made me wonder if I had wandered into a convention of crossword-compilers, when what I wanted was to seek the origins of the universe.
Many of you will know that in his failure to face William Lane Craig, Professor Dawkins was not alone. Several other members of Britain’s Atheist Premier League found themselves unable or unwilling (or both) to take him on.
The important thing about this is that what Craig does is simple. He uses philosophical logic, and a considerable knowledge of physics, to expose the shallowness of Dawkins’s arguments. I would imagine that an equally serious Atheist philosopher would be able to give him a run for his money, but Dawkins isn’t that. He would have been embarrassingly out of his depth.
For what Craig achieves is this. He simply retakes an important piece of ground that Christianity lost through laziness and cowardice, rather than because it lacked the weapons to defend it.
He doesn’t (in my view) achieve total victory over the unbelievers. He simply says : ‘In this logic, which you cannot deny, and in this science, which you cannot deny either, it is clear that there is plenty of room for the possibility that God exists and made the universe’. No scientifically literate person, who is informed and can argue logically, can in truth say that he is wrong.
The trouble is that so many ‘official’ Christians have more or less conceded this ground, not being very firm believers themselves, and lacking Craig’s training in logic and science.
He is the antidote to the lazy belief that in some way ‘science’ is incompatible with ‘religion’, and to the idea that all believers are unlettered morons who think the earth is 5,000 years old and that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.
This is, I’m afraid, all too often the tone of the anti-God people who come here to post. It’s settled, you’re stupid, why not give up?
It’s not settled. We’re not stupid. We won’t give up.
(NB: A note to Mr ‘Crosland’. I won’t respond to any queries he posts here - and I have a small bet with myself as to what form they will take this time - until he replies to my ‘childishly simple’ private letter to him, which he has had since August).
END.
Dawkins has always come across as a very angry man. It could be because he's still having to pay off his ex-wives. It could be because his mammy didn't show him she loved him enough. Whatever it is, for a man with all the answers he doesn't come across as very happy. I remember a few years ago looking on his website and there were posters of him with a light shining on him, Messiah like. I'm sure a psych eval would have a field day looking at that.
Either way, the fact that he refuses to meet his match speaks volumes. I wonder, as I have always wondered, whether he actually really believes now that there is no proof of God. Pride is the worst one to battle with - if he were to show any kind of backing down now... No, with him the lad doth protest too much. I hope when he is interviewed again that someone will ask him why he didn't attend and go Paxman style until he answers.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 15, 2011 19:44:28 GMT
I haven't read his book but this part is fascinating! I cite from the Irish Catholic website, 5/4/2010.
"As you know, one of the planet's more ferocious critics of religion and the Catholic Church is Richard Dawkins of 'God Delusion' fame. Nonetheless in that book, written only four years ago, he did not throw in his lot with the Church-bashers who are using the abuse scandals to bring down their hated foe once and for all. Now he has changed his mind. Now Benedict is a "leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds… a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence." But here is what Dawkins wrote in 'The God Delusion' in 2006: "Priestly abuse of children is nowadays taken to mean sexual abuse, and I feel obliged, at the outset, to get the whole matter of sexual abuse into proportion and out of the way. Others have noted that we live in a time of hysteria about pedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witch-hunts of 1692… All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defense, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience). "The Roman Catholic Church has borne a heavy share of such retrospective opprobrium. For all sorts of reasons I dislike the Roman Catholic Church. But I dislike unfairness even more, and I can’t help wondering whether this one institution has been unfairly demonized over the issue, especially in Ireland and America… We should be aware of the remarkable power of the mind to concoct false memories, especially when abetted by unscrupulous therapists and mercenary lawyers. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories. This is so counter-intuitive that juries are easily swayed by sincere but false testimony from witnesses. (The God Delusion, pp. 315-16) Note the section I've placed in italics. Dawkins was correct in 2006. The Church was and is being unfairly demonised. That is even more the case now than then. Why has he now changed his mind? Does he smell blood?"
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Post by Bring It On on Nov 17, 2011 9:28:06 GMT
It's even more astonishing to learn that Dinesh D'souza has offered to debate Hitchens, Dawkins & Myers simultaneously. He has already demolished the likes of Daniel Dennett & Peter Singer, so - bring it on !.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 17, 2011 13:57:16 GMT
I cannot remember where I saw him speak but I was impressed. I doubt it was EWTN because he's not Catholic although his wiki page states he wrote a book on Catholic Classics. When did he make that offer? Are the debates available online? I would love to see that! What's the craic with Scaredy Cat Dawkins lately? Hitchens isn't well so that's understandable.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 17, 2011 14:13:26 GMT
People may be interested to know that there are increasing signs that the neo atheists game may be up & their intellectual fraudulance finally revealed - not via the sychophantic media of course. I have always viewed the likes of Dawkins & co. as being akin to psychics, who prey on the intellectually gullible : & with the weakness of cathecesis in schools, there are a lot of them about. However recently it has been reporte that the likes of Dawkins & Polly Toynbee have chickened out of debates with Christian apologists. The latter primarily represented by Dinesh D'Souza & Prof. William Lane Craig. It's also reported that PZ Myers would'nt debate with Vox Day. Fair play to the American Evangelicals, they're certainly up for it !. That part you wrote about them being like psychics preying on the vulnerable..I think the hopeful atheists is more like it. Do you remember that atheist campaign in England where they put huge signs on the sides of buses stating that "God probably doesn't exist so relax and enjoy your life."? There are many people I know who find God and all his rules a bit of an inconvenience. Agnostics is dócha, and not necessarily searching ones. They just want the nod that there is no God so they don't have to think too much. Dawkins and the lads give them the soundbites they need to block out any questions they might have. That's my own experience of those who find Dawkins wisdom himself. The atheists I have met, those who have really concluded on reflection that there cannot be a God are usually ones who have suffered very much; lost a child, a sister while young etc. Dawkins doesn't really appeal to them I find, they just cannot equate a loving God with all that pain. So who are these hardcore atheist writers who have some meat to their arguments? What type of people do they appeal to? I would like to read their works and compare. I do hope Christopher Hitchens repents, he's very ill and pride is so hard to overcome.
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Post by Los Leandros on Nov 18, 2011 10:01:33 GMT
Totally agree with you about distinguishing between " genuine " atheists & those whose atheism seems to be purely negative, based on a bigoted anti-Catholicism. Thus when most of the latter speak, invariably we learn very little about their motivation for their beliefs, instead we get a crude anti-religious rant. I fully respect those who for various reasons can't believe in God - for genuinely intellectual reasons, or maybe someone has experienced a loss that they can't come to terms with & cant believe in a loving God - there but for the grace of God !. Hopefully Christopher Hitchens will recover. As far as I'm aware Dinesh D'souza was raised Catholic, he said he has'nt rejected Catholicism as such, but worships in an evangelical Church. Saw a couple of his debates on Youtube.
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