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Post by hibernicus on Jan 21, 2011 18:13:44 GMT
Fr. Dwight Longenecker describes a new multi-authored book which aims to help Catholic students keep their faith at college by spelling out and analysing the foundational assumptions of some of the secularist views they will encounter there. This is meant to save people from losing their faith when they are shaken out of naive acceptance by encountering articulate unbelievers. I suspect from their naive assumption that materialism and atheism are self-evident, and the dismissive references to churchgoers as "zombies" and "sheeple" found on certain Politics.ie threads, that this is how many of our Irish cyber-atheists came to be atheists. This is the sort of thing that Catholic education should immunise against, but has largely ceased to do so in Ireland - first through old-style authoritarianism, then through new-age fuzziness. gkupsidedown.blogspot.com/2011/01/disorientation.htmlEXTRACT One of the problems with modern secular college education is that the atheistic anti Catholic propaganda is not always up front and inyerface. Instead it is down deep at the foundational, philosophical level. It seeps into every subject because of the professor's secular, atheistic or agnostic worldview. This worldview is difficult to criticize or even pinpoint because it is an amalgam of many different philosophies which have been imbibed uncritically by the professor himself. What DisOrientation does is expose and analyze these underlying viewpoints. The reader should be able, therefore, to spot the heresy by picking up on the symptoms the present themselves to him. Doing so is a bit like riding out to track down some cattle rustlers. You know they're out there, but they stay undercover, use aliases, seem real nice fellas by day and raid at night. Sheriff John Zmirak has called up a great little posse of writers to chase down the rustlers. Elizabeth Scalia (aka the Anchoress) contributes a chapter on Sentimentalism. Prolific philosopher Peter Kreeft writes on Progressivism. Wearing a black hat, Fr.Z exposes modernism, Apologist Jimmy Akin strokes his beard over Anti Catholicism, Mark Shea (The Dark Lord Shea-uman) shoots it out with Americanism, Donna Steichen comments on Feminism, and the distinguished Fr Rutler (like an ecclesiastical Bat Masterson) weighs in on Cynicism. My own very useful chapter is on Utilitarianism. (geddit?)
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 24, 2011 15:57:56 GMT
An interesting critique by an atheist turned Catholic of Sam Harris's argument that morality can be derived from science alone. moralmindfield.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/book-review-the-moral-landscape-by-sam-harris-part-1/EXTRACT That said, sometimes individuals like Harris will appear and try to distort science for the sake of their own ideological agenda. Harris has a political and metaphysical agenda driving his philosophy and interpretation of science. His atheism is the obvious, assumed ideology here. Addressing the deficiencies of atheism is beyond the scope of this review. Suffice it to say, I think it can be shown that atheism is irrational, or at least less rational than Catholicism. I used to be an atheist and I left it because I found it intellectually impoverished. I suppose I’ll have to post on that some time too. Harris’s politics are the other side of this, and I daresay they drive his atheism (in other words, I think (and I might be wrong) his politics came first, then he chose his metaphysics to support his politics, which is the backwards and wrong way to think about truth). Harris is an anti-traditionalist, he would like to direct society towards, as far as I can tell, something like JS Mill’s libertarian utilitarianism. I think this is a bad moral path to take because it disregards thousands of years of cultural evolution (which has a logic of its own) in favor of a system which at its core vitiates group cohesion and turns people into atomistic hedonistic self-seeking free-riders. In other words, a morality that will likely kill any group that accepts it, at least in its extreme form (talk about parasitic memes). That is a strong statement, but I think it is the logical limit to which Mill can be taken. This is a more complex subject because Mill’s libertarianism is in tension with his utilitarianism, but this review is already getting long so for now I’ll settle for brief and brutal. Perhaps the best response to Harris’s morality is “who cares?” Nietzsche found utilitarianism offensive for precisely this reason: who cares about the happiness of the masses? The little people don’t matter if there is no Christian God (or other entity) that demands it. This is the Nietzschean response: Harris is just doing atheistic Christianity. He has taken the Christian ethic and kicked out the metaphysical underpinnings and said “let’s do this because we get to decide what good means, and I like this.” This is a serious error. Retaining Christian morality while removing God yields a nonsensical system, the theology and the ethics are inseparable END
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Post by brencel on Feb 24, 2011 19:24:42 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 1, 2011 14:10:21 GMT
But it still doesn't take you much farther than the watchmaker God of deism, who lacks what is central to the faith - the idea of a divine covenant.
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Post by brencel on Mar 1, 2011 23:24:01 GMT
Perhaps, but the point is that the infinite leap from believing there is no God to believing in God is championed.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 11, 2011 11:50:11 GMT
The infinite leap is not between belief and disbelief in God - it is between belief that God loves us and cares for us and belief that the universe is utterly indifferent (the latter being compatible with belief in the existence of a god or gods).
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Post by brencel on Mar 11, 2011 16:08:00 GMT
Not really, hibernicus, as atheists believe "that the universe is utterly indifferent." This does NOT mean they believe in God.
In addition, the type of God one believes in is a question of degree not infinity.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 11, 2011 19:10:35 GMT
Do you really mean that someone who believes that God exists but is a malevolent being devoted to torturing sensate life for the fun of it is closer to Christians than they are to atheists? I never said that atheists believe in God - I said that that is not the central distinction. The central distinction is whether or not you believe in a divine covenant. Read Cardinal Newman's comments on the subject.
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Post by brencel on Mar 15, 2011 14:21:48 GMT
Hibernicus, you ask “Do you really mean that someone who believes that God exists but is a malevolent being devoted to torturing sensate life for the fun of it is closer to Christians than they are to atheists?”
Yes, in the sense that they believe in God as do Christians. Lucifer covered the full spectrum from loving to hating God and always believing in Him.
Atheists do not believe in God and still have to make that leap.
The question of good and evil is a different question.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 16, 2011 11:55:31 GMT
Lucifer is not a good parallel for this, firstly because he has direct empirical knowledge not available to human beings, secondly because Brencel's argument would imply that Lucifer is closer to God than (say) Richard Dawkins. A great deal of atheist literature/propaganda is based on the argument that God cannot exist because the world is such that if it were made by a God He could not be a good God. (For example, in Thomas Harris's early Hannibal Lector books - before Harris fell in love with lector himself - it is strongly implied that Lector "gets" the nature of reality better than his adversaries, and that if God exists He must be like Hannibal Lector. The title THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is quite deliberately chosen...)
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Post by brencel on Mar 17, 2011 22:37:27 GMT
hibernicus, I chose Lucifer because his knowledge of God made the spectrum from love to hate so complete.
Your logic is strange; nowhere do I imply "that Lucifer is closer to God than (say) Richard Dawkins."
You are still confusing the two arguments: 1) between good and evil & 2) the point we are debating, which is whether the infinite leap is between believing in God or not, or "between belief that God loves us and cares for us and belief that the universe is utterly indifferent (the latter being compatible with belief in the existence of a god or gods). "
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 21, 2011 11:06:49 GMT
I am not confusing the two arguments; I am arguing that they are not so completely separate as you say they are. My point about Lucifer and Richard Dawkins is not that you explicitly said that Lucifer is closer to God than Dawkins, but that your argument logically implies this proposition. If an argument entails an obviously fallacious conclusion, that means there is something wrong with the argument. Let us take an example: If I say "Ireland is the island of saints, therefore everyone in Ireland is a saint" and you reply "That implies Tony Felloni is as holy as Mother Teresa" it is not an adequate response to say "I never said that Tony Felloni.. etc". You may not have explicitly said it, you may not have meant to say it, you may not even realise that your argument logically entails this conclusion - but nonetheless the premise of your argument does entail this conclusion, and the fact that the conclusion is obviously fallacious shows that something is wrong with the premise.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 21, 2011 11:07:56 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 21, 2011 11:14:56 GMT
www.ncregister.com/blog/the-catholics-guide-to-atheists Thsi psot by a former atheist lists the five commonest mistakes Catholics make in discussions with atheists -e.g. citing the Bible when atheists do not accept the Bible as authoritative, assuming that atheists are well-versed in Catholic doctrine (rather than e.g. thinking that Catholics believe in the verbal-literalist theory of biblical inspiration or in the Feeneyite interpretation of exclusive salvation), assuming atheists always feel there issomething missing in their lives, assuming that atheists are beyond the power of prayer. This "fallacy" I think gets to the heart of my dispute with brencel: EXTRACT 4. They can be convinced by arguments alone This one is tricky because I do think that making a reasonable case for faith and the truth of Catholic doctrine is critical, especially when conversing with atheists with a scientific mindset. They would never believe something that is fundamentally unreasonable, so it’s important that they understand that a person does not need to check his rational mind at the door to become Catholic—that, in fact, the Catholic worldview is the most reasonable of all. That said, God is love, therefore to know God is to know love—and you can’t reason your way into love. Love can and should be based on reason, of course, but at some point you have to have an openness in your heart as well as your mind. This is why we should always focus more on showing Christ to our atheist friends rather than just offering data about him. END
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Post by Merlin on Mar 23, 2011 5:23:10 GMT
Religion may become extinct Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Dallas
In the UK, Wales has the highest proportion of religiously "non-affiliated"
A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers. The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation. The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one. The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries. The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. Nonlinear dynamics is invoked to explain a wide range of physical phenomena in which a number of factors play a part. One of the team, Daniel Abrams of Northwestern University, put forth a similar model in 2003 to put a numerical basis behind the decline of lesser-spoken world languages. At its heart is the competition between speakers of different languages, and the "utility" of speaking one instead of another. "The idea is pretty simple," said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona. "It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility. "For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there's some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not." Some of the census data the team used date from the 19th century Dr Wiener continued: "In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%." The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the "non-religious" category. They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them. And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction. However, Dr Wiener told the conference that the team was working to update the model with a "network structure" more representative of the one at work in the world. "Obviously we don't really believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the other people in society," he said. However, he told BBC News that he thought it was "a suggestive result". "It's interesting that a fairly simple model captures the data, and if those simple ideas are correct, it suggests where this might be going. "Obviously much more complicated things are going on with any one individual, but maybe a lot of that averages out."
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