And he's very much involved in the evolution vs religion debate, so I'm guessing he has some interest in persuading people to believe something they don't already believe.
Isn't a title like 'The God Delusion' a bit of a hint of an agenda, perhaps?
He doesn't expect to change the minds of very committed Christians so he doesn't need the "faith (sic)" attributed to him by TBG, rather he has the quite reasonable aims of helping some people to clarify their ideas, and others to be more ready to speak up for the atheist views they actually hold.
I guess Ted should have chosen a language his audience could understand.
My talk at McGill was greeted, like several others, with a reassuringly wholehearted, and almost universal, standing ovation. I am under no illusions that I deserve these enthusiastic receptions personally, or that they reflect the quality of my own performance as a speaker. On the contrary, I am convinced that they represent an overflowing of bottled-up frustration, from masses of decent people pushed to breaking point and heartily sick of the sycophantic `respect' that our society, even secular society, routinely and thoughtlessly accords religious faith.
Ted:
But many are much more extreme, especially in the US. Being nice to them and not questioning their faith is no more likely to succeed than Obama's hope to work with the Right, as Edwards has scornfully pointed out. The most dangerous ones are not just a powerless, eccentric fringe in the US, but people who've organised to get power.
So you're suggesting everyone has been having a polite after dinner conversation about changing people's minds here?
Right. Gotcha.
Hence futility, because their beliefs are not the cause of their influence.
You or I or any of the other six billion (armchair) historians on the planet can sit down and analyse - in great detail - the conflicting interests that give birth to and fuel various conflicts and religious cults. We can then come to the conclusion that it was the underlying social, economic and political movements that caused and fueled the conflict completely independently of religion.
But this is an exceedingly simplistic reasoning that ignores the ability of religion to mobilise people and give them marching orders. There may well need to be an underlying economic, social or political conflict for such a mobilisation to be possible, but to say that those reasons are the be-all-end-all of why Joe Schmoe decides join the revolution or go to war against Eastasia is like saying that nationalistic jingoism had no responsibility for the first world war, because it was ultimately caused by the underlying economic and strategic tensions in early 20th-century Europe, or that Marx and Engels had no hand in the Russian revolution, because it was caused by the inherent instability of the Czarist regime.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
You can't make sense of this by assuming that it's worth debating whether or not the god in question actually exists. And you can't stop a war by arguing that he, she or it doesn't.
In the 20th century arrived Marxism, Nazism and Capitalism borrowed the social dynamics, removed the 'god' part and replaced it with different abstractions. But functionally these are secular religions with very similar social dynamics - mythologised narrative, rituals of hierarchy, an explicit morality reinforced by punishment/reward and narrative repetition, teleology and personality cults.
So - show me an example from history of a religious movement with significant political influence which was dismantled purely by a debate about its its beliefs, with no other political activity.
It doesn't happen. Narratives change because of wars, civil unrest, popular pressure on elites, and occasionally because the elites decide they need a different story to control people's interests and activities.
Narratives don't change because someone writes a book telling people that what they believe is silly.
The point of my original diary is that if you want to change people's minds you have to offer them a more positive and inclusive experience of a different narrative - which is clearly not happening with the atheist-led anti-fundie movement.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/%7Ealtemey/
strongly suggests that there are more fundamental processes at work, processes that transcend "belief", and that the breakdown in the ability to rationally evaluate evidence and construct a personal world based on it seems typical of the authoritarian personality and plays a big role. Brains that are ---well, broken in this way-- are drawn to fundamentalisms of many sorts. It seems they cannot be dissuaded by reason from these loyalties.
Finally, Lots of us godless atheist devils enjoy a well reasoned and well written bit of work that says what we might---if we had the time and talent.
Thanks, Ted.
Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
The real cause is abusive psychology and stressful depersonalising relationships, and the way they bond with them and come to see them as normal and necessary, while outsiders are seen as evil.
Arguing that they should stop believing in god and start believing in science and evolution instead doesn't connect with their experience in any way.
