IBest of Richard Dawkins against Religion (youtube.com)
Going to try to answe r Dawkins again without the intemperate rant. I think that URL above goes to the same video , at least I haope so because capturing URLs is not easy for me.
As usual it all starts out with his claim that faith is belief in something without evidence, and as usual my answer is that it simply isn't so. I really don't think anyone believes anything without evidene. It may be bad evidence but you always have some kind of evidence for whatever you accept as true. Anyway, faith as he is thinking of it comes from Christianity and is of course the strongest concept we use in discussing what we believe. I sue the term myself as my own psedonum here. But my believe in the God of the bible and in the teachings of the Bible, and in my dsalvation through the death of Christ on the cross, which I believe in by faith, is all baed on the evidence given by the witnesses in the Bible and the witnesess of the Bible itself as a collection of testimonies attributed to the inspiration of God Himself.
Why Dawkins doesn't think of witness evidence as evidence I don't know. I believe in tghe resurrection of Christ becaues it is reported in the Bible by people who claim to be wyweyewitnesses of the life of Jesus, and who report on other witnesses of His life and of His appearing after His death. All this is evidence whther you think it is good enough evidencde for you or not. If your cousin told you he syw a bobcat in the woods and narrowly escaped and you never saw a bogcat would you not believe him anyway? Wouldn't it be a basis for taking it as reality?
We knw a lotof thigs this way. but we certainly have to know the revelations of the Bible this way because we have no other way of knowing it. It's all intin the past and we can never see it ourselves. Some of ti is outside our normal experience, supernatural , and that askes a lot of us to believe it, but we believe it because we count the witnesses to be trustworthy. If you don't you don't, I can't help that, but I do and for me the ressurection is very real and my salvation based on it trustworthy.
And I don't have faith in the boiling temperature of water for pete's sake. I can measure that. Or any other question that can be dealt with by the method of observation and experience, the scientific method. Good grief.
Then we have his remarks on biblical morality as he objects to stoning people for adultery and death for breaking the sabbath without regard to the biblical context which of course escapes him completes. Laws for the ancient Israelites had a specif purpose of keeping themj separate from the peoples around them and protecting the integrity of the population of God's chosen people. Christians wer not subject to those laws, they were for the Israelites only. We ave are subject to eh Ten Commandments because those are universal laws but we are not subject to those given to the Israelites for the purpose of identifying them with the true God. Since the people wer e prone to wander off into the mindset of the surrounding nations they sometimes had to be brought back harshly. Bug t askdide from theat adultery threatened the cohesiveness of the group and had to be punished severely. The Sabbath had farreaching implications concerning the nature of God and His promise of the Messiah to come, breaking the law of respecting the prmomise was a very serious thing, and it isn't that it could be violated inoocently, the death sentence for breaking it was well known so there was no expecuse. There is also reelation of the mind of God on these thigns, what He considers to be of great importance, which we too are to take seriously even if we are not under the lolaws as the Israelites were.
I'm not very happy with that paragraph but oh well, on we go.
He goes on to say how he liekes our modern morality, for instance that we are rid of slavery, women are treated as equals with men, we favor gentleness in general and being kind oto animals and so on. He has zerio idea that this all comes from Christianity. He thinks it is a secular achievement. Slavery used to be universal throughout the world, may cultures depended on it economically and there was no opposition to it. To oppose it under those circumstances would have accomplished nothing but the rebellion of the pepole or at least the leaders. SlAvery couldn't have been effectively opposed until modern times and when it finally was it came from Christianity. The west was finally freed sfrom slavery but it still remains entrenched in the rest of the world. It is a Christian achievmenet and Dawkins is completely wrong about history. Same sith equality for women. Jesus liberalized relations with women and that became the basis for its eventual accewptance in modern times. Again only in the west. Same with kindness to animals and kindness in generl. All from Christ.
He aparently thinks that secular morality and rational thought somehow exist apart from the Christainity that pervades the west but aththat is his big mistake. It all derives from Christaintiyh. Ayaan Hirsi Ali understands this which she touches on beriefly in the previous post.
Then he goes into his hatred of the doctrine of original sin which he considers to be highly immoral and demeaning. Funny when I first understood it I wa thrilled by it because to my mind it explains all kinds of things in our lives that otherwise don't get exlainsed, all the suffering and hatred and violence and war and etc etc. but I take the Bible as revealing universal truths, dawkins takes it as being the wordk of fallible humanity so he thinks we can just do away with it and make up our own morality.
I'm not at all happy with this post but it's the best I can do right now. I think I'll end it by saying that I think Richarc d Dawkins needs to engage in some empirical science to get a better nderstanding of what is really going on with religion. If for instance he learned something about how Chrsitain children perform in science I'm sure he'd be forced to admit that there is no difference in how they perform than unbelieving children, that includeds strictly homeschooled Christain chidlren. They are taught the scientific method like weveryone else.
the only difference is that evolution is not science in that scense, it is hosistorical science that can't have the absolute certainty we get from the hard sciences. they don't even have witness evidence for their supposed facts concerning the change from ne species to another, ti's all speculative, all conjecture and thee evidence as I've tbeen trying to show in many recent posts is just not there at all.
but now I'm going to end this very unsatisfactory post.
Later . I have to add here that I just went back and listened to some of the Ayaan Hisrsi Ali interview and want to emphasize that I think it's an extremely good discussion about how the west and all our institutions and philosophies are shot through with Christain principles. They refer to a gook by Tom Hallond I'm not familiar with but apparently he developes this theem and I'd like to be able to read it. But the discussion alone is very good and I want to promote it for anyone who is interested.
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