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One of my big gripes with the new brand of atheism championed by Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens is that they don't offer an alternative. They seem to simply say, "don't believe in God, it's dumb." Even though I agree to a certain extent, you can't just ask people to abandon a major part of their life and not offer anything to fill it with. And, unfortunately, I don't think science will fill the void.
Anyway, I found an interesting quote for those of you who happen to be both ACists and "militant atheists". It may make you reconsider how you approach religious conversations:
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"An anti-something movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be."
--Ludwig von Mises
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did you get this from the scientific american opinion? i read that and didn't like it.
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I was reading someone else's rather long blog entry that briefly referenced this scientific american article. I didn't actually read the article though. Here is the blog post:
http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry...and_atheis.php
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I pretty much disagree with the article as well, even though it echoes my position that there isnt anything very new about "new atheism".
Tolerance is a virtue only when the differences are non-threatening to those holding different positions. Christians would remain tolerant of Islam as long as the practitioners of Islam are not a threat, but that tolerance is self-defeating when Islam or its practitioners become a threat.
Likewise science can be tolerant of religion as long as religion remains non-threatening to science. However, the rise in power of the religious right, and the willingness of government to accede to the demands of vocal minorities, does represent a threat to science. Much of scientific research depends on public financing which in turn depends on faith in science on behalf of the public. When science is pubicly called into doubt, as it is when creationists began to cloak religion in scientific garb, it threatenss to de-legitimatize real science. Also, by making science education the battleground, creationism threatens to contaminate logical thought in future scientists...if non-scientific thought is allowed to stand beside science on equal footing, it weakens science.
Of course the von Mises quote is just another in a long line of his unsupported and unsupportable proclamations. "Anti" positions, whether or not they alienate the other side, can and do succeed.
Cliff notes:It was creationism that fired the first salvo against science, and science should be expected to respond.