Atheist claim: War is caused by religion if participants are religious.

[Jon Miller]

Why should we give Hitchen's the benefit of the doubt when you and he won't give the religious any whatsoever?

JM

[Jon Miller]

Why should we give Hitchen's the benefit of the doubt when you and he won't give the religious any whatsoever?

JM

[MikeH]

Platypus.

We learnt some cool stuff about them from their genome.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080507131453.htm

It's weird when people hold up the Platypus as a problem for evolution when they show us some of the interesting intermediate steps you get during mammalian evolution from reptiles.

[The Mad Monk]

[MikeH]

( I only mentioned it 'cause it seems like Felch is genuinely interested in this stuff )

[Felch]

I must say, it's cool to see a lizard evolving before our eyes.

[kentonio]

Why should we give Hitchen's the benefit of the doubt when you and he won't give the religious any whatsoever

Because if you want to start selectively quoting people to reinforce your own argument then you're going to get an awful lot of replies like..

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

Wow, so Jesus was a violent nutjob who came to earth to break up families and cause violence and suffering?

[Felch]

That quote does not undermine what I said, the living world at the time and the level of human knowledge was not wildly seperated from the narrative of the bible. St Augustus may have been demanding that christians not make up farcical interpretations of the events in the bible, but at the same time many of the very things he believed to be truth such as the age of the earth were themselves examples of biblical literalism.

I've been watching James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed lately, and he talks about how our knowledge is what determines what we see. Basically, absent any other evidence, it was perfectly rational for Augustine to believe that the Earth was 6,000 years old. It wasn't like he knew about continental drift, the time it took for erosion to occur, or even the existence of dinosaurs. All he had was the data available to him.

So did I initially, there were strong moral reasons for supporting it before the US managed to totally **** the whole thing up.

I don't think there was any realistic way for the United States to not **** it all up. We could have firebombed Iraqi cities, but then we'd just be a new tyrant. We could have invaded and then left right after taking Baghdad, but that would have left Iraq as a failed state like Somalia today. The war was wrong, we were wrong to invade, Hitchens was wrong to support it, and the Pope was right to denounce it.

[Jon Miller]

Yes, that is exactly what you and some atheists do.

JM

[Jon Miller]

There are plenty of reasonable arguments to make against religion and against theism/deism.

I rarely hear them.

Mostly I hear variations of the above.

JM

[kentonio]

I've been watching James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed lately, and he talks about how our knowledge is what determines what we see. Basically, absent any other evidence, it was perfectly rational for Augustine to believe that the Earth was 6,000 years old. It wasn't like he knew about continental drift, the time it took for erosion to occur, or even the existence of dinosaurs. All he had was the data available to him.

Yep, and as one of the sharpest minds of his day he did an amazing amount with what he knew. The thing is that he was filling the understandable gaps in his knowledge with a book that made a series of claims about things that no-one could rationally explain.

I don't think there was any realistic way for the United States to not **** it all up. We could have firebombed Iraqi cities, but then we'd just be a new tyrant. We could have invaded and then left right after taking Baghdad, but that would have left Iraq as a failed state like Somalia today. The war was wrong, we were wrong to invade, Hitchens was wrong to support it, and the Pope was right to denounce it.

For me the biggest fail was the complete stripping of power from any Ba'ath party member, leaving Iraq without any established leaders and in a Somalia like state. That and the complete lack of rationale post war planning. We went to topple a dictator and stayed to... completely reshape the entire country in our image?

[kentonio]

There are plenty of reasonable arguments to make against religion and against theism/deism.

I rarely hear them.

Mostly I hear variations of the above.

Partly because whenever anyone asks a question or makes a statement about religion you assume they are attacking your beliefs and go on the uber defensive.

[snoopy369]

I think the stupidest thing Atheists/etc. do when arguing about religion, is to paint all religious as the same. The fact that there are some religious types (perhaps even many!) who deny evolution, burn witches, torture jews, whatever, is not the same as ALL religious types who believe those things. Plenty of very religious people understand and agree with the theory of evolution and are very pro-science. Believing in God does not prevent you from being quite scientific - after all, the difference between a physicist who is searching for the origin of the universe who is religious and one who is not, is simply a difference in what they expect to find there

[giblets]

The Pope condemned the Iraq War and Hitchens supported it.

A broken clock is right twice a day.

[Elok]

Okay, I no longer have the same time and energy I once did to pursue these arguments. I'm just going to say that there was never any good reason to support the invasion of Iraq. We invaded a foreign power that had done us no harm, on a transparently silly pretext, to turn them into our guinea pig for a laughably hubristic experiment in making dumb darky Muslims into good liberal democrats. You know, so they could use democratic self-determination to become something more agreeable to us than what they actually wanted. The whole project was flagrantly immoral from beginning to end, and only differed from what Cortez did to the Aztecs in that it was not feasible to exploit the locals economically this time around. The money men got their share from old-fashioned war profiteering instead. And Huck Fitchens for supporting the whole sordid fiasco.