Brady J. Frey

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Richard Dawson on the dangers of religion

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Quoting Richard Dawkins on the dangers of religion post 9/11:

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!

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5 Reader Comments::
  1. 1 nrgins says:

    I suppose one could say the same about anything, whether in the physical or social realms. One could pinpoint physics, point to the atom bomb, say it gives men an unnatural feeling of “god-like” abilities and importance, and depreciates ethical considerations for natural ones. And so forth.

    The point is that in any realm – physical, social, etc., there are going to be fringe elements that show the worst that that area of discipline has to offer.

    One could even take school teachers, I suppose, and make a similar argument: school teachers have an unnatural intimacy and privacy with students that previously was only allocated to parents, which is often abused, as in the numerous cases of teachers having sex with their students, as young as 11 or 12, both male and female.

    And yet in these other areas we don’t try to condemn the whole because of the actions of fringe individuals. Yet somehow, with religion, we can attempt to paint the whole with the brush of the few – perhaps not saying that they all are homicidal maniacs; but implying that that’s what religion could make them if left alone.

    But, I suppose, as the quote implies, if religion has no plus side, and only has a downside, then it is a dangerous thing. But to say it has no plus side is to ignore millennia of history, and the social advances and charitable works done through it.

    My point is that all things should be viewed with balance, and not judged based on a small subset of individuals and viewpoints. To do otherwise would, well, make oneself just as fanatical as the very fanatics one is opposing.

    (And speaking of extremism, what up with the gray text in the comment box?? I couldn’t even see what I was typing! Had to type in Notepad and paste! Definitely a comment box fail!! :-D )

  2. 2 nrgins says:

    Oh, and the smiley face in the lower right of my quote was actually typed inside the closing paren of the last sentence (to give levity to the last paragraph), but instead ended up outside the entire paragraph (and seems to give levity to the entire comment, which shouldn’t be the case).

    So there are two things for you to work on here. :-)

  3. 3 Brady J. Frey says:

    Hmmm, what browser are you using, Neil? The text shows up white for me in Firefox and Safari, but if you’re using an older version, I’ll test and check it out. Thank you for catching the smiley face (I had some styling applied to float the gravatar images), all fixed:).

  4. 4 nrgins says:

    The problem isn’t the text being white or gray; the problem is the background. I see you have a black background in the comment box; but it disappears. So both white or gray text would be equally bad. The problem is with the black background disappearing.

    But right now I’m using it and, when I first started typing this comment, the text was regular black on white (black background was there for a second, then disappeared). Right now (after I moved to this second paragraph) it became white on black. Either is fine. But earlier it was gray on white, which is near-impossible to see.

    Also, it wasn’t just gray on white. The first letter of each word was black; but the rest of the word was gray. Very weird.

    And just realized that when the mouse is over the comment box, it’s white text on a black background. When the mouse pointer is not over the comment box, it’s black text on a white background.

    Again, either of these is fine. But earlier it was different.

    I’m using Chrome 3.0

  5. 5 taelor says:

    I love Richard Dawkins, the world needs more brilliance like his!

    I say the negatives brought on by following religion blindly OUTWEIGH the positive, especially since they usually end up with people suffering because of it.

    It’s easy enough to knock religion (since it’s pretend) but it used to rule the world and helped bring us to where we are now in civilization (while also contributing to the massive periods of dominance and murder.)

    Let’s hope the future-people have better ideas than us.

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