Dawkins on Christianity

Discussion in 'Off-Topic Discussions' started by John Bear, Aug 14, 2001.

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  1. John Bear

    John Bear Senior Member

    Richard Dawkins, delivering the Hitchcock Lecture at Berkeley, on Christianity:

    "It is a bizarre idea that the origin myth of one particular group of Middle Eastern camel-herders should take precedence over the origin myths of any other group."
     
  2. Tom Head

    Tom Head New Member

    Creepy timing; I just finished reading Bernard Levins's blanket response to Richard Dawkins. And, as is so often the case in religious matters, I can see just enough of each point of view to disagree with everybody.


    Cheers,

    ------------------
    Tom Head
    www.tomhead.net
     
  3. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    I thought the origin myth turned out to be from mesopotamia? (at least the Adam and Eve part of the story) So rather than Middle Eastern camel-herders wouldn't that make it Middle Eastern Astrologists? (Astrology also originated in mesopotamia but I don't know if they had astrology in the earliest cities.)
    Or how about Middle Eastern Paganists instead?


    Oops, maybe I should now start discussing politics so that people will forgive me for discussing religon?
     
  4. mamorse

    mamorse New Member

    It might be a stretch, but I'll guess that Mr. Dawkins is not a frequent lunch guest of Jerry Falwell's...
     
  5. Tom Head

    Tom Head New Member

    Some scattered thoughts:

    Discussing Beliefs (and Lack Thereof): I wish we did more of that, really; not necessarily arguing about our philosophies and theologies (because I do plenty of that already on other forums, and it's nearly always fruitless), but at least making it a subject of conversation from time to time.

    Richard Dawkins: Evolution-friendly folks unfamiliar with Dawkins would be well-advised to grab a copy of The Selfish Gene; those of you who don't favor evolutionary theory would probably not enjoy his work, since it tends to fall into two categories, namely brilliant evolutionary biology (The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, etc) and average-to-above-par atheist-skeptic philosophy (The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, etc). Fair warning: Prof. Dawkins is not crazy about any major world religion (or minor one, either!), so if you're a religious person like me (and I've noticed I'm far from being the only theist on board), wear your asbestos suit. But that said, he's a brilliant writer--and his metaethic is nothing to sneeze at, either (I'm thinking of the last paragraph in The Selfish Gene, primarily).

    Mesopotamian Astrology: They did have a system, but I don't think it was widely used outside of the upper class; if memory serves, bone-casting was a more common means of divination.


    Cheers,

    ------------------
    Tom Head
    www.tomhead.net
     
  6. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Well, that certainly clears up the stem cell research debate. (Or insert other bizarre reponse here.)

    Rich Douglas, "myth-ing" in action.
     
  7. Tom Head

    Tom Head New Member

    Eek.

    Well, it's worth mentioning at this point that Dawkins's quote in this case doesn't really represent an original sentiment--if you read the last paragraph of Freud's The Future of an Illusion, it says much the same thing in slightly different terms.

    It's also worth mentioning that the Gutierrez liberation theology movement is motivated, in part, because it is bizarre that such a small and marginalized people would have gotten it right--but if you proceed with the belief that they have, you end up with a very humbling (and useful) theology.


    Cheers,

    ------------------
    Tom Head
    www.tomhead.net
     
  8. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    I hope that Christianity wasn't the topic of his Hitchcock Lecture, because Dawkins is no more an authority on religion than a fundamentalist preacher is on evolution.

    I'm not sure how that is relevant. Besides being totally ad-hominem, it probably applies more to the Hebrews in the patriarchal period than to the eastern Mediterranean in Roman times.

    Was this remark addressed at Christianity or at Genesis, which is a part of the Hebrew scriptures and not a product of Christianity?

    The Christians (and Jews) would say that it is because these things were divinely revealed. They would probably disagree among themselves on what that means. Many would consider the whole thing metaphorical, meant to reveal the nature of God's relationship to the universe rather than presenting a literal scientific depiction of how creation happened.

    If Dawkins has a point, I guess that it is located right here: Why should Jewish creation stories be accepted as authoritative (in whatever sense, literal or not), while Japanese Shinto tradition is dismissed as "mythology"?

    How should human beings proceed when confronted with conflicting "revelations"? How can we possibly determine which, if any, is true?

    This subdivides into two issues:

    How can finite human beings encounter the divine, and more to the point, how can those finite beings ever know that they had in fact encountered it?

    Can the different myths of different cultures, even if formally inconsistent, nevertheless each reveal real symbolic truths? Or must only one be true and all the others false?

    Personally I'm not a Christian. I could probably be described as a religious agnostic with Buddhist tendencies. I am in sympathy with Dawkins' underlying idea (assuming that I understood it from this tiny exerpt) even while I reject the attitude with which he expressed it.
     
  9. Tom Head

    Tom Head New Member

    Well. This is almost frightening, Bill; point by point, you have summarized exactly what I thought of Dawkins's quote, and better than I would have. I really wish you'd consider writing some books in the field of religion, because we need more articulate liberal religious thinkers.

    We also need more effective critics of religion. I agree completely that Richard Dawkins is not a religion expert, and I wouldn't even classify him as a philosophy expert; his writing on the subject tends to be more polemic than anything else (though he does produce some nifty one-liners), and I wish he'd focus less on his religion hangup (and I've been told that, in a recent interview, he expressed that even he was getting burned out on being a professional atheist (though that probably wasn't exactly how he put it), and wants to focus on science again).


    Cheers,

    ------------------
    Tom Head
    www.tomhead.net
     
  10. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member


    Bill does seem to have a tendency to do that, doesn't he. Makes me proud to be a fellow Bill. [​IMG]

    I decided long a go that it is not worth worrying too much about things I can't really know. I never did buy into the faith lessons that were taught in my Sunday school lessons. But I think religon in general does more good than harm so I won't knock it.

    I've talked with someone that has had a near-death-experience and read some on that subject. It makes a pretty good argument that there's something to this soul idea.
     
  11. Lewchuk

    Lewchuk member

    Tom, a question for you.

    According to Mosaic law if you murder someone the punishment is death... if you kill someone accidentally there is no punishment (city of refuge pass)... however if "men strive together" and the "unborn" is destroyed a fine is levied. Exodus suggests that the unborn is closer to property than human life.

    What are the fundies so upset about?

     
  12. Lewchuk

    Lewchuk member

    Good ol' Clive Staples said something to the effect that one thing you do not need to do to become a Christian is believe that everyone else is necessarily wrong. Therefore, the point is somewhat moot. There is nothing superior of one myth to another if the truth they contain is the same.

     
  13. Tom Head

    Tom Head New Member

    I'm not a biblical literalist (my concerns about abortion are based solely on the possibility that late-term fetuses could be sentient), but when I want to read what the conservative Christian biblical literalist position is on a given issue, I turn to the immensely useful www.reformed.org. And, true to form, an exceptionally well-written article is available on this subject.

    Good luck!


    Peace,

    ------------------
    Tom Head
    www.tomhead.net
     
  14. Tom Head

    Tom Head New Member

    Amen. Lewis (who was schooled in Greek mythology and knew about Mithraism, etc.) wrote at great length about what he called the "good dreams" of Christian theology that had occurred in previous traditions, and even went so far as to say that if we encounter alien life, we would be well-served not to convert these new races to Christianity (since they could have perfectly adequate relationships with God, and may be in no need of salvation).


    Peace,

    ------------------
    Tom Head
    www.tomhead.net
     
  15. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    I don't know a whole lot about it, but Mesopotamian religion is fascinating, especially in its later stages. Originally very similar to Hebrew religion, it evolved in a totally different direction.

    In their earlier stages thay had a fairly typical Semitic pantheon, which they partly identified with the heavenly bodies. The sun (Shamash), the moon (Nannar), venus or the morning star (Ishtar) etc. There were lots of lesser gods and intermediate angel-like spirits and demons too. The cities would have one of these gods as its patron and offer cult to him/her in its temple.

    Their ethics revolved around the will of these gods. They sought to do what would bring divine favor and hence good fortune both to their city and to themselves. And they sought to avoid behavior that would draw down a curse.

    So far it isn't a whole lot different than the early Hebrews. The difference comes when you ask how one knows what the will of the god is. The Hebrews decided that Yahweh had revealed a set of rules, the Law. The Hebrews became the religion of the Book. The Babylonians turned their religion into a science.

    The Babylonians attempted to approach the problem empirically, listing all categories of observed phenomena which had preceded good or bad fortune. They drew up elaborate handbooks listing all these observed correspondences. More than a hundred of these tablets still exist.

    If a person had committed an act predicted to bring on divine disfavor, he or she could expiate the sin by penitential prayer or by an expiatory sacrifice of a lamb which was "substitute for the man". They also had professional exorcist-priests who could be called in like physicians to diagnose the problem.

    So the whole thrust of their religion centered around determining the will of the gods. Divination became high-tech and they practiced it in all its forms: slaughtering animals and looking at their livers (hepatoscopy) and observing monstrous births (teratology). They observed the behavior of animals and birds. They also had a very interesting technique of putting oil drops onto the surface of water and observing the chaotic patterns that form.

    But the chief gods were associated with the heavenly bodies, and that inevitably directed their attention to the skies. What happens in the heavens is reproduced here on earth. As above, so below.

    So the Babylonians applied their empirical methods particularly to the motions of the planets. They drew up elaborate tables listing earthly events and the corresponding positions of the heavenly bodies.

    If the positions of the planets are associated with good favor in particular endeavors, then it is prudent to wait to undertake those kinds of acts until the stars are favorable. So obviously they wanted to predict when that would be. This led to very precise observations of planetary motions, and a great interest in finding cycles that would allow their religious scientists to predict their future positions.

    After the Greeks conquered the region under Alexander the Great, this religious science reached its most developed form. The Hellenistic Greeks brought their advanced mathematics to bear on the heavens and produced the astronomical systems of Ptolemy and others. These enabled precise predictions of astronomical positions that weren't really improved upon until Copernicus in the 16th century. The familiar system of astrological charts was devoloped with its aspects and other arcana.

    And all of this spread throughout the Roman empire, forming part of the environment of early Christianity. To some extent at least, Christianity succeeded as a means of freeing mankind from the iron grip of the stars.
     
  16. Nosborne

    Nosborne New Member

    Oh gosh. May a modern Jew speak?

    It has never been a requirement of Jewish belief to accept as literal the first eleven or so chapters of b'reshit, known to Christianity as the Book of Genesis. For myself, I consider that ALL of Torah is the expression of a people seeking to organize itself and looking for Authority outside of itself.

    I cringe whenever anyone uses Torah text to prove to someone else how that person ought to behave. The reason is, you can't understand the mitzvot, the commandments, from Torah alone. There is an enormous amount of discussion and dissection contained in the Talmud, in the codes, in the responsa, right up to this very day...

    It is very rare (in my limited experience) to run into a Christian who actually UNDERSTANDS concepts like ritual purity or the measure of damages yet some preachers seem willing to condemn people who behave in ways that the preacher deems 'sinful' based on his less than rigorous understanding of our ancient Hebrew texts.

    Keep in mind please that the most Reform of congregations reads the weekly Torah portion in Hebrew and does its best to make sure that Jewish children are able to read it for themselves. I don't suggest that I am a better translator than a Christian scholar would be; far from it. I do suggest, though, that the best translation there is says as much about the translator as it does about the text. Ancient Hebrew does not translate directly into English. The translator makes choices among meanings and he sometimes makes choices that to me seem uninformed by the legal and social context that the text was written in.

    Thanks for listening. I apologise in advance if I have said anything offensive.

    Nosborne (formerly Joybaum)
     
  17. Tom Head

    Tom Head New Member

    Nothing offensive at all. I don't know why I keep talking as if all Jews are Orthodox when the only temples/synagogues here in Mississippi are Reform.

    Thanks for setting us straight!


    Cheers,

    ------------------
    Tom Head
    www.tomhead.net
     

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