This book has caused something of a stir between some of us, even some of us who haven't even read it yet. For me this book has meant a renewed vigor in my fight against religion. If you don't understand why I want to fight religion, or even think that I am wrong, I suggest you read this book. I highly recommend it.
A preeminent scientist - and the world's most prominent atheist - asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.
With rigor and wit, Richard Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, forments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong, but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe's wonders than any faith could ever muster.
Reviews of the book:
"Passionate religious irrationality too often poses serious obstacles to human betterment. To oppose it effectively, the world needs equally passionate rationalists unafraid to challenge long accepted beliefs. Richard Dawkins so stands out through the cutting intelligence of The God Delusion."
James D. Watson, Nobel Prizewinner, Co-discoverer of the DNA Molecule
"At last, Richard Dawkins, one of the best nonfiction writers alive today, has assembled his thoughts on religion into a characteristically elegant book. The God Delusion puts the lie to the lazy and soothing platitudes that people embrace to escape the responsibility of thinking seriously about religious belief. If you think that science is just another religion, that religion is about our higher values, or that scientists are just as dogmatic as believers, then read this book, and see if you can counter Dawkins' arguments-they are passionately stated, and poetically expressed, but are rooted in reason and evidence."
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate
"Oh, it's so refreshing, after being told all your life that it is virtuous to be full of faith, sprit and superstition, to read such a resounding trumpet blast for truth instead. It feels like coming up for air."
Matt Ridley, author of 'Genome' and 'Francis Crick'.
"I've read this with pleasure and satisfaction. Dawkins is a great rationalist, but he is also a good man. History has seen a number of supreme rationalists who weren't good at all. He gives human sympathies and emotions their proper value, which is one of the things that lends his criticisms of religion such force, because many religious leaders in the world today - certainly the loudest ones - are men who, it's obvious to anyone but their deranged followers, are willing to sanction vicious cruelty in the service of their faith. Dawkins hits them hard, with all the power that reason can wield, demolishing their preposterous attempts to prove the existence of God, or their presumptuous claims that religion is the only basis of morality, or that their holy books are literally true."
"The God Delusion is written with all the clarity and elegance of which Dawkins is a master. It is so well written, in fact, that children deserve to read it as well as adults. It should have a place in every school library - especially in the library of every 'faith' school. Naturally, it won't. But with any luck, the teachers in these ridiculous establishments will ban it from their shelves, and thus draw the attention of the intelligent pupils in their care to something that might be interesting as well as true."
Philip Pullman, author of the children's trilogy His Dark Materials.
"Richard Dawkins is smart, compassionate, knowledgeable, and true like ice, like fire. But, that doesn't scare a guy like me. As soon as he says something wrong, I'm going to rip him apart. He just hasn't said anything really wrong yet. If this book doesn't change the world -- we're all screwed."
Penn Jillette (Penn & Teller)
"I took the first 115 pages of The God Delusion on a short vacation, thinking this would be some heavy reading I might dip into. I'm normally a VERY slow reader. I burned through every page I'd brought, and kicked myself for not bringing more. You are the one author alive who could make an atheist polemic into a riot of vacation fun and a real page-turner."
P.S. There are numerous passages that made me laugh aloud. What a delight.
If there were a God, and he read this, he'd wish he were dead."
Teller (Penn&Teller)
"This is my favourite book of all time. In an age of violent religious fundamentalism from both East and West, we should be embarrassed to hear proud talk of blind faith. I hope that those secure and intelligent enough to see the value of questioning their beliefs will be big and strong enough to read this book. It is a heroic and life-changing work.
Derren Brown (British illusionist, conjurer and caricature artist)
". . . an invitation to explore an exhilarating new view of what it means to be human and alive now. . . I see this as a book for a new millennium, one in which we may be released from lives dominated by the supernatural and the metaphysical."
Brian Eno
"In this book Dawkins with lucid simplicity exposes the intellectual poverty of the stratagems used by the propagators of fundamentalist religious ideas. . . . Unless the majority of 'believers' can reach some rapprochement with the rational arguments in this book and recognize the true humanity and spirituality implicit in them, the tightening grip of irrational mystical belief will not only extinguish the Enlightenment but also, in this age of monstrous weapons, the whole human race."
Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel Prizewinner
"A wonderful book - a passionate and vital advocacy which is also joyous, elegant, fair, engaging, and often very funny, and which is informed throughout by an exhilarating breadth of reference and clarity of thought."
Another review. This one by Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor of its magazine Skeptic.
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Arguing for Atheism
by Michael Shermer
"There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me r30; that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are?"
Such stirring words, spoken with such moral conviction, must surely come from an outraged liberal exasperated with the conservative climate of America today, and one can be forgiven for thinking that in a review of The God Delusion these are the words of Richard Dawkins himself, who is well known for not suffering religious fools gladly. But no. They were entered into the Congressional Record on 16 September 1981, by none other than Senator Barry Goldwater, the fountain-head of the modern conservative movement, the man whose failed 1964 run for the presidency was said to have been fulfilled in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, and the candidate whose campaign slogan was "In Your Heart You Know He's Right."
If Goldwater had been president for the past six years, I doubt that Dawkins would have penned such a powerful polemic against the infusion of religion into nearly every nook and cranny of public life. But here we are, and like Goldwater, Dawkins is sick and tired of being told that atheists are immoral, second-class, back-of-the-bus citizens. The God Delusion is his way of, like the Howard Beale character in the 1976 film Network, sticking his head out the window and shouting, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."
But The God Delusion is so much more than a polemic. It is an exercise to "raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled." Dawkins wants atheists to quit apologizing for their religious skepticism. "On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind."
Dawkins also wants to raise consciousness about the power of Darwin's dangerous idea of natural selection. He believes that most people - even many scientists - do not fully understand just how powerful an idea it is. He attributes that failure to the need to be steeped and immersed in natural selection before you can truly recognize its power. In this context, natural selection "shatters the illusion of design within the domain of biology, and teaches us to be suspicious of any kind of design hypothesis in physics and cosmology as well."
Out of obligation, of course, Dawkins reviews and offers rebuttals to all the standard arguments for God's existence. He concentrates on dissecting the anthropic principle and dismantling intelligent design creationism. (As part of the latter efforts, he redirects the creationists' argument from complexity to show that God must have been designed by a superintelligent designer.) He then builds a case for "why there almost certainly is no God." The remainder of the book outlines possible evolutionary origins of morality and religious belief, a justification for being hard on religion, childhood religious indoctrination as child abuse, and an elegant commentary on the progressively changing moral zeitgeist. Dawkins closes with a tribute to the power and beauty of science, which no living writer does better.
When I received the bound galleys for The God Delusion, I cringed at the title, wishing it were more neutral (why not, say, The God Question?). As I read the book, I found myself wincing at Dawkins's references to religious people as "faith-heads," as being less intelligent, poor at reasoning, or even deluded, and to religious moderates as enablers of terrorism. I shudder because I have religious friends and colleagues who do not fit these descriptors, and I empathize at the pain such pejorative appellations cause them. In addition, I am not convinced by Dawkins's argument that without religion there would be "no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers,' no Northern Ireland 'troubles'r30;" In my opinion, many of these events - and others often attributed solely to religion by atheists - were less religiously motivated than politically driven, or at the very least involved religion in the service of political hegemony.
I also never imagined a book with this title would ever land on bestseller lists in the United States. But I was wrong. The data have spoken. The God Delusion is a runaway bestseller, a market testimony to the hunger many people - far more, I now think, than polls reveal - have for someone in a position of prestige and power to speak for them in such an eloquent voice. Dawkins's latest book deserves multiple readings, not just as an important work of science, but as a great work of literature.
Another review. This one by Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University. He received a PhD from Princeton University in 1967. He has been a prominent figure in the science wars, often arguing against relativism and for the objective nature of science. He is a firm believer in the scientific method and its ability to uncover the truth.
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What a Friend We Have in Dawkins
by Norman Levitt
Discourse in this country is sometimes held in such a death-grip by religion that a genial "up yours" directed thereto is, perhaps, the only way to initiate a meaningful conversation on matters theological. Dawkins certainly supplies one in his recent book, The God Delusion. He is the Voice of Faith and Inspiration (as a fundamentalist radio station in my neighborhood used to style itself) though the faith, of course, is in the penetrating power of human reason in the absence of any cosmic Imaginary Friend, while what he inspires is chiefly a determination not to be intimidated by the religiosity that saturates our culture.
Dawkins is a wondrously efficient and beguiling writer - colloquial, unpretentious, and direct, notwithstanding his deep erudition and the exacting reasoning he continually deploys. The obvious comparison is to Bertrand Russell, a thinker with similar views and a similar gift for turning a devastating phrase. But Dawkins's virtues also include easy familiarity with popular culture, American as well as British. He cleverly uses it to gain the ear of an audience that, perhaps, would be a bit put off by a purely academic style.
It is greatly encouraging to note that this book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over four straight months (as of January, 2007), and that this is not just a one-shot deal. It's a good bet that ten or fifteen years ago, that wouldn't have been the case. Until relatively recently, most mainstream publishers would likely have treated any work heaping scorn on conventional belief as pure poison, commercially. Why has the climate changed so much? My own guess is that the surge of the religious Right into the corridors of power has put many heretofore diffident unbelievers into a position where a fight-or-flight choice has to be made. Many - not only those who write in defense of godlessness, but also a wide spectrum of literate intellectuals - have chosen to fight, disdaining the notion that tactful silence best serves the right to unbelief. In any event, the infidels are now out in force to an extent not seen since the glory days of Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken. Today's primus inter pares amongst the paladins of rationalism is Dawkins, who, though British down to his toes, fights brilliantly on American soil.
The ideal readership for The God Delusion consists neither of grizzled old infidels like me nor of those still clinging to the frayed shrouds of faith who might be persuaded to turn them loose by a few more well-honed arguments. Instead, the book is best suited to a rather young reader - in the 15-to-30 demographic, say - who has recently discarded religion (or simply realized that it was never part of his or her makeup) and whose major need is for an arsenal of conceptual and rhetorical strategies to deal with peer hostility, cultural and political pressures, familial unhappiness, and so forth. Such young people require a crash course in urbanity, wit, and the uses of irony to supplement the raw intensity of new-found (dis)belief. Dawkins is a superb model in this regard, in addition to the substantive virtues of his specific arguments against theism. What he teaches is that one's world-view may be worn lightly, that one can be in dead earnest without being a prig. He brings to the beleaguered adolescent unbeliever the welcome news that he or she has a lot of company.
Social Aspects of Religion
Many reviewers of The God Delusion have noted, with varying degrees of dismay, that Dawkins gives little quarter to "liberal" theism, that is to say, the kind of undogmatic, diffident, and even dilute faith that finds it easy to coexist with atheism in a social context, that eschews high-pressure proselytizing, and that offers no objection to evolutionary biology or cosmology or to science in general. In that sense, Dawkins is indeed a hard-liner. For him, "original sin" lies in agreeing to set aside a certain set of questions, those involving a transcendent intelligent agent presumed to rule over the universe, as an area where belief may be condoned without having to answer to the rigorous standards of evidence and logical consistency that mark science and other realms of serious inquiry. In other words, he finds it contemptible that theological propositions get an epistemological free pass even when the theology in question is easygoing and gracious to those who don't accept it.
His reasoning is that, even coupled with tame religion, the willingness to accept some kind of "revelation" as a legitimate source of knowledge creates a fatal gap in the barricades that ought to be maintained against irrationality as such. In and of itself, it breeds an unjustifiable deference toward the kinds of knowledge-claims that bolster religion in its most self-aggrandizing and violent forms. It reduces one to arguing that this or that faith has gone astray for purely local reasons and disallows use of more powerful and general arguments that religion, per se, is undone by its ultimate reliance on unproved principles and can therefore be safely disregarded without having to examine sectarian idiosyncrasies.
On the plane of theoretical argument, I'm inclined to agree with Dawkins on this point. Yet I wish that he'd weighed the political and social costs of such an approach a bit more carefully. In the grim practical world in which we find ourselves, it doesn't seem like a very good idea to equate Quakers, say, with Wahabist Muslims. They are very different creatures intellectually as well as behaviorally; they affect human welfare in very different ways. Indeed, if organized religion in general were universally Quaker-like, I doubt that Dawkins would be devoting so much time to fending off theism. Moreover, shrugging off these differences truncates an investigation into questions of serious historical and sociological interest, for instance, why is Western Europe so much less plagued by religious zealotry than the United States?
Another point that might have benefited from a deeper analysis is the role religion plays in fostering practical moral judgment, that is, actual ethical choices made in real life, rather than abstract assent to the moral strictures of a creed. Dawkins claims to see only two ways in which a religion can make its influence felt. First of all, there is simple fear, terror that transgression of the rules will draw down the wrath of the deity. Second, and perhaps more subtle, is the notion that merely by promulgating a comprehensive moral catalog, a religion provides a behavioral template that the nominal believer will generally follow rather than strain to devise spontaneous and personal moral judgments. Dawkins's main point is that neither of these mechanisms seems to be consistently at work in the day-to-day life of ordinary individuals.
But I think he misses something, specifically, the role of "conversion experience" - epiphany, the infusion of the "holy spirit", being "born again", call it what you will. I am not suggesting, of course, that such subjective episodes argue for the objective reality of the spiritual. I merely assert that the recurrence of such experiences in many religions and many cultures, doctrinally at odds though these be, implies that they do play a role in dictating human behavior and that behavior thus conditioned will usually be closely governed by whatever moral code is endorsed by the faith that elicited the conversion experience. The moral code itself, though, might be highly arbitrary; it might demand that you give all you have to the poor, or fly a jetliner into a skyscraper, or avoid at all costs the company of menstruating women (if you're male). The neurological and evolutionary roots of effective morality, which Dawkins explores briefly but clearly, are probably supplemented in many cases by the effects of "revelation." Therefore, the biological roots of the latter phenomenon must also be understood if we are to comprehend the sources of moral feeling in humans.
Hobbesian Religion
Another matter that is a bit too quickly disposed of is the ancient thesis that, although religion may be nonsense, objectively speaking, the understanding that this is so ought to be confined to a secretive ruling elite. The great mass of the population, by contrast, ought to be thoroughly indoctrinated in an appropriate faith, for otherwise they will inevitably devolve into an unruly and criminous mob. Religion, false though it may be, is the only reliable instrument for shaping the average person into an obedient and well-behaved subject of state and society.
This is on its face a profoundly cynical and anti-democratic doctrine, but it is one that is endlessly revived in one form or another. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, private atheist and emphatic authoritarian, was probably the bluntest advocate of this viewpoint. His ideas make most of us squeamish, but discomfort does not constitute a refutation, per se. This is a doctrine that directly subverts Dawkins's ideal of a society entirely free of the trammels of religion, and must therefore be refuted if one wants to maintain that humanity would benefit, by and large, from the triumph of atheism.
Dawkins attempts to do so simply by observing that, as a matter of history, religion has done little to suppress humanity's most vicious impulses, so that it is folly to assume that it should play a key role in the maintenance of a peaceful, orderly, and stable society. But this assumes that religion, ipso facto, produces nasty social consequences in the long run. What if, hypothetically, it were possible to create and propagate a religion that really did evoke honesty, kindliness, self-sacrifice, and even tolerance in most of its adherents? Moreover, what if it turns out that lack of faith in the transcendent, when it becomes demographically pervasive, does indeed breed selfish and callous behavior that in the end makes a society violently unstable? It is impossible to confront this doctrine head on without foreboding. Given these assumptions, we would presumably have to accept the Hobbesian rules of the game. They have, after all, been accepted, however secretively, by generations of monarchs, politicians, and, to be sure, clerics. It is reasonably certain that more than a few White House staffers, even at the highest levels, think along these lines.
I bring up these points not to champion the Hobbesian view but merely to show that it is not ridiculous a priori. There is still work to be done beyond what Dawkins has to say, work both empirical and analytic, if the idea that the general run of mankind will be better off once religion is discarded is to be sustained.
Missionary Work
Another task that Dawkins seems to have left to a future book or a future writer is that of devising an effective means for bringing about the eclipse of religion. This is a very different thing from offering arguments, no matter how well-tuned in a philosophical sense, for the absurdity and futility of religion. One is asking here how it is possible to persuade people in general to accept the consequences of valid arguments. It is a matter of sociology and psychology rather than logic and metaphysics. The God Delusion might well persuade quite a few people that, in deferring to religious faith and accepting its fundamental dictum that the world is governed by a supernatural intelligence, they have fallen into a deplorable intellectual trap that can only be escaped by a commitment to atheism. But it is certain that this will not be a general phenomenon, the negative, so to speak, of the waves of zealotry that converted entire nations to Catholicism or Islam. Where, then, is the mechanism that can indeed produce a torrent of "deconversions," assuming that it even exists? This, to be fair, lies beyond the immediate scope of Dawkins's book. Still, it would have been pleasant to hear him out on this question to the extent that he has formulated ideas.
The nub of the problem, I suppose, is that atheists make poor proselytizers; there are, after all, no Brownie points in heaven to be earned for bringing a soul away from Jesus. All one has to offer a potential convert is a sharpened sense of his own intellectual self-sufficiency and a glimpse of his own courage in coming to terms with the fact that the universe owes him no favors. It may well be that on a statistical basis, evolution has made us far to willing to place our trust in illusions and to take comfort in self-deceit. Sincere atheism might never be more than a minority taste, and a tiny minority at that. That wouldn't vitiate the arguments Dawkins and countless others have offered scorning the cosmic Big Brother, but it would drastically curtail their wholehearted acceptance.
Pussyfooting
One of the most curious aspects of the success of The God Delusion is the proliferation of reviews that take the line "I, too, am an atheist - but...", going on to savage Dawkins for his tactlessness, his dismissiveness, and his unremitting hostility to religious belief in any form. These pieces seem desperate to revert to an old-fashioned quietism, where the deal is that you are left in peace in your atheistic gloom so long as you don't explicitly flaunt your disbelief in the public sphere. Obviously, a lot of nervousness persists, stemming from the intuition that this country's verbal hostility to unbelief might well turn into something more physical and lots nastier. This, rather than the predictable hostility of the forthrightly religious, has been the most discouraging aspect of the uproar stirred up by Dawkins.
An ostentatious case in point is the review published in the New York Review of Books by the biologist H. Allen Orr, who creates a thicket of quibbles and demurrals just to show his displeasure at Dawkins for having written The God Delusion. Intermittently, he makes some relevant philosophical points, but his overriding intention is to spank Dawkins for his temerity in daring the wrath of the pious. When Orr rises to the defense of theologians, he is almost comical. I presume him to be an unbeliever, but he is nevertheless willing, even eager, to concede a privileged discursive space for God-talk, where the rules, if any there be, have little to do with the canons of rationality appropriate to science. He contends that theologians are experts in something or other, even if he has no idea what their subject-matter might consist of. Worse, his major allegation is that Dawkins dares to comment on these matters without the benefit of the training and indoctrination that licenses theologians to do so: "Why does Dawkins feel he has anything significant to say about religion and what gives him the sense of authority presumably needed to say it at book length?"
The text of The God Delusion itself constitutes Dawkins's answer, and it is thoroughly adequate. Far more damning to Orr is the obliviousness that leads him to ask exactly the wrong question. The right one is "Why should theologians think that they have anything significant to say about good and evil, time and eternity, or who "rules" the universe, given that their fundamental ontological premise is worse than vacuous?" It is these theology guys, after all - priests, preachers, rabbis, imams, pandits, lamas, the whole damn lot - who not only construe a cosmology and a teleology out of their own fancies, but who then go on to tell us, often in the most minatory tone, how we have to behave, what we must and must not do, and who, among men, we are obliged to obey. Distilling it down, then, the real question becomes, "JUST WHO THE HELL DO THESE BOZOS THINK THEY ARE?" Orr is far too timorous to ask this question, which renders his criticism of Dawkins futile and anemic. Dawkins, by contrast, never lets it go, insisting that we continually ask it in the face of all the social conventions devoted to repressing it. This is where he really comes into his glory. Hallelujah!
Richard Dawkins reads excerpts from The God Delusion and anwsers questions at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia on October 23, 2006. This Q&A features many questions from Jerry Falwell's Liberty "University" students. In Richard's tour journal he says:
"Many of the questioners announced themselves as either students or faculty from Liberty, rather than from Randolph Macon which was my host institution. One by one they tried to trip me up, and one by one their failure to do so was applauded by the audience. Finally, I said that my advice to all Liberty students was to resign immediately and apply to a proper university instead. That received thunderous applause, so that I almost began to feel slightly sorry for the Liberty people. Only almost and only slightly, however."
(Jerry Falwell is the guy who said that "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way ... helped [9/11] happen", that "AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals", and that the purple Teletubby is gay.)
Religious fanatics are dangerous, just as Anti-religious fanatics are dangerous. It's the people in the middle of the spectre that are the sane buildingstone of society and morality.
Such rantings, be they religious or contra-religious do more damage to society than good.
Ateist fanatics (I don't care if I invent the term here!) out to undermine the moral fabric of the established eclestial population, seem more like jealous children, trying to bully the established world to get attention.
This is my personal view of them. Interpret this as you will.
hmm, you're right he seems quite reasonable. Someone posted a video of him attending a rally here. Doesn't look like a fanatic at all. Maybe I was wrong about him.
You want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing?
Hitler didn't seem like a fanatic either at first!
Wether people are fanatics or not, can not be judged by appearance or vocabulary.
I have not read the book, so I can not, and will not, decide on his views from exerpts and reviews.
If you can't view it in its entirety, then you won't see the full picture.
The man can be right and he can be wrong. But, imposing your predominant interpretation of a singular view on several individuals of varying views, is wrong, no matter what the interpretation might be.
I have no need, nor want, of any new "messiah" or "profet" of any new or old views regarding religion, be they pro or con.
No decision is so fine as to not bind us to its consequences.
No consequence is so unexpected as to absolve us of our decisions.
Not even death.
-R. Scott Bakker. 'The Prince of Nothing'
Hitler didn't seem like a fanatic either at first!
yeah, I think he kinda did.......
And I still want people to challenge my views instead of just them knowing 'their' truths and me knowing 'my' truths.
Without labelling anyone 'messiah' or 'profet' I think some people have ideas others just haven't thought of. And they should put these ideas up for debate so all of us can come closer to the truth.
It seems to me that you want to bury your head in the sand, jogvanth.
I hate the fact, that everyone insists on labeling the ideas "Truth".
How can we be so damn confident, that what we belive or even think, is the sole, undeniable, universal and unequivical Truth?
The argument of religion/Universalism/ateism/all other ism's, is not that important to me. I have my beliefs and convictions, and I stand by them.
No decision is so fine as to not bind us to its consequences.
No consequence is so unexpected as to absolve us of our decisions.
Not even death.
-R. Scott Bakker. 'The Prince of Nothing'
I hate the fact, that everyone insists on labeling the ideas "Truth".
If I said that any ideas where 'Truth', I have misspoken. I believe that discussion of ideas, even dangerous ones, get us closer to the truth.
How can we be so damn confident, that what we belive or even think, is the sole, undeniable, universal and unequivical Truth?
We can't, and we shouldn't. But some things are more likely than others.
Example: Maybe in a 5 dimensional space, compensating for gravity singularities etc. etc., the earth is flat (/technobabble). However, we have to go with the things we can measure and the most likely scenarios. Therefore we conclude that the earth is most likely round.
The argument of religion/Universalism/ateism/all other ism's, is not that important to me. I have my beliefs and convictions, and I stand by them.
Almost everybody agrees with this. Most people don't get their beliefs and convictions from ism's. They start with their beliefs and convictions, and then put them in boxes called ism's to better categorize them. That way we can describe ourselves in ism's instead of having to go through every belief and conviction to explain our outlook on the world.
