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Source: (consider it) Thread: Better to get rid of religion than rape.
Yorick

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I don't think it's a matter of proving anything with evidence, quetzy. It's just a bit of rhetoric aimed at provoking people to think and talk about it, which I think is quite useful.

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quetzalcoatl
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
I don't think it's a matter of proving anything with evidence, quetzy. It's just a bit of rhetoric aimed at provoking people to think and talk about it, which I think is quite useful.

It's all good, mate. I just find it ironic that someone like Harris, supposedly one of the Great Gnus, should set out unsupported and evidence-free assertions like this. In fact, he's almost boasting of them, isn't he? He think that religion is the most dangerous ideology - well, fuck me, if Sam Harris thinks it, it must be well, thinkable, at any rate.

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Justinian
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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
FFS, are some of you atheists utterly incapable of seeing the difference between a thing that is intrinsically evil, and one which is only evil as a result of abuse?

Of course most of us aren't. We can see the difference between the imaginary and the real. That you choose to make a song and dance out of the imaginary and consider it more important than the real is a different matter entirely.

And absolutely right on faith earlier - it is nothing more than intellectual sloth with a new coat of paint. The answer to the sky challenge is that without sloth we would say "I wonder what's up there" and all go and invent telescopes and spend our lives on astrophysics. Of course this is a reason why a limited degree of sloth is necessary.

That said, Sam Harris has about as much of a moral leg to stand on as any other torture apologist and, as has been pointed out if you are a torture apologist and an atheist (as Sam Harris is) then your argument that religion provides a unique approach to getting to absurd evil is self-defeating.

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The Great Gumby

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quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
The whole reason the comparison is stupid is because "the good done by rape" is pretty well an empty category (unless you're particularly enthusiastic about increasing the world population).

Ironically, the only times I've heard anyone claiming that rape was anything but wholly negative, they were explicitly doing so because of their religion.

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Erroneous Monk
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quote:
Originally posted by Liopleurodon:
quote:
Originally posted by Spiffy:
I really wish old white men would quit telling me about how awesome rape is. It's getting quite irksome.

Yes, I must admit that my first thought on reading this was not a careful examination of the relative wrongs of rape and religion, but "Really? Again?" And noting that it's much easier to make these kind of glib comments about rape when it's extremely unlikely to happen to you and not something that you have to have at the back of your mind on a day to day basis. If you want to make a comparison of religion with something nasty, it's probably best to talk about something that concerns you personally. Otherwise it comes across as "I have been more personally inconvenienced by religious people than by rapists, so they're clearly worse for the world."
Yes, this is what's at the heart of Dr Harris's cuntiness. He knows he can't avoid a suicide bomber's blast, so he seeks to make his own world safer by getting rid of suicide bombers. However, ignorant, nasty piece of work that he is, at heart, he reckons he can *avoid* being a victim of rape, (a) because he's a man and (b) because he isn't a rape-victim-type-of-person - rape victims being inherently different from people like him; so it's OK with him if rape lives to rape another day.

There's even the hint of an implication that if religion didn't exist then rape wouldn't be all that bad, but if I start on that, I'll never stop.

I'm finding him quite hard to love. Oh and none of this is because he's an atheist. It's because he's a complete fucking cock.

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George Spigot

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While I agree that religion does far more harm than good I also agree that his decision to use rape as an example is rubbish. The only reason I can think of as to why he did it was wanting something bad to compare with religion and then going "hmm, what's the worse thing I can think of".

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Yorick

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quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It’s not really that hard to understand.

Religion can cause people to do bad things. > Some of the bad things people do because of religion would not be done without religion. > Without religion, there would be less bad things done by people.

Harris is suggesting that without religion the overall reduction in harm done by people would be greater than the overall reduction in harm done if there were no rape.

Which deliberately ignores:

Religion can cause people to do good things. > Some of the good things people do because of religion would not be done without religion. > Without religion, there would be less good things done by people.

I'm suggesting that without religion the overall reduction in good done by people would be greater than the overall reduction in harm done if there were no religion.

The whole reason the comparison is stupid is because "the good done by rape" is pretty well an empty category (unless you're particularly enthusiastic about increasing the world population). You're taking something where the focus is harm, harm, harm, and the whole reason for comparing it to religion is to slip the mind into thinking about religion in terms of harm, harm, harm.

Which is blindingly unfair. I said it once, I'll say it again. If you want to weigh up the good and bad caused by sex against the good and bad caused by religion, go right ahead. If you want to weigh up the harm caused by rape with the harm caused by religious bigotry or religious hatred, go right ahead. But "religion" does not consist of only the nasty aspects of religion. It's a 2-sided leger, and no amount of comparing to 'bad-only' sex will turn religion into something that's all bad.

I agree with this. It’s clear that religion causes some people to do good stuff and some people to do bad stuff. It may perhaps be argued that religion is a net benefit to mankind, though I find that doubtful. I suppose most people will view the equation from an entirely personal perspective- those who love their religion will consider it a net benefit to mankind, and those who don’t won’t.

As a secular humanist, I wonder how many Cistene Chapel ceilings and Bach oratorios are worth one single human being’s life. I guess the relatives of those killed in the 9/11 attacks are better qualified than me to answer this.

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orfeo

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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
As a secular humanist, I wonder how many Cistene Chapel ceilings and Bach oratorios are worth one single human being’s life. I guess the relatives of those killed in the 9/11 attacks are better qualified than me to answer this.

Oh yeah, Yorick, that's really a better comparator than the one we started the thread with.

Do me a favour. Go and read Robert Pape's Dying to Win, and come back when you've stopped believing the shit-arse nonsense that acts of suicide terrorism are religiously based.

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quetzalcoatl
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But Yorick's point reminds me of something that seems imponderable. How do you calculate the harm done by anything?

If you take disastrous events of the recent past, you might list WWI and WWII, Vietnam, Mao's Great Leap Forward, the war in Congo, and so on.

You can actually add up the number of dead, well, roughly at any rate, I believe the dead in Congo are currently estimated at 5 million, in the Great Leap Forward, about 34 million, but these are obviously estimates.

So how do we do our comparisons now? I suppose start a ledger, with a column for religious wars, and a column for secular ones, and another one for 'don't know'.

Do historians do this?

But 9/11 shows the obvious problems, since an increasing number of people are arguing that it was not really a religious attack at all.

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Yorick

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[this to orfeo]

I was making a point about personal perspective. If you ask a relative of a suicide bomber victim whether the good caused by religion outweighs the harm, you are likely to get one answer; if you ask the Pope, another.

[ 22. November 2012, 13:40: Message edited by: Yorick ]

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Jay-Emm
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quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
But Yorick's point reminds me of something that seems imponderable. How do you calculate the harm done by anything?
...

In any case with the Dead...if you take worst case, and even count whatever Hitler and Stalin was* as religious, you get around 0.5Billion.

There are around 3Billion women in the world, and I remember the sexual assault statistic in the west being shockingly high. So I'm far from convinced that one isn't forced to try either some 'rape' and 'non-rape rape' argument to argue the premise, or more tortured links**.

*or if you really want to sound bitchy, argue it should be counted because the victims were religious.

**And even with something seemingly sound-bitey like Aids, I'm not sure that follows.

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Curiosity killed ...

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And male rape never happens? Not

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Jay-Emm
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True, I was remiss.
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orfeo

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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
[this to orfeo]

I was making a point about personal perspective. If you ask a relative of a suicide bomber victim whether the good caused by religion outweighs the harm, you are likely to get one answer; if you ask the Pope, another.

And if you ask an atheist with a massive axe to grind, another again. Which is how we got here in the first place. Not by ACTUALLY asking the relatives of suicide bomber victims, many of whom know perfectly well that suicide bombing is not a religiously motivated act.

I just love these contrasting opposite pairs that aren't actually correct opposing pairs. The opposite of "terribly religious Pope" is NOT "relative of suicide bomber victim who is inevitably atheist because of the trauma", okay?

Because the supposition in the latter category is completely false. The correct category is "atheist who wrongly believes that all relatives of suicide bombers will be atheists and simultaneously sympathetic so that no-one would dare to tell them that ascribing suicide bombing to religion is a crock of shit".

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Eliab
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quote:
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
...because he isn't a rape-victim-type-of-person - rape victims being inherently different from people like him

Can you point us to something said or written by Sam Harris that gives some evidence about what he thinks are the sort of people who get raped, or are you just making shit up?

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by George Spigot:
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I still don't get the sense in which Harris argues that religion is particularly dangerous or conflictual. How does he establish this? Nobody presumably denies that religion can be a source of conflict, and war, but is it more so than other things? How would he know that?

If someone stated that it would be a good thing to magicly get rid of war how much sense would it make to argue that it would be pointless as we would still have famine, greed and natural desasters.

The argument that religion isnt the only thing that causes problems and therefore it's pointless to get rid of it sounds close to the argument that we shouldn't arrest the drug pusher on the street corner becasue someone else will still be steeling cars.

But you're equating "religion" with "stealing cars" -- as if "religion" were an act that is intrinsically wrong. You're making a category error. We're saying if you get rid of religion as a means of enticing people to kill, people will find another way to entice people to kill. Which is completely different from saying if we stop people from killing they'll all go out and commit arson.

[ 23. November 2012, 00:53: Message edited by: mousethief ]

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RooK

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Hey now. Leave Grant Theft Auto out of this. It's so great, they made a video game about it.
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Snags
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Yorick:
quote:

As a secular humanist, I wonder how many Cistene Chapel ceilings and Bach oratorios are worth one single human being’s life.

Orfeo's already picked up on the whole "is suicide bombing actually religiously motivated issue", but this equally false and weighted pairing seems to have slipped past.

A better comparator would be lives damaged/taken due to religious motivation vs. lives blessed/saved as a result of religious motivation.

Assuming, of course, that one can adequately define "religion" and then determine the root causes and motivators in all of the countless incidents that would be covered.

[ETA: and that's doing the question the courtesy of accepting it on its own merits when actually the whole thing is just a facile rhetorical device for point-scoring and ducking the core issues which hinges on "Is it true?", and if so "If the outcomes are harmful, have we got it right?". It's not really something with which one can play some cosmic accounting game, and as both 'sides' have pointed out, your viewpoint is inherently coloured by your own underlying assumptions]

[ 23. November 2012, 07:30: Message edited by: Snags ]

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Marvin the Martian

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quote:
Originally posted by RooK:
Grant Theft Auto

Sounds like one of our Automotive Engineering professors after they've been turned down by yet another research council...

[Razz]

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Erroneous Monk
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quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
quote:
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
...because he isn't a rape-victim-type-of-person - rape victims being inherently different from people like him

Can you point us to something said or written by Sam Harris that gives some evidence about what he thinks are the sort of people who get raped, or are you just making shit up?
I'm making shit up. Because he's a cock.

But there is a big difference between saying "I would rather suffer rape myself than live in a world where religious belief exists" and "I would rather rape existed than religious belief." Rape existing pre-supposes someone is being raped - it cannot exist without victims.

Anyone who is preferring the existence of rape to the existence of [any other act] is either saying that that they would prefer to be a victim of rape themselves, or that they would prefer other people to be victims of rape.

Which do you think he means?

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Erroneous Monk
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quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
quote:
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
...because he isn't a rape-victim-type-of-person - rape victims being inherently different from people like him

Can you point us to something said or written by Sam Harris that gives some evidence about what he thinks are the sort of people who get raped, or are you just making shit up?
I'm troubled now. Maybe Dr Harris *has* been raped - or at least, I don't know that he *hasn't*. That would certainly make his statement even more bizarre. But it would make me even more wrong too. And I can't *know* that it isn't the case. Maybe I'm very very wrong.

[Hot and Hormonal] Sorry.

[ 23. November 2012, 11:31: Message edited by: Erroneous Monk ]

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quetzalcoatl
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He certainly seems to be saying that religion is worse than rape; therefore, presumably, rape is better than religion.

That makes the argument seem truly atrocious, which is probably correct.

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RooK

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At the very least, we can probably deduce that Mr. Harris dislikes religion so much that it has entered the realm of the irrational. Can't say that I think that makes it wrong for him to hate religion. There's plenty of rational reasons to hate it without inventing magical comparisons.
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Justinian
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quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
Religion does not cause evil, even in the context of your argument. What certain aspects of religious belief can do is provide a pretext to justify evil actions. That is far removed from the idea of 'causation'.

That depends how you count theological doctrines - for instance (to take an extreme example) the Aztecs mandated mass human sacrifice which would have been incredibly unlikely to have happened without religion. And there are two major doctrines I consider very harmful that simply wouldn't exist without religion.

The first is the concept of an eternal hell - something that is inherently a perversion of justice. We've clashed on that before (mostly because you do not believe in an eternal hell, instead using the word hell to refer to something more like purgatory). I believe that this doctrine can only undermine moral sensibilities because it is itself so wrong.

The second is a desire for purity - something I find fundamentally inhuman. This maps to sacredness, setting things aside, and to opposition to contraceptive sex, and numerous other things I consider obviously wrong - and is a consequence of many if not most religions.

But those are case studies - although I don't believe that the religion in question is a mere pretext in either case; I don't think even that many of the aztec priests wanted to sacrifice humans on the scale they did. But I believe it is a consequence of a corruption - and Atheism gave the world Ayn Rand amongst others (and there's a moral corruption). To me the only thing wrong with religion per se is that it casts faith as a virtue rather than a form of (necessary) intellectual sloth.

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Yorick

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quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
He certainly seems to be saying that religion is worse than rape; therefore, presumably, rape is better than religion.

No, I don't think so. The comparison Harris makes is between the overall harm to humanity caused by religion and the overall harm to humanity caused by rape. It's a rhetorical argument, designed to provoke people into considering the scale of harm caused by religion. It's not a matter of whether rape is literally better than religion, any more than being stabbed to death is 'better' than being killed by a dirty bomb. Rape and religion cause harm, and Harris is proposing that, in the abstract, religion causes more overall harm than rape. I'm inclined to agree with this as far as it goes (but then I don't have a vested interest in religion being described as all nice and lovely).

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orfeo

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Well, you're inclined to absurd lapses in logic, then.

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quetzalcoatl
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Well, OK, then, 'in the abstract' religion is worse for humans than rape. Therefore, rape is better for us than religion.

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Inger
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quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
And there are two major doctrines I consider very harmful that simply wouldn't exist without religion.

The first is the concept of an eternal hell - something that is inherently a perversion of justice. We've clashed on that before (mostly because you do not believe in an eternal hell, instead using the word hell to refer to something more like purgatory). I believe that this doctrine can only undermine moral sensibilities because it is itself so wrong.

The second is a desire for purity - something I find fundamentally inhuman. This maps to sacredness, setting things aside, and to opposition to contraceptive sex, and numerous other things I consider obviously wrong - and is a consequence of many if not most religions.

I'm surprised you don't mention the concept that for me is the most harmful of all. It is not found in all religion, but is an essential part of Christianity and Islam: the concept of an afterlife that is not just good, but infinitely better than life here on Earth. This Earth is but a vale of tears; what happens to you here is ultimately not very important, since (if you believe/are good) you will get your reward or compensation in the hereafter. You've only got to listen to a few Bach Cantatas to get the picture.

This concept has led to some very bad things, which I think are essentially dependent on religious belief. On a milder level to

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate

a verse usually omitted today.

At worst however to the auto da fé and "Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own." I would guess this is what prompted Steven Weinberg's remark "But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

It has also led to the belief that the Earth is ours to despoil as seems good to us, since it is ultimately unimportant what happens to it.

I'm well aware that most people here on SoF would dislike these consequences as much as I do. As for the comparison with rape, it seems unhelpful to me - essentially meaningless.

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Erroneous Monk
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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It's not a matter of whether rape is literally better than religion, any more than being stabbed to death is 'better' than being killed by a dirty bomb. Rape and religion cause harm, and Harris is proposing that, in the abstract, religion causes more overall harm than rape.

The problem I have with this is that only one of the two really works as an abstract concept - the harm caused by religion. The harm caused by rape is not an abstract. It's not a bit of head-scratching about whether terrorist acts are religiously motivated or politically, it's not a bit of navel-gazing about whether those who kill in the name or religion are really true followers of their claimed faith. It's about people violently abusing and degrading other people.

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rolyn
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Better to get rid of religion than rape ?

Not sure it's possible to get rid of either really .
Mind you if rape carried a sentence of castration that may go some way to getting rid of it.
Using violent deterrents to get rid of religion was tried by Rome . It failed.

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RooK

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# 1852

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Check out the myopic miss-the-point goggles on rolyn. Is there anything you can't misconstrue into a sufficiently moronic concept that you can pretend to understand?
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Tortuf
Ship's fisherman
# 3784

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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
No, I don't think so. The comparison Harris makes is between the overall harm to humanity caused by religion and the overall harm to humanity caused by rape. It's a rhetorical argument, designed to provoke people into considering the scale of harm caused by religion. It's not a matter of whether rape is literally better than religion, any more than being stabbed to death is 'better' than being killed by a dirty bomb. Rape and religion cause harm, and Harris is proposing that, in the abstract, religion causes more overall harm than rape.

I agree with everything I quoted. While I think the dichotomy is a bit over the top, it is thought provoking.

Where I disagree is that religion itself is bad, or that rape itself is bad. Neither is an animate object. Religion and rape do not happen without the presence of people.

All rape is bad. I think I am safe in assuming everyone on the Ship believes that. So, no need to address or persuade anyone on that front.

Not all, but at least some religion can motivate people to do good things. Religion at it's best speaks to the desirability of acting well as regards other people.

Is some religion bad? Of course. Any notion of religion that says "we" are good and getting a reward from some divine being and everyone else is "bad" and getting something bad from some divine being is not good as far as I am concerned.

Does that say anything about whether or not religion is better than rape? No. It says some religion is better than rape. That is as far as formal logic takes us.

Back to is it better to get rid of religion than rape. Pfft. Y'all are straining to pull a syllogism out of a false dichotomy.

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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740

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Or, as it's known colloquially, pulling a syllogism out of your bottom.

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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.

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mousethief

Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953

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quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It's a rhetorical argument,

As opposed to some other kind of argument.

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Eliab
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# 9153

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quote:
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
But there is a big difference between saying "I would rather suffer rape myself than live in a world where religious belief exists" and "I would rather rape existed than religious belief." Rape existing pre-supposes someone is being raped - it cannot exist without victims.

Anyone who is preferring the existence of rape to the existence of [any other act] is either saying that that they would prefer to be a victim of rape themselves, or that they would prefer other people to be victims of rape.

Which do you think he means?

I've already set out what I think he's saying. And I struggle to see any plausible alternative reading. This is the same point worked through:

Harris starts of by opposing the argument that religion is acceptable because it is a natural impulse. So, he says, are genocide and rape.

As it happens, I think that's a poor response to a (bad) argument. Genocide and rape are not the same sorts of thing as religion. But you can see what point he's trying to make. And you can see that by lumping rape with genocide, that Harris (like all civilised humans) regards rape as an unmitigated evil.

After that he's told he's being inflammatory, and says he can top that, because he'd rather magic away religion than rape.

He then attacks religion. But he doesn't seek directly to quantify the harm of religion and balance it against rape. He gives specific examples of people (who he says are "not evil") doing things which are highly damaging (opposing medical research and vaccinations) because of their religious views. He is thinking about one particular consequence of religious thought - one that Marvin explains upthread - that religious belief can change the very definitions of right and wrong, and lead people to do thinks believing them to be morally obligatory which, but for religion, they would reject as plainly evil.

And Harris is absolutely right to identify this as a major concern about religion. Not particular religions, or the abuse of religion, but to identify it as a real and serious danger inherent in religious thought. There may be other ideologies that also do this, but there's no sensible case for disputing that religion is particularly good at it. There is nothing like having an absolute moral authority in the form of a God whose teachings define what is right and wrong, combined with an imperfectly understanding such as all humans possess, for making the bad seem good. Religious people who do not see that Harris has a point here are fooling themselves.

Is that enough to make religion worse than rape? There's only one thing that Harris says in the interview on which such a case can be built - which is his point about nuclear war. It's a point he also makes in Letter to a Christian nation. Having nuclear weapons potentially in the hands of people who believe that the end of the world will be a glorious vindication of their faith in a morally perfect deity really, really, scares him. Is he wrong?

Harris is certainly not saying that he thinks rapists are better than believers (his point is that religion can make people do bad things who are not themselves wicked) , or even, necessarily, that the total harm done by religion could be weighed out on some metaphysical set of scales and would exceed the harm of rape. He is saying that religion might end the world. That is the essential respect in which it is worse than rape.

Why look for any other interpretation of what he might mean? Isn't it a sufficient interpretation that, once he identifies religion as a significant threat to the whole of human existence, he would prefer its abolition even to the abolition of a great deal of human suffering?

If you read him like that - and I submit that there is absolutely no reason not to - then what he is saying may be provocative, but it is not outrageous or evil.

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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"

Richard Dawkins

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Erroneous Monk
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# 10858

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I see the logic what you're saying, Eliab, but I still think you are being kinder to him than he deserves. Is it always/ever worth causing pain to provoke thought?

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And I shot a man in Tesco, just to watch him die.

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Sioni Sais
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# 5713

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quote:
Originally posted by Erroneous Monk:
I see the logic what you're saying, Eliab, but I still think you are being kinder to him than he deserves. Is it always/ever worth causing pain to provoke thought?

Would you like a reply from a Hellhost? [Snigger]

[ 26. November 2012, 11:59: Message edited by: Sioni Sais ]

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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"

(Paul Sinha, BBC)

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LeRoc

Famous Dutch pirate
# 3216

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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
It's a rhetorical argument,

As opposed to some other kind of argument.
I guess that would be a big club?

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I know why God made the rhinoceros, it's because He couldn't see the rhinoceros, so He made the rhinoceros to be able to see it. (Clarice Lispector)

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George Spigot

Outcast
# 253

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quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
Having nuclear weapons potentially in the hands of people who believe that the end of the world will be a glorious vindication of their faith in a morally perfect deity really, really, scares him. Is he wrong?

Nope.

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C.S. Lewis's Head is just a tool for the Devil. (And you can quote me on that.) ~
Philip Purser Hallard
http://www.thoughtplay.com/infinitarian/gbsfatb.html

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quetzalcoatl
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# 16740

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It's a bit odd to say that someone is 'wrong' to be scared, since I don't know that person's psychological make-up. For myself, I am not scared about the possibility of religious nutters destroying the world, and I find it to be a melodramatic and even hysterical reaction, especially to be 'really really scared'. Does this mean that Sam Harris is permanently shivering in fear?

However, if someone is scared, fair enough. I can't say that I am scared in general, about the prospect of global war, leading to our destruction. I can see that various factors, such as patriotism, nationalism, territorial expansionism, the plunder of mineral wealth, economic competition, and so on, might lead to a huge war, for example, between the US and China. At the moment, though, it doesn't scare me.

I am trying to think of something to cheer up Sam Harris, but it's difficult, if he is that way inclined. I find that baking pies and cakes is very good for me, and dispels pessimism, so I recommend it. Last week, I made a pumpkin pie, and by gum, it made me happy!

[ 26. November 2012, 14:11: Message edited by: quetzalcoatl ]

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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.

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Fr Weber
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# 13472

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Turns out a prominent New Atheist is a complete dick.

Gosh, what a surprise.

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"The Eucharist is not a play, and you're not Jesus."

--Sr Theresa Koernke, IHM

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quetzalcoatl
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# 16740

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Oh come on, you can be a torture apologist, and support a nuclear first strike, and still think religion is very very bad. Where's the contradiction?

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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.

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orfeo

Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878

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The fact that someone with their finger on the button is religious is not what makes them scary. The fact that someone with their finger on the button is the kind of person who can rationalise their actions and divorce themselves from the consequences of what they're doing is what makes them scary.

Because there are plenty of religious people who maintain their internal mechanisms of doubt and scepticism and 'what if I'm wrong'. One need only look aroud the Ship to see that.

Are religious people capable of being one-eyed and deluded and therefore dangerous if they have weapons at their disposal? Yes. Is that a property of religion? No. It's a property of a certain kind of mind that embraces points of view and ideologies uncritically. I see them at football matches booing decisions against their team even when their team was in the wrong. I see them on Idol and X Factor and Dancing With the Stars cheering wildly for their favourite after an utterly crap performance.

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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.

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quetzalcoatl
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# 16740

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I see them saying my country, right or wrong.

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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.

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RooK

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# 1852

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Watching the hysterical poo-flinging as a response to a stupid false-equivalency made my eyes roll. As they rolled, I saw a kaleidoscope of religion / rape / religion / rape... Got me wondering.

How does one go about raping religion?

And would we be talking about scientology, or Gaza?

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lilBuddha
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# 14333

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Scientology is rape of the credulous. Gaza is a mutual clusterfuck.

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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou

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quetzalcoatl
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# 16740

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If anyone is hysterical it's Sam Harris. Torture apologist, advocate of a nuclear first strike, fuck me, he should be in the Pentagon.

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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.

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Cthulhu
PRAY TO BE EATEN FIRST
# 16186

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SOUNDS LIKE MY KINDA GUY

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I WILL DESTROY YOU ALL. Nothing personal.

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Sioni Sais
Shipmate
# 5713

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quote:
Originally posted by Cthulhu:
SOUNDS LIKE MY KINDA GUY

That sounds like thread necromancy, which we hate on H&A days too.

H0stly Bowler on

Thread closed

H0stly Bowler off

Sioni Sais
Hellh0st

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"He isn't Doctor Who, he's The Doctor"

(Paul Sinha, BBC)

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