dreamer_easy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dreamer_easy) wrote2007-01-06 09:15 pm
dreamer_easy) wrote2007-01-06 09:15 pm
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Oh, Richard *slaps forehead*
I dug up a Sunday Times (24/1/07) interview with Richard Dawkins re The God Delusion, from which I quote:
But if religion only amounts to coffee mornings and more upbeat passages from the New Testament, why the pressing need to turn its followers atheist? "I don't exactly want to turn people, I suppose." That's what you say you want to do in your book. "Well, I think they're missing something. The scientific world-view is so exciting, so breathtakingly enthralling when you think of what we now understand. Here we are sitting on a planet that may possibly be the only planet in the entire universe which has anything like life. We don't have it for long. What a shame to spend your few decades grizzling and grumbling about your lot when you could be revelling in the fact you exist at all." And religion is the barrier to such pleasures? "I think so, yes."
To a Neo-Pagan (or indeed a Zen Buddhist), whose religion is rooted in nature, this is the most bizarre nonsense - although frankly, I'm unsure that Dawkins realises there are religions other than the Abrahamic trio. More to the point, the idea that a scientific worldview is mutually exclusive with religious faith is also bunkum. According to National Geographic, a 1997 survey revealed that 40% of US scientists believe in a God who answers prayers. NG points out that an even larger proportion may believe in some kind of deity, and quotes physicist Brian Greene: "The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand," he said. "If someone wants to place the word God on those collections of words, it's OK with me."
But if religion only amounts to coffee mornings and more upbeat passages from the New Testament, why the pressing need to turn its followers atheist? "I don't exactly want to turn people, I suppose." That's what you say you want to do in your book. "Well, I think they're missing something. The scientific world-view is so exciting, so breathtakingly enthralling when you think of what we now understand. Here we are sitting on a planet that may possibly be the only planet in the entire universe which has anything like life. We don't have it for long. What a shame to spend your few decades grizzling and grumbling about your lot when you could be revelling in the fact you exist at all." And religion is the barrier to such pleasures? "I think so, yes."
To a Neo-Pagan (or indeed a Zen Buddhist), whose religion is rooted in nature, this is the most bizarre nonsense - although frankly, I'm unsure that Dawkins realises there are religions other than the Abrahamic trio. More to the point, the idea that a scientific worldview is mutually exclusive with religious faith is also bunkum. According to National Geographic, a 1997 survey revealed that 40% of US scientists believe in a God who answers prayers. NG points out that an even larger proportion may believe in some kind of deity, and quotes physicist Brian Greene: "The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand," he said. "If someone wants to place the word God on those collections of words, it's OK with me."
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Dawkins makes the point that soft religion, the coffee morning and love thy neighbour stuff, provides cover for extremism and ignorance. Being unable to critise harmless but irrational beliefs because of respect or tolerance is a slippery slope that leads to increasingly more harmful irrationality. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with that, since slippery slope arguments aren't the most solid of logical constructs, but I do tend to agree that even if religion were totally harmless, it would still be wrong and should be criticised on that basis.
Calling the universe God
When Dawkins talks about God, he's explicitly not referring to the Einsteinian non-anthropomorphic, non-sentient, natural and universal God.
What he argues against is irrationality. I guess this includes Neo-Paganism, to the degree in which Neo-Paganism includes magical thinking and irrationality, but Dawkins chiefly writes about the Abrahamic religions because they're the ones that are most dominant and harmful in the world today, and the ones his readers are likely to be most familiar with.
If you could elaborate on what your practise and belief of Neo-Paganism and Zen Buddhism entail, I could split it into stuff that the big D would rail against and what he'd have no problem with.
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(I think Dawkins would find my own beliefs particularly irritating in their slipperiness.)