Is religion inherently dangerous?

[_agnomo]

This seems to be what some popular atheists are saying. I'm referring to Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

I was curious what their arguments were, and how convincing they are.

[_Ray A]

To me that's like asking whether the sea is inherently dangerous. Of course it is. It depends on whether you're a good swimmer who knows all the dangers and how to avoid them.

I wouldn't regard someone like C.S. Lewis "dangerous", for example. I also have many Muslim friends of the non-fanatical disposition, and I don't consider them dangerous either.

[_Danna]

To me that's like asking whether the sea is inherently dangerous. Of course it is. It depends on whether you're a good swimmer who knows all the dangers and how to avoid them.

I wouldn't regard someone like C.S. Lewis "dangerous", for example. I also have many Muslim friends of the non-fanatical disposition, and I don't consider them dangerous either.

I agree. People don't need religion in order to become a terrorist. Just look at the animal-rights fire-bombing nutters.

But does religion produce more than its fair share of nutters?

Maybe it is more dangerous because it is condidered OK to indoctrinate children, and shut down their minds before they get the chance to use them independently.

[_Ray A]

Maybe it is more dangerous because it is condidered OK to indoctrinate children, and shut down their minds before they get the chance to use them independently.

Possibly so, but my caflick upbringing wasn't doctrinaire, and I wouldn't say it was harmful. I can see how it would be very harmful in the case of someone like GoodK.

[_The Nehor]

Yes, religion is inherently dangerous. It's playing with huge stakes. It's where people deal with things beyond their comprehension. It breaks some people.

As a weapon it is VERY dangerous. Humanity has an inherent desire to do good within them and an inherent repugnance to evil as warped as both may be. The best way to get people to do horrible things is with the call of, "God wills it." How do you argue with someone convinced of that? I would also say that the truest adherents of a religion are dangerous but of a different kind. They are usually not violent but they are always disturbing things. Their main focus is God and that can make them very unpredictable and they won't respect convention, society, law, or anything else if it interferes with their worship and obedience to God.

[_Jersey Girl]

But does religion produce more than its fair share of nutters?

No. Early emotional, physical and sexual abuse does.

If you'd like to name some of the religious nutter's you have in mind, we can check out their bio's and I think you'll see almost an across the board presence of early abuse.

[_JohnStuartMill]

Yes, religion is inherently dangerous. Irrational, superstitious thinking always is.

[_dartagnan]

I guess I can take a break from holiday cheer...

Religion is no more "inherently" dangerous than are automobiles. I've proved this on a number of occassons. The new atheists, along wth their naïve followers, like to refer to religion as "irrational," and therefore, "dangerous," but they have not demonstrated either to be true. They just keep repeating the assertion while throwing up fallacious arguments as evidence.

If some atheists don't know X to be true, their own arrogance compels them to preach to the world that the rest of us can't know it to be true either. Hence, it is "irrational" unless X is knowledge gained by one of the accepted methods, fixed in their own materialistic paradigm. And thanks to relatively recent philosophers like Popper, the concept of science has been overhauled to suit an atheistic agenda. He didn't like the fact that evolution and natural selection would be classified outside the realm of "science." He referred to it as something like a "metaphysical research program" because science required observation and NS wasn't falsifiable. You'll hear plenty from our board atheists about falsifiability as a prerequisite for real science, but what they won't tell you is that this is a very selective and restrictive use of the term. They like it because it allows them to dismiss virtually every theistic argument known to man while claiming that they're just being "scientific."

The problem I have with the "four horsemen" is their inability to tackle socio-religious issues in a scholarly fashion. From start to finish they are flippant and dismissive and proud of it. They veer off of their fields of expertise and pretend to be sociologists and it becomes appalling clear to anyone vaguely familiar with the subject that they haven't the faintest clue what they're talking about. What's important to them is their agenda: make the world less religious via misinformation and scare tactics. Something other famous atheists would appreciate. Stalin for example, who said religion must be fought against by the State because it was the antithesis to science.

Sam Harris actually tried to prove Christians in America were more violent by using the political red/blue map of various states. What an absolute joke. He also listed 123 wars that were described as "religious wars" from the Encyclopedia of War, to make the point that religion creates war, and yet failed to mention the fact that these only constituted only 6% of all the wars the book mentioned.

And then there is Dawkins, who says that without religion, there would be nothing to divide humans up into groups. I guess he never heard of this thing called language! His ridiculous meme theory is a true howler that makes you wonder how this guy can hope to be taken seriouslyt. The idiotic arguments by these guys have been discussed on this forum previously. Do a search and you should come up with some fairly decent threads.

[_The Nehor]

Yes, religion is inherently dangerous. Irrational, superstitious thinking always is.

I'm more afraid of rational, methodical thinking with evil intent myself.

[Guest]

I guess I can take a break from holiday cheer...

Religion is no more "inherently" dangerous than are automobiles. I've proved this on a number of occassons. The new atheists, along wth their naïve followers, like to refer to religion as "irrational," and therefore, "dangerous," but they have not demonstrated either to be true. They just keep repeating the assertion while throwing up fallacious arguments as evidence.

Religion is irrational. It requires people to make ascribe veracity to claims that are insufficiently supported by evidence (and the evidence I'm looking for doesn't even have to be scientific, necessarily -- it just has to be good.)

If some atheists don't know X to be true, their own arrogance compels them to preach to the world that the rest of us can't know it to be true either. Hence, it is "irrational" unless X is knowledge gained by one of the accepted methods, fixed in their own materialistic paradigm.

No, atheists are saying that belief in religion isn't rational using the accepted definition of the word. Look, even if people who think that an emotional feeling is sufficient evidence for the truth or falsity of a claim are not wrong, they are still irrational, because 'rational' simply means 'using reason, and doing it well'. The people who claim that reason isn't important can't claim to be rational, in the same way that people who don't believe in God can't claim to be theistic.

And thanks to relatively recent philosophers like Popper, the concept of science has been overhauled to suit an atheistic agenda. He didn't like the fact that evolution and natural selection would be classified outside the realm of "science." He referred to it as something like a "metaphysical research program" because science required observation and NS wasn't falsifiable.

Actually, certain aspects of evolution by natural selection are falsifiable: if paleontologists ever found fossils of rabbits in Cambrian strata, for example, the theory would be disproved. I don't think you're parsing Darwinism finely enough. The theory that all life forms are descended from a common ancestor is falsifiable; the idea that we see this because of evolution by natural selection is not falsifiable, strictly speaking, but it's proven to be so useful as a predictive and explanatory tool that it would be absurd to not at least provisionally think of it as true.

You'll hear plenty from our board atheists about falsifiability as a prerequisite for real science, but what they won't tell you is that this is a very selective and restrictive use of the term. They like it because it allows them to dismiss virtually every theistic argument known to man while claiming that they're just being "scientific

Well, if atheists claim that the only method of determining truth is Popperian science, I can't defend them. There are good ways -- reasonable ways -- to discover truth than science; it's just that purposefully irrational hocus-pocus of the kind that religion tends to proffer is not one of them.

The problem I have with the "four horsemen" is their inability to tackle socio-religious issues in a scholarly fashion. From start to finish they are flippant and dismissive and proud of it. They veer off of their fields of expertise and pretend to be sociologists and it becomes appalling clear to anyone vaguely familiar with the subject that they haven't the faintest clue what they're talking about.

I don't think any of the popular atheists that I have read have been flippant about ignorance of sociology. Can you provide any evidence that they have? No, they tend to be flippant regarding their ignorance of theology -- and who can blame them, when it hasn't been established that the field's subject, a supernatural god, even exists? You should be careful to remember that Richard Dawkins, at the very least, deals with the strongest philosophical arguments for the existence of God, takes them seriously enough to examine them critically. He doesn't just arbitrarily dismiss them, as you seem to think; he shows that they are bad arguments. The onus is on you to engage him on this ground, and not just skip ahead to assuming that God exists and has the characteristics you think He does.

What's important to them is their agenda: make the world less religious via misinformation and scare tactics. Something other famous atheists would appreciate. Stalin for example, who said religion must be fought against by the State because it was the antithesis to science.

Do any of even the most antagonistic modern atheists want the State to repress religion? If they have, I haven't heard of it. You're trying to tar all atheists with the actions of one atheist, who held irrational, dogmatic views of his own. That's neither fair nor sensible.

Sam Harris actually tried to prove Christians in America were more violent by using the political red/blue map of various states. What an absolute joke. He also listed 123 wars that were described as "religious wars" from the Encyclopedia of War, to make the point that religion creates war, and yet failed to mention the fact that these only constituted only 6% of all the wars the book mentioned.

If Harris was indeed trying to prove that Christians are more violent, then yeah, that's an ineffective way of doing so. If I remember correctly, though (and I could definitely be wrong), he was merely trying to rebut the idea that Christian societies are more civil.

If Harris' point in the second argument was that religion creates war, then pointing out wars that were caused by religion is sufficient to prove it.

And then there is Dawkins, who says that without religion, there would be nothing to divide humans up into groups. I guess he never heard of this thing called language! His ridiculous meme theory is a true howler that makes you wonder how this guy can hope to be taken seriouslyt. The idiotic arguments by these guys have been discussed on this forum previously.

Wow, this is just blatantly contrary to reality. There's a section in The God Delusion that says the exact opposite of this, and even brings up language specifically! I can't find the text of the book online (and I'm on a train right now, away from my physical copy of the book), but Dawkins said something very similar to what he wrote in the book long before it was published:

Well if you look at what's going on in Northern Ireland, for example, one gets into trouble if one says that the conflict in Northern Ireland is about religion, people argue, "No, it's not religion, it's all about politics, it's all about economic deprivation and the unfairness of things.” and of course it is, but if you ask how do they know who's ‘us’ and who's ‘them’, how do they know who's the one who's been oppressing them economically over centuries, how do they identify that WE have been oppressed by THEM over the centuries, it turns out that religion is the only label. If they were different in colour as in South Africa, or if they were different in language as in Belgium, then that would be the badge. But in Northern Ireland they're the same colour, they speak the same language. Religion is the main candidate for a badge to identify us versus them.

So yeah, thanks for demonstrating that you don't know what you're talking about. It makes my task considerably easier.

Do a search and you should come up with some fairly decent threads.

Oh, you mean like the thread where you still haven't responded to my post after a week and a half? Yes, that's a good one.