Comments by ukslim

Comment #14121 by ukslim on December 21, 2006 at 8:13 am

Gank: I'm sure I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. Neither, it's likely, do you.

Comment #13784 by ukslim on December 19, 2006 at 12:28 pm

Paul, I think you're onto something with your moustache theory.

Comment #13752 by ukslim on December 19, 2006 at 9:27 am

penbat: I was responding to David A Robertson, when he said "It's amusing to watch how you fundamentalist atheists react whenever your faith is attacked."

I repeat: atheism is not a faith. It is the absence of faith.

4. The Trouble with Atheism

Comment #13747 by ukslim on December 19, 2006 at 9:16 am

David,

I've resisted hitting the "troll" button.

I can't speak for the other atheists here, but my atheism is not a faith -- it is the absence of a faith. To give you some credit, I think you probably knew that already.

The reason the same comments about strawmen, ad hominem attacks etc. come up time and again is that those kinds of logical fallacies come up time and again. It sounds like you don't know what they are, so I'll summarise (for more detail, Google).

- strawman argument: misrepresent the position you're argument against, the better to mock that position. "The anti-smoking lobby believe that one cigarette will kill you instantly. Look, I've just smoked one. Am I dead? Such fools!"

- ad hominem attack: instead of discussing the matter in hand, attack the messenger. "Rod Liddle believes in an all knowing God -- but Rod Liddle is a serial adulterer!"

As for the Hitler and Communism aspect, I agree the arguments you've quoted aren't constructive. I would, however, argue that Hitler and Stalin's atheism was unrelated to the evils they committed -- it wasn't the absence of a faith that killed all those Jews and Poles and Russians, it was the presence of a faith in a set of values just as poisonous as religion.

Let's not condemn Communism too quickly though. Pure Communism has lofty ideals, which I'm sure Jesus would have embraced. Alas mankind's natural ability to cock things up means every attempt at a Communist state has been corrupted into something else.

5. The Trouble with Atheism

Comment #13728 by ukslim on December 19, 2006 at 8:09 am

J - yes, the sign-waving "nutter" did fail to justify himself when given the opportunity (or, if he did, his best answer didn't make the final cut).

After some thought, I decided one way he might have answered -- obviously I don't know his real opinions.

Marx described religion as "the opium of the masses". I'm not enough of a Marxist scholar to know exactly what he intended that to mean, but conventional interpretation is that religion makes its millions comfortably numb.

I'm not sure whether Marx also meant that while numbing and cossetting, religion also had seriously damaging effects (as if numbness isn't enough) -- but one could certainly persuade oneself that this was the case.

If you devoted your life to helping people kick heroin, nobody would question your motivation or call you a nutter. If you went out on the street to try and save complete strangers from heroin addiction, you might even by lauded as a hero.

I think this man believes he is doing just that -- trying to free people from the shackles of a belief system which is holding them back.

Personally, I don't feel that Christianity is harmful enough to warrant this kind of intervention -- but if this man feels that it is, then his actions are completely rational and understandable (even if his methods are confrontational and probably ineffective).

6. The Trouble with Atheism

Comment #13707 by ukslim on December 19, 2006 at 6:34 am

While the whole thing was riddled with logical holes, I thought the most telling thing was his treatment of memetics.

Step 1: Have Richard Dawkins begin to explain memes
Step 2: Liddle completes the explanation, but misrepresent it. The meme of religion is "passed from generation to generation because it has the useful feature of providing comfort".
Step 3: Ask a real virologist if virii are exactly like memes. They are not!
Step 4: Point scored: memetics and by implication genetics is flawed.

I'd love to know -- but doubt whether I ever will -- whether Liddle really doesn't understand the core concept of memes, or whether he deliberately misdescribed them in order to make the naive viewer think it's suspect.