Today we heard from Kofi Annan’s Chief of Staff (RealAudio) discussing the ‘search for a UN definition of terrorism’.
March 17th, 2004.
BBC Today programme, 8.35. “In the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, we discuss the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist.””We” being Leila Khaled, Palestinian hijacker and hostage-taker, and Danny Morrison, Sinn Fein/IRA publicity head (and the man who has the last word on what happens to republican ‘informers’).RealAudio link here.
This seems like a dumb subject.
You had a partial success. The BBC made a notable part-change on the T word. It is now OK for the UK. But not for deaths in Egypt, including maybe many Brits.
Please focus on the issue where things are going our way.
Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Hey, JohninLondon, it all matters, although personally I’d draw the line at praising Dr. Who on Biased BBC, as happened recently, however good it may or may not have been – especially since Dr. Who later turned out to include the usual partisan nonsense that we complain about here.
But, whatever, each of us who posts here writes about whatever seems relevant, whenever we can, all at no charge to you. If you don’t like it please at least refrain from patronising us – otherwise we may not bother to spend our valuable time writing here.
The BBC and the Left in general have destroyed Christian belief in Britain making the territory safe for Marxism to flourish.
All on cash extracted from Capitalists under penalty of law. More fool the Capitalists I say.
Exactly what great monuments has atheism raised?
Heh, it would be amusing to see Michael Wood, Michael Palin or Dan Cruickshank stand outside a mosque somewhere in the Middle East and say such things.
Or maybe it wouldn’t.
.
Your choice, Andrew. I have repeatedly thanked you for sustaining the site.
My worry is that this is now the first place new visitors see. Sweating the small stuff may be better within a thread – or as part of a more general attack in this case of the way the BBC demeans Christianity.
No need to worry JohninLondon – we survived people seeing Dr. Who on the top post, I’m sure we’ll survive this post too. I’m grateful for the more positive interest shown by the others who have commented on this topic so soon after it went up. Thank you.
Wonder what Meades would make of the period of history in which Notre Dame was transformed into an atheistic Temple of Reason, by way of sheer vandalism, by a Parisian revolutionary mob.
Didn’t someone just post, a few days ago, a link to a BBC news statement that the Beeb doesn’t believe in “denigrating” religious faiths?
I guess the “no denigration rule” doesn’t apply to Christianity.
I’m shocked.
You will probably be surprised that I’m defending you, Andrew but I also think that it’s not always the big things that count. The BBC’s bias comes very subtly sometimes and the piece you’re referring to is a good example.
By the way, the Beeb Website had a (more than controversial) piece about Tariq Ramadan on their website (I’m not going to call him names because of the libel implications) but, fact is, he is not a messenger of peace:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4714101.stm
The Sun’s article is much more accurate.
Oh, I almost forgot. If you want to know more about “Mr. Ramadan” read http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/004397.php or http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/004019.php
(There’s more in the archives)
Thank you Joerg – your comments are appreciated. I have amended my earlier comment that you referred to, and have therefore amended your reference to it. I hope this is okay. Do feel free to criticise other people’s ideologies as you wish and even proponents of those ideologies.
With regard to libel etc., it is okay to refer to individuals, so long as what is said is ‘fair comment’ or demonstrably true (although libel law is, naturally enough, a large and complicated subject) – but do bear in mind that none of us particularly want to get dragged in to the dock on your behalf, as is potentially the case under UK law (e.g. WHSmith being sued for distributing Private Eye, etc. etc.).
Re. Hal’s comments yesterday, it’s one thing to call George Galloway a traitor (given his position and track record), it’s another to name a couple of BBC journalists as traitors without at least saying why that might be the case.
Andrew,
if UK libel laws are as bad as you state (and I believe you when you say they are) shouldn’t we get someone in the US (outside the UK libel zone) to set up a Anti-UK Libel Laws Blog? I am absolutely serious about that suggestion because where is the free speech when a radical muslim “cleric” can call for attacks on infidels but we can’t defend ourselves because there might be a libel. Isn’t there a case of a US journalist who was libeled in a UK court but who’s now fighting back against (the Saudi guys) libel in a US court? Can’t remember exactly what it was about but it was about Islam.
Another suggestion: For a “Hard-Talk” version of this blog get someone in the US to do a similar one. I think it’s about time the gloves came off (as you may have noticed from my earlier input). We need to make sure good people get their share of “free speech”!
Andrew. Remember the UK is the home of fair comment. Journalists thrust themselves into the public view — no one asks them to — and thus are more liable to robust and sustained criticism than ordinary members of the public. I’m not sure what Hal said but I think it is okay to publish the viewpoint that the opinions of such and such a journalist are, in your honestly held view, treasonous. I would much prefer that sites like this erred on the side of withering sarcasm. Easy for me to say, but if you placed a pay-pal button here, I would be willing to donate — as I’m sure others would — to allow you to run posts or opinions you are unsure of past a libel professional.
i do think it is an important post.it shows the bbc at its most arrogant and patronising self.
it would be best if they kept to jane austen.
Joerg, I don’t see what’s so wrong with the UK’s libel laws other than the ludicrous monetary value which courts place on ‘hurt feelings’ and ‘damage to reputation’ which serves to discourage ordinary people from making controversial statements. Surely you’d agree that if you fling abuse at someone through a public forum you should have the facts to back it up. I’m not sure what the UK’s law on treason actually says but given the dearth of prosecutions recently I’d imagine it’s a hard one to make stick.
Regarding this post, dismissing the country’s main religion out of hand is pretty poor form and hardly a minor point, although I think it’s ambiguous as to whether in this case it’s supposed to refer only to the atheists own view. Furthermore, why should being an atheist mean that one can’t appreciate religiously inspired works of art and architecture? Presumably the Sistine chapel, Last Supper and St Pauls should be avoided because they are dedicated to the propagation of medieval superstitions and fears?
Thank you for your support anon. I/we are aware of the rules re. fair comment, and we certainly are robust in what we say ourselves, and are happy to stand by our own words. The catch is that, it could be argued (with what degree of success remains to be seen) that we are also liable as the ‘publisher’ of third-party comments. Now, Blogger and Haloscan are obviously US services – but that’s not much of a protection – as seen by the case last week where Roman Polanski in France used a British court to sue an American magazine (because it’s also distributed here) and won (See here and here).
We are also aware that fair comment applies to comments and commenters as well, and we are generally quite laissez-faire in our approach to freedom of speech in the comments.
However, we have in the past been threatened by at least one obnoxious journalist (who obviously doesn’t like free-speech – do as I say, not as I do!) – mostly on the basis of what third-party commenters said. Whilst it’s most likely defensible, it takes time and trouble to do so, and life is sometimes to short to bother with a deluge of unpleasant, obnoxious, harrassing emails on behalf of a third-party’s comments!
What Hal originally said was, in my view, borderline between stuff that’s okay and not okay. The reason I’ve banned him is that when asked, in a reasonable manner, to pay heed to this, he came back with a load of cheeky crap, and when I asked him to reconsider that, he came back again with a load of cheeky foul-mouthed crap, at which point, my interest in dealing with him as a mature adult ceased – I have better things to do with my time – e.g. writing posts about the BBC.
Don’t worry though – Biased BBC will remain robust in outlook – both in the main posts and in the comments.
>The BBC and the Left in general have destroyed Christian belief in Britain making the territory safe for Marxism to flourish< Total and utter tosh and a textbook false dichotomy and a non sequitar. It does not follow that just the left is against religion or destroying Christian Belief makes it safe for Marxism. Atheism is simply lack of belief in any and all deities that’s all. There are atheists at all points of the political spectrum. I for instance am by no means left wing. I'd vote Republican if I was a Yank (I’m a Brit living in South Africa) and Tory in the UK and agree very much with US foreign policy on Iraq, however I am very much an atheist. Indeed Id argue that the BBC pushes religion too much, with religious programming on TV and thought for the day. The state (and the Beeb is an organ of the state) should to my mind be completely secular, as per the US. Religion should be a private matter. More I for one don’t buy into the underlying premise in the above statement i.e. that Christianity is per se a good thing. Personally any suspension of reason and attachment to dogma is bad and more can be extremely dangerous; to whit the problem currently with the Islamo fascists throughout the World and the faith inspired Islamic 5th column in the UK. Christianity has been through this phase too. Folks should be free to believe in any supernatural entity be it Jehovah or Allah or fairies at the bottom of the garden, or not to believe in this sort of thing; but the state has no business supporting any particular superstition. Britain is largely secular and whatever the nominal beliefs folks have I would posit that non believers are arguably the largest group in the UK. I would also argue that one sees way too little in the main stream media including the Beeb on atheist thought. For instance I have never seen any programme covering atheism, the history of atheism and atheist thinking, the reason atheism is the prominent viewpoint of be far and away most top scientists on the BBC. Yes the beeb is lefty biased but it isn’t anti religious in general or anti Christian in particular.
Slightly OT, don’t know where to put this.
Orla Guerin sure does know a thing or two. Yesterday she was telling News 24 viewers at 3.20 pm that Egypt has a lot of enemies because it’s an ally of the US! Well then, how many other countries fit that description?
And now this — The innocent, but suspected suicide bomber shot dead in an overkill fusilade of bullets was killed because the ISRAELIS advised the British to do it! The Shin Bet, Israel’s security arm frequently just disarms the suicide maniacs because their intelligence networks are so complete that they know when most of the slimeballs are about to act. They would never tell the British to kill someone if there were other methods of stopping an attack. Watch the bbc for some amazing perversions of the truth in coming days!
>Exactly what great monuments has atheism raised?< ROLF....Oh just reason itself and everything that has followed from that. It sure wasn't Christianity or indeed any theistic belief that gave us our understanding of science and how the World and the Cosmos works, nope history shows that the buggers fight reason and science at at every turn. Still fair's fair, the Catholic church did admit Galileo was right, you know about the Earth being round and being in orbit around the sun..rather than as per the biblical description..took em till 1992, but they got there!.... Among the top natural scientists, disbelief is greater than ever; almost total - well according to various polls including to a 1998 poll in nature. One might turn the question on it's head and ask 'What has religion done for mankind?'
It would be pretty strange to remove all religious programming from the BBC on the basis that the state broadcaster should be secular. Songs of Praise isn’t pre-empted by a statement that viewers should be aware that failure to sing along is punishable by eternal damnation – it has a market and is on offer to those who want to indulge. I don’t think the quantity of religious broadcasting is out of proportion to the still significant (if declining) Christian population.
What has religion done for mankind? It helps many many people stay optimistic through problems and tragedies in their lives, without which there’d be a lot more stress and grief around.
Nick says
“One might turn the question on it’s head and ask ‘What has religion done for mankind?’
Just some of the world’s finest art, architecture and music. Organised education, medical treatment, prison reform etc.
Oh, and the world view of some of the world’s finest scientists – Mendel, Faraday, Polkinghorne, Einstein et al. If disbelief is common amongst natural scientists, there are plenty of believers amongst physicists and mathematicians. http://xastanford.org/archives/scientists-and-their-gods/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1034872,00.html
But hey, what do they know?
Seriously though. We (and the Beeb) should recognise and respect each other’s integrities where a world view is concerned.
Thanks Fran, I was about to say. Never heard of the Renaissance Nick Good? Expanding man’s knowledge to please God etc etc?
Nick Good
I am not making a pro Christian arguement but refering to the fact that the BBC has been inimical to Christianity whilst at the same time treating Islam with reverence and kid gloves.
Is this because they are scared of Islam?, because they wish to promote Islam? or will they, given time seek to undermine poke fun at Islam in the way that they at present only do to Christianity. Remember the furore over the BBCs “PopeTown” satirical cartoon series, made on our money and eventually not broadcast.
The entire point of Andrews Post, it seems to me is to ask when all religions are going to be treated equally by a BBC terrified of insulting Muslims, Blacks, Gays, Animal rights activists, Bono, Castro et al.
I totally agree that religion is a “medieval superstition”. However, the BBC would never dare to criticise Islam in the same way. It’s a minor case of bias, but it is bias non-the-less.
As for promoting a secular society, surely that is the only way forward for the UK? We need to abolish state funding for religious schools. All state funded schools should arrange their break-times around Muslim/Jewish/Hindu/Christian prayer times. Then we can have children from all ethnic groups, religious backgrounds and social class together in one school. The more barriers we erect in society, the more problems we’ll create. At the moment, we care creating artificial divisions in society.
This anti-Christian attitude is just part of a politically correct trend which the BBC has been following for a while. Read my thoughts below on the BBC’s choice of programmes, and the BBC’s disrespect towards Christianity:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4294417.stm
A while back, the BBC put up an article on their website about exorcism. I dont have a problem with religious affairs stories, however this story is only a small part of a slow erosion of the credibility of Christianity by the BBC.
The BBC have tarnished the image of Christianity. For a start, thay have generalised the extreme and un-Biblical practices of eccentrics to represent the whole of the “Christian right” in America. In their documentaries, they have shown footage from these churches, and commented that it is “a worrying trend in America”. This is despite the fact that these churches only represent an acute proportion of the church in the USA.
Recently, they had a documentary about African missionaries. In it,they interviewed a few African women, who claimed basically that missionaries were ruining the area in their country, and causing lots of major problems. Then of course, as the BBC usually does, it generalised this criticism to the whole of Africa.
In Britain, they are doing the same. First we had the blasphemous and disgusting “Jerry Springer’s The Opera”, in which the BBC paid no attention to the Christian people. And now the BBC is generalising the incidence of the exorcism of children to being a major problem for Christianity in the UK. They refer to an incident where 2 parents starved their child and then beat them to death because they believed that they were possessed by demons. In fact, they were not, their local doctor said that they were exremely mentally ill. The BBC of course does not mention this. Instead, saying that they were in fact, “Christians”.
Resulting from all this bias from the BBC, is the false recognition that Christians are lunatics.
Please investigate all the incidences where the BBC undermines Christianity. It would be worth publishing a report about this as it is a very important issue. The BBC is extremely offensive to Christians. It puts on programmes promoting prostitution, sado-masochism, and homosexuality, yet it cannot give any proper coverage to Christianity apart from possibly, “Songs of Praise”.
The Renaissance being religiously inspired…Hmmm free thinking and a culture of critical thinking , empirical proof good gives good science, not revealed truth and constrained thought. Arguing that a religious outlook is generally conducive to discovery and pushing back the frontiers of knowledge is total and utter tosh!
Look I have no problem with folks subscribe to superstitions, be they the Tooth fairy, santa, Yahweh, Poseidon, Thor, Shiva or any of the over 2,000 deities recorded; each to their own I say. That is so long as they are tolerant of folks with different superstitions or those with none that’s all dandy. I just don’t see why the state should give preference to any particular one i.e. ‘Songs of praise’, and I don’t see why the atheistic viewpoint doesn’t get a proper airing, but then that’s maybe better than airing Islamic theology which rather fails my tolerance test, but then so does Catholicism but they don’t seem quite as staunch as the Mohammedans who seem to have a mindset rather akin to the medieval Catholics.
As for religious music and art, very true much artistic talent has been expressed as religious themes. Great art and music are now much more secular • people express their artistic talents based on what’s on their mind. Critical thinking, scientific discovery, social improvement….relgion is rather thin on, tolerance too • with perhaps a couple of exceptions Buddhism springs to mind; which of course largely has no deities, it is without theistic belief it is atheistic.
>Oh, and the world view of some of the world’s finest scientists – Mendel, Faraday, Polkinghorne, Einstein et al.< Well you could have added one of the greatest • Newton, but it was kind of tough to break out of the grip of theology in them there days; rather like in Islamic countries today. Hell these folks were scientists despite their religion, not because of it! Some 19th century scientists started to break the vice like grip of theology on free thinking, Darwin springs to mind, his work started the avalanche of top scientists becoming free thinkers. Now well over 90% of American leading scientists are non-believers, and the US is perhaps the most religious country in the developed world. Oh I’ll remove from that list of believers Einstein, he definitely wasn’t a Christian or even a theist, at most he subscribed to Spinoza’s rather nefarious concept of the divine; as self described I would call him as an atheist, here’s just one of many quotes from him by way of example: "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modelled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbour such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms." -- Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955, quoted from James A. Haught, "Breaking the Last Taboo" (1996 Amen to that!
Nick, ever wondered why science arose in Europe? After all, medieval Islam was advanced, had access to the works of Aristotle and much of the rest of Greek thinking and had developed the mathematical tools necessary for scientific thought (the ‘zero’, algebra, derived from an Arabic word, etc). Islamic thinkers like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rush (Averroes) were pioneers at this time. So, what happened?
Well, in Islam there was an argument between the proponents of Greek philosophy and those who rejected Greek thought as contrary to the Qu’ran. This eventually led to the Asharite doctrine that rejects all secondary causation: ie. the match burns because of a direct act of God’s will, rather than because you struck it against the matchbox. Championed by al Ghazali, this view triumphed.
However, in Europe the Church consistently taught that the universe was rational. It had to be, since it was made and sustained by a rational god. After all, why should the universe be explicable? This is summed up in the old saying: faith does not contradict reason. Hence the long labours of people like St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas to show that there was no inherent dichotomy between classical knowledge and biblical knowledge. All of this allowed for the creation of the intellectual framework that not only made science possible, more importantly, it made science conceivable.
Thus, to answer your question as to what religion has ever done, the ironic truth is that Christianity created science.
To be more accurate, Islam preserved and developed the Greek traditions (science without arithmetic, anyone?)while Christians were busy burning libraries.
Shortly after the Muslim worldview became overly theocratic, we started getting access to the Arabic and Greek texts they’d preserved – at which point the Arab tradition of sums and the Christian tradition of proving by logic how many angels could fit on a pinhead intersected to allow Science.
Nick
I happen to believe that Christian thought in Britain has historically had a huge influence on so called western ‘liberal’ values in as much as underlying assumptions are taken for granted, .which is why the BBC and others find it necessary to view other religions / cultures as in reality sharing their views if only they weren’t ‘impoverished , underprivileged etc’ hence the need to avoid calling someone a terrorist, barbaric etc. However that is not the point, the relevance to the thread is that the BBC has consistently rubbished every traditional institution in this country for many years. The ‘inclusive ‘ society where all culture is recognised, as long as it doesn’t stem from the home tradition. (Unless romanticised class / colonial struggle etc) In order to conform with Auntie’s view history always needs to be rewritten as long as it doesn’t offend anyone on the exempt list (‘minorities’, Muslims, the third world, leftist politicos et al). Although it’s de rigueur for these groups to be relentlessly patronised.
Nick Good
Thanks, you’ve made your point. Now can we get to the issue at hand? The obvious question to ask is, would the BBC describe Islam as a set of Dark Age suspicions and fears?
No justification for any fantasy,er religion. There is one that says a Jewish man from the Middle East who has been dead for 2000 years was born of a virgin, rose from the dead, and will return at some future time. Now it is just this kind of rubbish that caused followers of this creed, call it Paulism to be accurate, to unleash two millenia of unbridled violence and mayhem upon the whole world!
Islam too is a fantasy of a different stripe, based on a high level of seminal violence. The sooner we get rid of these ancient shackles, the more chance we’ll have of seeing clearly.
“To be more accurate, Islam preserved and developed the Greek traditions (science without arithmetic, anyone?)while Christians were busy burning libraries.”
Surely those traditions were also being preserved in the Byzantine empire itself, before it was overrun by the Turks?
Innovation and discoveries in Islam were largely confined to the peripheral of the Islamic world: places where Islam butted up against non-islamic cultures, or where a pre-islamic culture of learning still flickered, as in Persia. Very little, if anything came out of the heartlands of Islam, Mecca and Medina. That in itself should tell you something.
Surely atheists by definition don’t believe in anything therefore it’s pretty tough to provide quasi-religious broadcasting specifically for them. Footage of people having a nice long lie in on a Sunday morning perhaps?
I’m sure that political correctness is involved, but part of the reason why minority faiths don’t get the p*ss taking and criticism that Christianity does in the media is that very few people know anything about them. To mock or criticise something it helps to have a fundamental understanding of what it is. The few posts above provided far more interesting debate on Christian/Isamic theology than anything I’ve seen on the BBC this year.
It was the Arabs who burnt the library at Alexandria – while the Christians were zealously copying and recopying those works from the classical world that survive today. Medieval Islam added virtually nothing that wasn’t already in the libraries of Byzantium
pete_london makes the only relevant remark here thus far.
I believe I made a relevant point: the Beeb has a stated policy of “not denigrating” religious faiths. Someone posted the link to that policy on this discussion board a while back.
Why aren’t they following their own policy in this case?
Or is it just one particular faith they meant when they made that statement? (And I’m sure people here are totally mystified as to which particular faith falls under the Beeb’s “no denigration” policy 🙂 )
>Surely atheists by definition don’t believe in anything therefore it’s pretty tough to provide quasi-religious broadcasting specifically for them< That's not quite true, and who would want quasi religious broadcasting. I for one would not want that. Individual atheists have a myriad of views and beliefs about all sorts of stuff. All being an atheist tells you about someone is that they are without god belief (‘a’ from the Greek denotes ‘without’ and theism ‘god belief’- exactly like a-symmetrical without symmetry), that's it. However, that said atheism is a strongly corrolated co-factor in much other human thought, rationism, humanism, objectivism, critical thinking, science and so on. This stuff just aint covered and I posit that it should be. But then so should the bible with its barbarism...ripping pregnant women open and dashing babies on rocks...folks forced to eat their kids by an angry god. Luckily most Christians don’t take the barbarism and tosh in the Bible literally, the Moslems do with the Koran given this literal interpretation terrorism is almost inevitable. This needs to be faced and the BBC just wont do it. It MUST be faced. As has been mentioned in this discussion -again in this short thread we have had a more informative discussion for many on religion than you'd ever get on the Beeb. Sure there is plenty of disagreement here; so what, that's healthy...most participants here would not be forced to do violence because of these disagreements. Yes I agree that there is no way the Beeb would allow a critique of Islam or a little dig like the medieval superstition tag, and yes that is odious. Rather than not digging at Christianity there all should be fair game. Indeed I’d argue strongly for the disestablishment of the Church Of England and the repeal of the blasphemy law, both are archaic concepts (if ones god is omnipresent and omnipowerful it should be perfectly capable of looking after itself). My position is that there should be open debate on all religious and philosophical views and all should be fair game, including atheism and agnosticism (Huxlian or the neuvaux half way house cop out). I would not like to see the special treatment Islamic sensibilities get extended to Christianity, Id like to see Mohamed get the life of Brian treatment....can you imagine....the Pythons would have a field day with the Koran a veritable gold mine to ridicule. No not a chance. The BBC I posit has done a large part of shutting down debate due to PC/ Lefty cultural sensitivity...it is a large part of the problem of where we are at; its shabby news reporting and blatant bias and misplaced cultural sensitivity has done its part in altering the nation's political climate and allowing the massive arrogant intolerance we see in Mohammedans and the cultivation under our very noses of a massive 5th column. Help fight terrorism - take the piss out of Islamic beliefs today /Rant
Well the problem Nick Good is that neither Monty Python nor any other sane entity is going to sign up to take the piss out of Islamic beliefs — for good reason.
So there you have it, the imbalance will always remain: under your scheme of equal-opportunity religious ridicule, Christianity and other religions will always be fair game for mockery because their adherents don’t fight back violently, but Islam will always be off limits because it’s adherents do.
There is treasure trove of snippets and cartoon storylines here that could be used towards a satire on Islam :
http://ahmed-mohammed.mindswap.net
I like this example page :
http://ahmed-mohammed.mindswap.net/ParadisePromotion.php
As some people at the BBC track this site, no doubt they will take up the idea of the Islam verion of Life of Brian ? Could be a big moneyspinner.
Also, it fits in well with the BBC’s normal line of challenging or mocking or insulting Islam, just as it does Christianity.
JiL:
As some people at the BBC track this site, no doubt they will take up the idea of the Islam verion of Life of Brian ? Could be a big moneyspinner.
Shine on, you crazy diamond 🙂
“Popetown” is more their speed.
Yeah, I can’t think of a single example of when another religion (certainly not the Sikhs) have used physical violence at people they felt were mocking their religion.
Sure john b,
A score such as:
Sikhism = 1-2
Islam = 800 gazillion million
sure seems like an equivalent score of violent religion-defenders to me.
Good work, Sherlock!
”A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”
Francis Bacon
Perhaps a bit more reading to be done Nick Good ; )
Yoy,
>Perhaps a bit more reading to be done Nick Good ; < The blindingly clear premise behind your post being that I am not well read and am philosophically shallow! Funny my anecdotal experience suggests very strongly that most atheists who care to articulate their position publically know much more about philosophy and religion and at more depth than most theists. Maybe my anecdotal experience is different to yours. Still I’d be happy for you to recommend something specific to read that sheds new light on the topic and comes up with a better argument than any of the 7 major ones usually trotted out in one guise or another, feel free to suggest something? Meantime following on from your Beacon quote on religion, it’s not religion per se I find ridiculous, it’s theism and the trite and highly dangerous concept of ‘blind faith’ of holding something to be true despite (or maybe because) of lack of evidence as per Christianity and Islam. To that end I think this rather apt …. "Do not believe in anything (simply) because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumoured by many. Do not believe in anything (simply) because it is found written in your religious books. "Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conductive to the good and benefit of one and all then accept it and live up to it." Attributed to Siddhatha Gotama (The Buddha), extracted from a translation of the Kalama Suta Amen to that!
Sorry Anonymous above was me!
”The blindingly clear premise behind your post being that I am not well read and am philosophically shallow!”
Oh calm down or are you really comparing yourself favourably with Francis Bacon?
The irony of you then quoting a religious figure to re-inforce your argument is, you must admit, amusing.
”it’s not religion per se I find ridiculous, it’s theism and the trite and highly dangerous concept of ‘blind faith’…
And Atheism as practiced by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler,Pol Pot, Mao isn’t?
”Maybe my anecdotal experience is different to yours.”
Mine includes such atheists as Hitler Stalin Pol Pot Lenin
oops, note to self
always press the ‘preview’ button