cool book

John Larkin usually loves propaganda, but his preferred propaganda comes with lashings of flattery, telling him how clever he is to believe the rubbish he is being spoon- fed.

Not exactly.

Save your money. Don't bother.

No intelligent designer?

It might not be the be best exposition around.

I can, and do read faster than that. Most of what I read sticks, which doesn't seem to be the case with John Larkin.

And get back the reliably flattering nonsense

So what *do* you think created the universe?

People say that about DL Sayers

Haven't a clue. The question may be unanswerable.

Lord Peter? Great writing.

I think I agree with JL - Dawkins can be a bit boring. I think I've read all his books, but I read SJ Gould books and essays in between, as a sort of counterpoint - and SJ Gould is not a boring writer.

BUT the point about being boring is immaterial. It does NOT define what are good ideas and bad ideas per se.

While Gould is not boring, some of his ideas are a bit iffy. While less of Dawkin's ideas are iffy - even if he is a bit more boring.

Jim

Precisely. It ought not to be necessary to state that :(

I really like the exposition in The Blind Watchmaker, but Dawkins' other books can be somewhat dry - especially the excellent Ancestor's Tale. Those two together very neatly sum up (for the layman) the mechanisms of evolution and what we do (and don't) know about the specifics of the evolutionary path that lead to us.

I'll also agree with Bill in that Dawkins can be very strident w.r.t. atheism.

Dawkins is an atheist first. His reasoning is subservient to that. No different from a door knocker bible banger, except that the dk's are nicer.

I don't think atheism makes people nasty. I think nastiness makes people atheists.

A Creator who made a universe with coffee and peach pie gets my vote for re-election.

The dk's cause brain damage.

My personal experience is that Christianity makes people nasty. That's probably a consequence of Christ's requirement stated in Luke 14:26.

I don't have enough experience of other religions, but since "mensch is mensch" I expect they are no better.

More realistically, atheism/religion and nice/nasty are orthogonal axes, except that loudly proclaimed religiosity is more associated with being nasty in private.

Do mean Yoruba, or Obassi Osaw and Obassi Nsi, or Izanagi-no-Mikoto and Izanami-no-Mikoto, or Ometecuhtli/Omecihuatl, or perhaps yet another creator?

/One/ personal example comes from when I had just learned to read, with an infamous sequel 30 years later.

A family opposite us were the mother, the father (a squaddie often away with BAoR), a son my age also called Tom, and his younger sister, a toddler. The father was a decent caring family man; I remember him making Meccano toys for/with Tom.

While the father was deployed overseas, a Miss Lily White(!) got her claws into the mother, and converted her. The father would not convert when he returned home, which did not bother Miss White since she had nailed the wife's soul to the church door - and presumably been praised for it.

That destroyed the family, but Praise the Lord for a convert.

Forward 30 years and there was a widely reported case where a mother went abroad on holiday leaving her 13yo daughter at home. Since this was shortly after the film "Home Alone" appeared, you can guess what the press called the mother. The daughter was, rightly, taken into care.

That mother was the infant daughter, now grown up.

So, in order to claim a convert, three generations of family life were ruined.

Bastards.

The remedy for that kind of thing is *education* for everyone. When you've been exposed to enough bullshit for long enough, you develop callus on your mind to be forever immunized against religious zealots.

Jeroen Belleman

I think it is deeper than that; education helps but isn't a panacea.

I was self-inoculated against organised religion.

When I was, I guess, about 8yo, the kids at school found out about the disciples. Being that age, teasing was a common pass time, so I found myself being teased for being named after "doubting Thomas", a poor disciple.

I didn't know what they were on about, so I asked them. On being told about the stigmata and Thomas wanting physical proof, I was puzzled and told them I thought that was very sensible. They didn't have any retort :)

I always thought Thomas was to be admired. Knowledge is so much better than belief. It's doubt, not faith, that eventually brings enlightenment.

Jeroen Belleman

My copy just arrived. Looking forward to dipping into it. Vaguely sane philosophers have been fairly scarce for awhile now. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's /always/ been my attitude - instinctively.

But the propaganda is that faith is more praiseworthy. Especially so if you can believe six impossible things before breakfast, as per Lewis Carroll and Alice.

Christ did too. He met Thomas where he needed to be met, and invited Thomas to put his hands into His wounds. Thomas fell on his knees, and proclaimed, "My Lord and my God!"

Thomas subsequently evangelized large tracts of India, and his spiritual children are still there.

Thomas certainly wasn't credulous. As his subsequent history shows, he was one of those folks who are willing to alter their whole way of life on the basis of conviction, and you don't want to do that without due consideration.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(Who appreciates St. Thomas because his own history in a very very small way recapitulate the great saint's.)

Funny ones even scarcer.

I'm reading The Devil's Delusion now; great fun. He's not religious, but makes the case that unprovable belief is fundamental, no matter what you are. The origin of the universe may never be known or knowable, but here we are.

When I find a new good author, I tend to read all I can; I read too fast. He wrote a couple of novels too, which should be interesting.

Let me know what you think of this guy.

He's much more committed to Darwinism than he is to atheism

Twaddle. John Larkin doesn't have a clue about what might constitute reasoning.

No difference that John Larkin can detect. What John Larkin knows about Dawkin's niceness is entirely inferred from what he understand of Dawkins books, which doesn't seem to be much.

It's a question of you react to the absence of evidence. Agnostics are more relaxed about the absence of any evidence for the existence of anything that might be a god. Atheists get more worried about the excesses of people who claim there is one. Nastiness doesn't come into it - except perhaps in the nastiness of the bible-bashers you may have run into. Some of the ones I've run into have been pretty unpleasant, but I've seen religion as more of an excuse than a cause.

If he or she existed. Even if they did, that wasn't the whole of their agenda. It's rather like voting for Trump because you liked his tax cuts, while ignoring his disastrous mismanagement of the Covid-19 epidemic in the US.

It's not a callus. Critical thinking is an active skill.

It doesn't look as if David Berlinski is going to pass muster as one of them.

Not that anybody sane is going to spend much time on philosophy. It's a little too disconnected from reality to justify much expenditure of effort. Rooting out bad examples of disordered thinking is worth occasional effort, but it's not something you'd want to make career of.

John Larkin's criteria for ranking an author as "good" seems to include quite a heavy weighing on their flattering their readers.

It may be revealing.