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Merrick wrote: handofdave wrote: Well, he's used atheism as a way to become a celebrity and cash in on it. Which makes him little better than the holy rollers who exploit faith for a quick buck.
Are you really saying that the only reason he's done his work is to be famous and make money? That he doesn't believe any of what he says, he just saw a gap in the marketplace and moved in?
The only more charitable reading I can take from your comment is that anyone who makes a living from what they do is a whore like phoney evangelists. Would you level the same criticism at, say, Bill Hicks, Kurt Vonnegut, Nelson Mandela?
I'm sure he believes there is no God, but he's crossed over a line as a scientist to becoming a sort of celebrity agitator. I think it's damaging to science.
I don't like preachy dogmatic types who use emotional exploitation in the service of self gain, is all.
I've talked at length about my distaste for the whole deism/anti-deism pissing match before. It's created camps of thought that elevate loyalty to one's side over free intellectual query.
Some people think that atheism as a movement is required to counter the long history of religious domination... maybe so. But if you are going to paint it as 'science', then you are distorting what pure science is supposed to be about.
Nelson Mandela didn't fight apartheid to become a wealthy celeb.. he did it because it was the right thing to do. That was a moral certainty in action, not a way to get rich.
You might say, well, Dawkins has the same motivation. But in acting under the banner of science, he's betraying a sacred trust, if you will, in utterly rejecting the possibility of God-something that billions of people believe in, and many of them who can testify to experiences that are not quantifiable by any tools that science possesses. Good science is aware of it's own limitations- Old scientific certainties have been overturned, and so no responsible scientist should be jumping to conclusions about things that cannot be measured by scientific means.
This is a subject that I've taken a lot of heat for, as there's a strong trend towards support for atheism in our little online community. And I've also been miscast as an advocate FOR deism, which is untrue. It may just be that this whole business is too emotionally volatile to discuss without it getting heated.
I object to some of the characterizations of believers in general that I've heard. As I've said, dogmatic evangelists piss me off as much as anyone, but they are the minority. Nobody is 'stupid' for being a deist*... Vonnegut was an Xtian, for example. So was Darwin.
I hope that serves to illustrate my stance better.
*Although there certainly are many stupid deists. And stupid atheists, for that matter.
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