The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #104170   Message #2130650
Posted By: Nickhere
21-Aug-07 - 05:47 PM
Thread Name: BS: Mutual respect
Subject: RE: BS: Mutual respect
I read an interview with Dawkins in Focus magazine. Despite his claim to have had a Sunday-school education (or perhaps because of it! ;-) ) he does not seem to have a fundamental grasp of what religion might mean to people. he seems to have picked it up as the kind of fairytale we tell kids to make them behave : "be good now, or the bogey man will get you"

Maybe that was his experience of religion, and unsurprisingly he wasn't impressed. But then if I had done one experiment that I didn't really understand a in science lab with a bad teacher, I might conclude that science was a lot of stuffy eggheads in white coats scribbling incomprehensible numbers on the board to amuse themselves and their cronies while the rest of the world lived 'real' lives. I might wonder "this science isn't all it's cracked up to be at all, I think I'll ignore it and leave it for those who want to believe in it" without ever wondering where all the technology around me comes from "well, why SHOULDN'T it be there?"

Dawkins basically said that he thought a morality based on people doing the 'right' thing out of fear of an imaginary policeman was a pretty poor sort of morality.

This showed to me he had no real understanding of what a deeply spiritual experience and developing relationship with the Divine can be. Sincere Christians (as far as I know) don't do 'the right thing' simply because they are afraid God will find out (in fact there's no question about that, as He already knows) rather they have developed a relationship with Him where they try and avoid those things that psuh Him away, just as you would try not to fart in front of your girlfriend (sorry about the example, but it's the clearest way I can think of explaining it as this hour!)

Dawkins went on to say "i'd like to think that I, and others like me, are moral for a BETTER [my emphasis] reason"

But typically he failed to explain what this better reason might be. So we are left with the impression that whatever Dawkins had in mind had to be better than the motives he acsribed to the religious - and indeed it probably is, only that Dawkins ascribed the wrong motives. I think it's called "a fallacy"?