The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #150190   Message #3498923
Posted By: Steve Shaw
04-Apr-13 - 08:37 PM
Thread Name: BS: Atheists
Subject: RE: BS: Atheists
So, Richard Dawkins, who once had something to say that made sense to me, has become doctrinaire and angry in his presentations.

Really? So how has he changed, in your opinion? I haven't really noticed anything different. As for doctrinaire, Richard Dawkins, along with other genuine atheists, never speaks of his convictions in terms of certainties. Your word seems misplaced to me. The whole point of atheism, as he would no doubt agree, is that we have no evidence for the existence of God, that everything in the realms of evidence and sane intuition suggests that he does not exist, yet we cannot be certain. If you're telling me that he's so doctrinaire that he's shuffled along from 6.9 to 7.0 on his certainty scale, then I'm parting company with him. I think that the real situation is that it's his opponents who have changed and that he has remained steadfastly the same. Opposition from church leaders and sundry scared and animated believers (there's a shining example of one of those on these threads) has increased significantly as his message has become disseminated, and their ever more shrill voices, set against which he finds himself having to defend against more forcefully in consequence, may be giving the illusion that it's him who's changed. I'm afraid that falling into the trap of alleging that we atheists are getting more and more angry is a sign of religion getting very worried. Most of us are ice-cool. After all, we have, literally, nothing to get worked up about.