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Richard Dawkins

Xanatic* said:
Not to get too scotsman about it but why judge islam on people you yourself say don't follow the rules of islam?
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Because isn't that the very point. In living lives imagined by anti-religionists to be "forbidden" by their faith, they don't disavow it, or denounce it, or count themselves as something other. Similarly the "rules" of catholicism include no sex before marriage, but catholics are rarely observant of the fact. Nor are there "rules" of islam per se..that is no single authority, just groups or individuals who put their own spin on these things and are followed or not followed.

My point is simply that I don't recognise the portrayal of the lives and practices of the vast majority of people of religious faith that the Dawkinistas keep trying to paint. If the Gospels say love your neighbour, don't judge, turn the other cheek etc...and some right wing preacher in Shitkicker Kentucky is preaching guns, hellfire and damn your neighbour, I don't take the latter to be related to the former, an obvious consequence of it nor remotely typical of what an everyday "christian" is. And the bloody slaughter, rape and savagery of IS or in the legal system of Saudi Arabia justified in religious terms is utterly alien to the lives, perceptions and upbringing of the vast majority of people labelled or self identified as Muslim.
The great evil the world, the cause of all conflict and violence is not "religion" as understood and practiced by most of the worlds population who do practice it. It is tribalism, and any form of "us and them". (Brights and Dulls anyone?)

An unwanted poem by "gattino":

One more online sermon from the Church of Disbelief
And I might just turn to Jesus, as he gives my ears less grief.
No Muslim tries to turn me, and though "Jehovahs" may
They're always nice when I say "no" and simply go away.
I know few Jews, and a Buddhist's views I'd really have to seek.
No, I'm preached to most by the godless host
- Five hundred times a week.
 
You wouldn't consider the quran or hadith to be authorities? The quran takes a dim view of wine and the hadith goes even further.
 
Yes such as a caliph. The nut in charge of ISIS is not looked upon as the source of guidance and rules for what is islamic by the worlds 1.2 billion muslims, unless you know better?

Or do you mean historical caliphs, such as the Turkish Sultan? Was he the "pope" of islam? A rhetorical question as hte answer is no.

My point was fairly clear, I think. Saying person x can't be used as an example of a typical muslim since he breaks the rules of what being a muslim is, is a flawed statement...there is no muslim equivalent to the Hierarchy of the catholic church deciding what is orthodox, unorthodox or forbidden for all muslims. It's a question of who you're asking.
 
gattino said:
An unwanted poem by "gattino":

One more online sermon from the Church of Disbelief
And I might just turn to Jesus, as he gives my ears less grief.
No Muslim tries to turn me, and though "Jehovahs" may
They're always nice when I say "no" and simply go away.
I know few Jews, and a Buddhist's views I'd really have to seek.
No, I'm preached to most by the godless host
- Five hundred times a week.
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Don't worry, Gattino, it won't be long before you get preached at by imams...
 
gattino said:
My point was fairly clear, I think. Saying person x can't be used as an example of a typical muslim since he breaks the rules of what being a muslim is, is a flawed statement...there is no muslim equivalent to the Hierarchy of the catholic church deciding what is orthodox, unorthodox or forbidden for all muslims. It's a question of who you're asking.
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That is true, yes. And that creates a big problem, because it is like herding cats.
 
I'm pretty sure that was the point. Though I don't quite see how the lack of a single, global authority means that islam doesn't have rules.
 
It does seem to have rules, but when anybody wants to change them or make new ones, that's when the people can't be controlled.
 
ramonmercado said:
I don't think Dawkins comments on cosmology.
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NO I deffo read it in a Dawkins book. And no he doesn't comment on cosmology or quantum physics, because he admits he's 'foggy' on the subject. Yet he attempts to tell us what is real and not.
 
fudgetusk said:
NO I deffo read it in a Dawkins book. And no he doesn't comment on cosmology or quantum physics, because he admits he's 'foggy' on the subject. Yet he attempts to tell us what is real and not.
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Well, I prefer not to make leaps of faith.

Which Dawkins book was it in?
 
My Evolution Assembly. And the Young Creationists.

“Charles Darwin had a big idea; arguably, the most powerful idea ever.” Richard Dawkins

That’s the quote I used to start my assemblies this week. To me, it’s the most important and extraordinary story children should know and understand. The story of evolution, of how we came into existence as Homo sapiens roaming the Earth on a small ball of rock orbiting a star. The purpose of the assembly is to give prominence to the idea of evolution by (non-random natural selection) and to present the range of areas of science that support our understanding of it. I linked it to something current by referencing the amazing gathering of planets visible in the early morning sky. Every day this week I’ve seen Venus and Jupiter from the top of my road. Mars and Saturn are in between, albeit quite faint. I told my students that, looking at Venus, gives an idea of how Earth looks from Venus- just a small object in space, reflecting light from the Sun.

I think we might do too many preachy moral message orientated assemblies; sometimes it’s good just to tell students something really very interesting and complicated, without patronising them. ...

My name is Tom Sherrington. I am a Headteacher and a teacher. I am interested in exploring contemporary ideas in teaching and learning and school leadership and regularly contribute to conferences and CPD sessions locally and nationally.

http://headguruteacher.com/about/
 
ramonmercado said:
“Charles Darwin had a big idea; arguably, the most powerful idea ever.” Richard Dawkins
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Personally, I think we idolise Darwin too much. It makes it easy for creationists to view evolution as the invention of a single figure who beguiled scientists with his view of a godless Universe, when, in fact, evolutionary thought was well along by the time of On The Origin of Species. Some portray scientists as fitting evidence into Darwin's theory, when in fact many had come to the conclusion of the transmutation of species from examining the evidence in spite of the lack of a complete, accepted theory of the mechanisms of evolution.
 
Wallace had the same idea, and gets nearly no recognition.

And I've always thought that quote is more about showing Dawkins's bias. He's a biologist, so of course he thinks the most important idea is from biology. Ask a physicist, and they might say Relativity is more important.
 
Anome said:
And I've always thought that quote is more about showing Dawkins's bias. He's a biologist, so of course he thinks the most important idea is from biology. Ask a physicist, and they might say Relativity is more important.
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I'm not sure about that, and I speak as someone trained in physics.

As living organisms, people are very much a product of evolution, so the idea tells us a lot about the living world and ourselves. Some of us may not have many descendants, but we all have uncounted ancestors, stretching back to the year dot!

Einstein's relativity only first popped up in 1905, so for by far the largest length of human history relativity has been totally unknown and thus unimportant. As we move into the 21st century relativity does become more important in research and technical activity, but even that only involves a minority of people. The closest the man in the street gets to relativity is (perhaps) knowing how his satnav works!
 
Anome said:
Wallace had the same idea, and gets nearly no recognition.
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So did Patrick Matthew, as early as 1831, although he didn't publish it as a full theory, but merely intuitively assumed it and chucked it in his footnotes to On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. The debate over whether Darwin stole natural selection either from Wallace or Matthew is ongoing. But I did find On the Origin of Species pretty compelling.
 
PeteByrdie said:
So did Patrick Matthew, as early as 1831, although he didn't publish it as a full theory, but merely intuitively assumed it and chucked it in his footnotes to On Naval Timber and Arboriculture. The debate over whether Darwin stole natural selection either from Wallace or Matthew is ongoing. But I did find Ohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Darwin#Poem_on_evolutionn the Origin of Species pretty compelling.
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Darwin hardly stole Natural Selection from Wallace since
"he established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors,[5] and in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

It's well known that Darwin delayed publishing his "Origin" for many years because he feared the reaction of what we today might call the God Squad.

And Darwin's grandfather Erasmus also speculated about evolution:
"Darwin's final long poem, The Temple of Nature was published posthumously in 1803. The poem was originally titled The Origin of Society. It is considered his best poetic work. It centres on his own conception of evolution. The poem traces the progression of life from micro-organisms to civilised society. The poem contains a passage that describes the struggle for existence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Darwin#Poem_on_evolution

So you could say Charles was just keeping the idea in the family!
 
Steady on! I'm not accusing him of owt. :)

rynner2 said:
And Darwin's grandfather Erasmus also speculated about evolution:
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True, and as I mentioned in a post yesterday, evolution was hotly debated long before Charles Darwin. Evolution, as in the transmutation of species, preceded the theory of natural selection by some time.

rynner2 said:
Darwin hardly stole Natural Selection from Wallace since
"he established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors,[5] and in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

It's well known that Darwin delayed publishing his "Origin" for many years because he feared the reaction of what we today might call the God Squad.
Click to expand...

The debate in some circles over Darwin's relationship with Wallace - whether Darwin essentially pieced the theory together from correspondence with Wallace and published while Wallace was away doing fieldwork in Borneo (I think it was) - isn't particularly convincing.

That it's well known that Darwin delayed publication due to concerns about public reaction, however, is fast approaching the critical mass of doubt required for it to be considered a modern myth. After all,
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation had been a best seller before On the Origin of Species, and continued to outsell Origin after its publication. There was plenty of public awareness of evolution before Darwin.
 
There's a fairly large section on cosmology in The God Delusion. Damned if I can track down anything about a particle travelling back through time and starting the big bang. There's plenty about the multiverse and the anthropic principle.
 
In retrospect: The selfish gene
doi:10.1038/529462a
Matt Ridley reassesses Richard Dawkins's pivotal reframing of evolution, 40 years on.

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins Oxford University Press: 1976.

Books about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivating a wide readership, and those that try to persuade fellow scientists to support a new theory, usually with equations. Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is another. From the moment of its publication 40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer.

The gene-centred view of evolution that Dawkins championed and crystallized is now central both to evolutionary theorizing and to lay commentaries on natural history such as wildlife documentaries. A bird or a bee risks its life and health to bring its offspring into the world not to help itself, and certainly not to help its species — the prevailing, lazy thinking of the 1960s, even among luminaries of evolution such as Julian Huxley and Konrad Lorenz — but (unconsciously) so that its genes go on. Genes that cause birds and bees to breed survive at the expense of other genes. No other explanation makes sense, although some insist that there are other ways to tell the story (see K. Laland et al. Nature 514, 161–164; 2014).

What stood out was Dawkins's radical insistence that the digital information in a gene is effectively immortal and must be the primary unit of selection. No other unit shows such persistence — not chromosomes, not individuals, not groups and not species. These are ephemeral vehicles for genes, just as rowing boats are vehicles for the talents of rowers (his analogy). ...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/529462a.html
 
No doubt someone will say his stroke is a punishment on this nearly 75 year old man from their loving god.
 
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