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[Phys-L] Re: A Letter to Juliet from Richard Dawkins - part 2



As I said they don't control my emotions, nor do I. I just control
how I act. Those who can't control how they act do things like
scream, honk horns, and other forms of road rage.

cheers


Joseph J. Bellina, Jr. Ph.D.
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556

On Dec 11, 2005, at 11:30 PM, Jack Uretsky wrote:

It's a free country, Joe, so you may believe as you wish. But
remind me
never to ride with you when you are driving, as long as other
drivers are
controlling your emotions - and, hence, your manual skills and
reaction
times.
Regards,
Jack


On Sun, 11 Dec 2005, jbellina wrote:

Au contraire Jack. I think have little choice about how we feel it
is sort of reptilean, only how we act on the feelings, that is the
human piece.

cheers

joe
Joseph J. Bellina, Jr. Ph.D.
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, IN 46556

On Dec 11, 2005, at 3:42 PM, Jack Uretsky wrote:

Dear R. McDermott:
Feeling insulted is a choice. Need I say more.
Regards,
Jack


On Sun, 11 Dec 2005, R. McDermott wrote:

How nice; a long, apparently reasonable message from Richard
Dawkins that
goes out of its way to insult religion of all kinds. Especially
appropriate
here in a physics forum during the holiest time of the Judeo-
Christian year!
No doubt this appealed to you because you see religious people as
enemies of
science? A Wonderful self-fulfilling prophecy, since that
attitude will
ensure the outcome. Richard makes his personal opinions clear,
and makes a
few errors as well:

"Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true".

Really? What is "true". I always thought we determined what was
untrue.

"First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a
discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited
because
they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had
been
brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or
Sikhs. The man
with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they
believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by
"tradition." Their
beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just
trotted
out the beliefs of their parents and
grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either."

I suspect that one could argue about the nature of "evidence" here
and
whether the believer had to personally experience the "evidence".
Certainly
Richard is not the arbiter of what is "evidence".

"Of course, since they all believed different things, they
couldn't all be
right."

Not in every detail, of course, and some beliefs are clearly
contradictory,
but that does not preclude the possibility that one or more are
essentially
correct.

"Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps
somebody just
makes them up originally, like
the stories about Thor and Zeus."

By all means, let's imply that all religious beliefs are "made up".

"Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of
England, but
this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There
are other
branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and
the Methodist churches. They all believe different things."

Not fundamentally they don't.

" The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more
different
still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims.
People who
believe even slightly different things from each other go to war
over their
disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty
good
reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But
actually, their
different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions."

And Richard, the world famous religious expert knows this - how?
Oh, it
must be "faith"..

"Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence
ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I
haven't, with
my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of
186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me
the speed of
light. This looks like "authority."

Why yes, Richard, it does indeed. But Richard has an answer to
that
criticism:

"But actually, it is much better than authority, because the
people who
wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look
carefully
at the evidence whenever they want."

And as we have ALL seen, evidence is ALWAYS unambiguous, unslanted
and
scrupulously interpreted. No one has ever fudged the data or
written
something that was untrue or exaggerated. And the "writers of
books" ALWAYS
review the evidence (and are knowledgeable enough to understand
it), and
CERTAINLY have no personal bias - Just like Richard.

On revelation:

"People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep
inside,
otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like "My wife
loves me." But
this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that
somebody loves
you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you,
you see
and hear lots of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up.
It isn't a
purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call
revelation. There
are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the
eye, tender
notes in the
voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence."

I'm certainly uncomfortable with "revealed knowledge", but the
above seems
to apply equally well to religion as there are lots of little
pieces of
"evidence" to support this or that belief. And of course I do not
have to
appeal to "authority" since it's written down in a book, and we've
seen how
Richard reveres books.

"So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is
completely
untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first
place - it
can go on forever. Could this be what has happened with religions?
Belief
that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary
never died,
belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are
answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these
beliefs is
backed up by any good evidence."

And, being the sole arbiter of what is good evidence, Richard at a
stroke
denounces all religion as "completely untrue".

Whatever Richard's private motives, this diatribe is insulting to
anyone
with religious beliefs. I come on here to discuss physics, not to
have my
beliefs insulted. That you felt it worthy of posting here, Brian,
makes me
wonder if this forum shouldn't be the "US against THEM" forum. I
don't know
your personal beliefs, nor are they any of my business, but I
certainly
would not post something that I KNOW would be insulting to
others. Some
time back I posted about my concern that the militant, anti-
religious
attitude that some science people demonstrate is responsible for
pushing
reasonable religious people into supporting such things as ID or
eliminating
the teaching of evolution. It is still my opinion that ID would
be nothing
more than a footnote in history (if it even surfaced) if some
science people
hadn't gone out of their way to alienate religious people. This
posting
goes a long way toward making my point, and I'm sorry you felt it
necessary
to post it here. It would have been better to point to where it
could be
found so that the anti-religious people could go there and feel
better
reading Richard sticking it to those religious fools. If people
who feel
strongly about religion are going to be made to feel unwelcome
here, then
that says something about the motivations of this group.


--
"Trust me. I have a lot of experience at this."
General Custer's unremembered message to his men,
just before leading them into the Little Big Horn
Valley


--
"Trust me. I have a lot of experience at this."
General Custer's unremembered message to his men,
just before leading them into the Little Big Horn
Valley
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