The Danger of Faith

[websearch]

• Tweet

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/1595744.stm

Following 11 September, Professor Richard Dawkins has this week re-stressed his belief in the danger of faith. As Caroline Frost of the BBC's News Profiles Unit explains, this comes after the best-selling author's long-running diatribe against all things religious.
When he applauded the cloning of Dolly the Sheep, moral pundits called him "the most dangerous man in Britain".

For his view that religious education is tantamount to child abuse, he has been labelled in some quarters as "evil incarnate".

 
But, just as the events of 11 September brought American citizens into direct contact with forces far more perilous than the intellectual opinions of an Oxford don, so these incidents served to crystallise Richard Dawkins's already strong opinions on the nature of religion.

[...]

To Dawkins, the leaps of faith found in the pages of the Bible, crystal balls and tarot cards only serve to cloud and interfere with the study of the real world. In the words of this detached scientist, "just because something is comforting doesn't mean it's true".

[lucy]

Well, what does Mr. Dawkins propose to do to those who are Anglican, then? The Anglican tradition is so much a part of British identity, really....should that simply cease to have any meaning, and history be rewritten in a way to erase it all? Every little crumb of Matthew Arnold, TS Eliot, Yeats and well, all the poets...all the beautiful writings of the Catholic and Anglican tradition "poof" and invalidated....they mean less than Dolly, the cloned sheep, I suppose.

[lucy]

What is truly dangerous is not believing in anything that is not within a realm beyond oneself and this world, regardless of how many signs and signposts in history that show us there is much we do not know yet, and cannot explain fully...

To simply dismiss belief in something other than what we are able to empiricallly "prove" in a laboratory "test-tube" is so limiting, imo.


It is also a pretty condescending attitude, as well, to tell you the truth.

[lucy]

There is also another danger. That one disassociates oneself from a faith that might not be perfect, but that has been one to fight for the belief that each person matters really, because ultimately GOD loves each soul, not as a collective entity, not as a nation, not even as a group gathered together at a local catfish joint...

No other religion recognizes the angst of the individual as Christianity and actuallly traditional Judaism, does. It isn't a belief formed for masses of people weeping and wailing and doing mass guilt trips on non-believers, but rather a come as you are sort of religion, which has accepted pretty much anyone regardless of what sort of background they have or what their hair looks like, etc/

And certainly, for the most part. we don't kill our babies just because they tend to disagree.

[lucy]

What is dangerous is when religion becomes the arm of a poltical force aimed at subduing a group for political gains....We saw that when the Europeans took the "new world" and we are seeing that now, in some respects, when CHRISTIANITY decides that it has the power to overcome other nations just because it deems itself more worthy of earthly power..this is not really what Christianity teaches actually...

Religion can be so abused.

[Michael]

What is dangerous is ignorance.

Professing knowledge about subjects that a person is clearly not educated on is beyond stupid and they CLEARLY do not belong in authority of those who DO have knowledge. 

Such a busybody.