In no particular order:
- The sad fact is that a large percentage of online atheists are so stupid and uninformed that it is evidence of the miraculous that they can manage to spell a comma correctly. Yet they mistake themselves, and even more surprisingly are passed off as the epitome of intelligence and erudition.
- No, people are not "hard wired to..." The metaphor comparing human minds to computers is one of the stupidest of metaphors ever to gain currency BECAUSE COMPUTERS, THEMSELVES ARE METAPHORS OF HUMAN MINDS. The various processes of computers were invented to mimic what scientists conceived of as the processes of thought. The more aware of those realized they were trafficking in metaphors and the creation of appearances, creating a simulation which could trick our perception into accepting it as thought. But it started as and remains a human activity, thinking, that is imagining itself and making machine and electro-mechanical analogues of its imagined processes for human consumption.
The metaphor of "hard wiring" takes the natural human mind - or even more naively, the brain - and compares it to a thing which is, itself a metaphor for the very thing being used as a model of it. If anyone can come up with a more inept metaphor that has gained similar currency, I'd like to know what it is.
I will say that the "hard wiring" metaphor and its use and distribution among the allegedly educated class shows how barren, desolate and insipid the materialist ideology is.
- I will write it up later but Larry Krauss's pipe dream that religion could disappear in a single generation because 13-year-olds use the computer is more evidence of the total stupidity that materialism seems to seep from. I did observe that for a professional physicist, Krauss is rather shockingly unable to crunch the numbers of atheists as compared to religious believers and that with the rate of increase in the self-reported atheist population in the Pew and other surveys - AFTER A DECADE OF ATHEISM BEING PROMOTED AS A FAD - none of us is likely to live to see it, not even the millenial generation he puts such hope in.
Hey, Larry, you think this is going to be more successful than your attempt to make black holes go away, too?
- For two ex-fundies turned atheist to assert, in effect, that fundamentalism causes brain damage is yet another sign that pop atheists aren't generally too bright. Those were their brains on fundamentalism during their formative years they are calling damaged. Though what it says about why they accepted atheism is worth considering. Lots of online atheists and others in the print era whined about what damage religion did to them. When they start talking about brain damage caused by fundamentalism, that includes lots of atheists. Or, maybe, it takes a religious person who was not brought up on fundamentalism to notice that.
The funniest part about Krauss's statement on religion was that even the majority of the comments at Salon (!) thought he was an idiot.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed that, when confronted with true reasoning, the atheists I meet on-line prove themselves unable to reason their way out of a paper bag. I'm not so arrogant as to believe my reasoning is air-tight and irrefutable (I often put it forward wondering who is going to notice the holes in my arguments); but damn! the atheists I encounter on-line are stupid!
I mean ignorant of philosophy (which is what they are doing when the espouse atheism) and even denigrating towards philosophy. My favorite was the commenter who kept posting a quote from Russell about the failures of philosophy. I pointed out to him/her that Russell was a philosopher, that he failed as a philosopher, that he wrote a history of Western philosophy, and the quote was probably from his logical positivism days, and could have equally have been said by Wittgenstein.
Never heard from him again.
Oh, an thanks for the "hard wiring" comments. Whenever I see that used sincerely, I always stop reading.
ReplyDeleteIt's a sure sign the author hasn't a clue.