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Current mood:w3lsh
I see my erstwhile
sparring partner Billy Bragg has been lambasting poor old Dawko in the august
pages of that learned philosophical journal Q - the organ of the British music
industry. He says that, "as a scientist
Richard Dawkins refuses to believe in anything he cannot observe and
measure", "and yet to Dawkins people who believe that an intangible
reality really exists alongside spiritual reality are 'stupid'".
Melvin's younger brother
It's all bollocks
you know Billy. Scientists are quite capable of believing there are things that
they do not know, and even that there are things that are unknowable. The only
thing they have trouble believing is in things that contradict the balance of
the evidence.
I've seen footage of
some of Dawko's early gigs and he started off being all sensitive and turning
the other cheek, pleading with people just to look at the facts, but the poor
bugger got nowhere with it. So he's started calling a spade a fucking spade, just
like the God-botherers, and suddenly the liberal-minded are up in arms against
him.
I've just searched
through my pirated e-book copy of "The God Delusion" and nowhere does
he describe people who believe in god as "stupid". He describe one
argument against abortion - the "Beethoven fallacy" - as stupid, but
that's because it self-evidently is. Like using the birth of Hitler as an
argument FOR abortion.
No - the God
Delusion doesn't call god-believers stupid. The main idea that Dawkins was
dimly groping towards is that religion is hard-wired into the human brain. That
we have a predisposition to believe in god/s, just as we have a predisposition
to see optical illusions. Our unconscious filters and processes what we
experience, and feeds the classified results to our consciousness in a
simplified form - a form that we can act on quickly without having to deal with
a lot of irrelevant data. There are certain experiences that are best shunted
into the "god box" and left up to the shamans to deal with.
as CJ Michiels gaily
(or should that be grayly?) points out, squares A and B are exactly the same shade.
It takes a conscious
effort to break out of those hardwired coping mechanisms. It doesn't mean you
are stupid if you haven't realised that they are there. I would however submit,
your honour, even if Dawko won't, that it would be stupid not to believe that
these unconscious religiosity algorithms couldn't possibly exist.
So, the main thing
getting up the capacious Braggian neb is not that Dawkins logic is flawed, nor
that he has become a hard-assed son of an illusion-destroying bitch, but his assumption that Dawko is
calling his favourite prison chaplains stupid, which these guys don't deserve
because they're doing some great pastoral work in rehabilitating the poor
buggers who may have strayed from the path of social righteousness (there but
for the grace of ineffable sensory input go I).
Aye, well, grow up
Billy. You don't have to be religious to be good. Why should anyone have to
take on a load of religious baggage just to get a bit of succour? Sure these
chaplains aren't thrusting their succour down your throat, but don't think the
pressure isn't there.
12:26 PM
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