The future is a bright?

[j4]

This has just irritated me mightily.


After the first paragraph, I was already gritting my teeth. The first flakes of enamel started fluttering down like dental dandruff onto my keyboard as I reached the third or fourth. By the time I got to "Children are too young to know their religious opinions" (ascribing a religion to a child is "child abuse", whereas writing them off as too immature to have an opinion is somehow not?) I was gnawing the table-edge and muttering "sorrel, sorrel" under my breath.

Despite the damage to my dental regions, I did manage to read as far as the point where Dawkins kindly decides to inform the "gay" community what connotations "gay", "homosexual", and "queer" have. No, I'm not about to be drawn into the deadly dance of self-identification; my objection is nothing to do with obsessive people-pigeonholing, much less poof-specific pedantry. (After all, I suppose it is understandable that he has failed to notice the Queer Rights movement, and thus still regards "queer" as unquestionably an "insult".) But to blithely limit the meaning of one set of words (and, like it or not, identities) while claiming to liberate his own smug subculture from the tyranny of being called a spade... well, I wonder what the current meaning of "double standards" is in Dawkins' ideolect?

Perhaps he is right, and "I am a bright" really does sound "too unfamiliar to be arrogant". Perhaps it really is "puzzling, enigmatic, tantalising", and will revolutionise the world with its daring and memetic (natch) approach to (a lack of) religion. Fortunately, his real message comes out wholly untainted (and unredeemed) by his religious bias, with the resounding familiarity of the shit hitting the bowl: "I am a self-satisfied waste of the planet's vital resources".

Comments

Smuggery

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

Which makes it all the more ironic that Dawkins is blithely making statements about what labels gay people want for themselves, while trying to stop people giving him and his cronies a label that they don't want.

And, moreover, he is implying (in his typically patronising and playschool-speak way) a thoroughly insulting label for people with religions other than his own---and nobody can say Dawkins doesn't have a religion. Suggesting that adherents to theistic faiths should be called "darks", "morons" or "dulls" (whichever antonym he has in mind) makes one guilty of the same sort of intolerance that Dawkins claims to be railing against. And when Dennett compares God to the Easter Bunny you can see he's sort of thinking the same thing. Such comparisons have been considered unsound for years and years, and I'm amazed that an "intellectual" would still be making them. Now if Dawkins rather than Dennett had said it, of course....

I'd probably be happy enough being classified with the "brights", especially if it provided enough lobbying weight to avoid the poison evis taking over the White House all over again. But I don't want to join any club that has as its members the scientism-zealot Dawkins (who hasn't read a scrap of philosophy in his life, isn't employed to comment on philosophy or theology, but keeps publicly sticking his thick-fuck oar in) and the reductionist Dennett (who probably has read a good deal of philosophy, especially concerning consciousness, but I imagine reads the more mystical philosophers, chuckles wisely, and considers them to be a trick played on everyone except wise AI/compsci students). It's like these people have just read Occam's Razor and are just dying to try it out without reading the instructions first.

Is it me, or does "brightist" sound very David Icke?

Re: Smuggery

[ex-monkeyhan688.livejournal.com]

when Dennett compares God to the Easter Bunny

it's really quite surprising, because normally everybody confuses Him with Santa Claus. The way I remember it is that Father Christmas brings presents for all good boys and girls, unless they're poor, and God brings famine and pestilence. And when that gets too confusing, I write stuff on my hand.

Re: Smuggery

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

... And when that gets too confusing, I write stuff on my hand.

"NEveR ANSweR thE PHONe."

Re: Smuggery

[j4.livejournal.com]

Dennett's actually quite interesting when he's writing pop AI / Theory Of Mind stuff. Readable, like. I actually really enjoyed Brainchildren, though I did read it in the bath over a period of several months. There was an article on MPD which made me go "Oh! ... Cool. But, er... moo."

So anyway, I'm so glad that three years in Cambridge hasn't dulled my critical faculties in any way. (But Dennett is SF!)

I now have a large stuffed towelling fish to serve as a bath-pillow, so I can read more rubbish without getting a crick in my neck. This is clearly an improvement.

Re: Smuggery

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

and nobody can say Dawkins doesn't have a religion

Hmm, the only appropriate definition I can find in the dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=religion) is "A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion." - is that what you had in mind? I'd tend to view that definition as an extension/reflection of the primary meaning of religion ("belief ... in a supernatural power") in the same way as people talk about vi versus emacs as a religious war without really meaning that either is a "real" religion.

isn't employed to comment on philosophy or theology

I assume he would argue that the "public understanding of science" requires the refutation of non-scientific arguments and beliefs. Pity he's not much good at being understood the way he wants to be, really :-)

compares God to the Easter Bunny ... Such comparisons have been considered unsound for years and years

Could you explain why to this ignorant compsci, please?

Re: Smuggery

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

and nobody can say Dawkins doesn't have a religion

Hmm, the only appropriate definition I can find in the dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=religion) is "A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion." - is that what you had in mind?

Gosh, I don't know. I don't generally check the dictionary before ploughing into my rhetorical devices, which is what makes me One Big Cabaret Act. I suppose I reasoned that Dawkins has a (rather noddy) belief system with regard to things outside the realm of science, which he pursues with more zeal than e.g. most Anglicans. I'd only got as far as that. Perhaps if I'd got involved in cataloguing and comparing dictionary definitions then, oh, heavens, I'd have found something better to do with my time. I can almost always recommend finding something better to do with one's time than arguing based on dictionary bloody definitions. Scratching my arse, say.

isn't employed to comment on philosophy or theology

I assume he would argue that the "public understanding of science" requires the refutation of non-scientific arguments and beliefs.

Which is why he should damn well read some philosophy or theology to find out why science and religion are completely independent, have been for years, and do not talk to each other at all.. Then maybe he wouldn't come across as an intolerant ignoramus. If you too want to understand why his comparisons are unsound then you could do worse than start with the discussions of the empirical/transcendental in Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, early on).

To sum it up less well than Kant did (and hence, rather than refuting my possibly holey summary with a big grin on your face you should read the original instead) an empirical study like science cannot comment either way on the nature of transcendental things. Kant says nothing about any given religion, but about what belief structures can and can't logically contain. By denying religion any ability to comment on the observed world he also is able to carve out a niche for it which science is unable to touch.

There is a difference between unscientific (e.g. homeopathy) and "a-scientific" (e.g. transcendental beliefs of any kind), which escapes those with all the subtlety of lump hammers, rotary engines or bilge pumps. The arguments have been known for perhaps three hundred years, for people who actually read any philosophy before going off on one. Have fun.

Gosh, compared to USENET and the web in general, LiveJournal truly is a foreign country: they do everything the same there.

Re: Smuggery

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

Oh, sorry, your authoritative tone made me think you had something interesting to add.

It's all very well to point out that belief in a transcendental being is independent of science, but just as Dawkins has this nasty habit of straying into the entirely pointless argument about whether or not there is one, most religions stray into the empirical world in many many ways. It's true that science and religion are independent in theory, but they certainly aren't in practice. I thought this was all obvious, despite not having read any Kant.

Re: Smuggery

[j4.livejournal.com]

Oh, sorry, your authoritative tone made me think you had something interesting to add.

He does. But neither J-P nor I can be bothered to do all the preliminary thinking for you. You barged into the argument blithely ignoring centuries of philosophical, religious and scientific thought; then when this was pointed out, instead of realising that actually this is one subject where a precocious ability to construct new autism spectrum disorders out of Lego doesn't really help you, you started shouting that the whole thing must be nonsense since you don't understand it.

Or, in layman's terms: fuck off.