Islamophobic/racist fraud is also homophobic? I’m shocked. \s
Seriously, I thought there was already an agreement on how to approach this. Sex is the biological identification. Gender is the social identification. Sexuality describes the relation towards other sexes and genders. Neither take is really is disagreeing with the other, but rather than refer to proper identification and the differences between gender, sex, and sexuality, all they are doing is raising drama and playing hot potato with the terms that already cover this.
Yes, sex had a biological objective determinant (except for outlying cases). Yes, gender is subjective to ideology. However someone wants to identify themselves should be defined by their gender, yet things like how they get treated at the hospital is going to be determined by their biological sex. “Experts” (usually the self-appointed kind) unwilling to make any compromise at the risk of putting their big massively throbbing authority at risk, more at eleven.
“Boo! Hiss! Protect the citadel!”
-United Atheist Alliance
(I’m mocking dogmatic pop sci types, not attempting to denigrate trans rights or identities)
Ridiculous.
I get the notion that biological sex is one thing, but gender is another thing entirely. They’re still conflating the two.
And even in saying that, biological sex is not a binary because we know intersex individuals exist—people born with ambiguous sex organs, sex organs that don’t match chromosomal makeup, or even chromosomal makeups beyond the typical XX/XY. For all of the claims of “scientific reality,” the figures named in this article seem to do a very good job of cherry picking facts while ignoring the actual, less convenient reality of science.
“It’s basic biology, XX or XY, man or woman!”
“OK, but have you ever looked into intermediate or advanced biology?”
Dawkins is such a disappointing person. He has all the knowledge required to not only understand but also advocate for trans people but instead is defending the Anglican church, “light pedophelia”, and gender essentialism. He wrote a couple of books with some good parts but honestly, he is a sad old man and should be forgotten. Science moves forward one funeral at a time.
Science moves forward one funeral at a time.
That is badass
I knew it sounded familiar. It even has a name and a wikipedia article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck’s_principle
Long ago I saw him speak at a local gathering of humanists and even despite believing that atheism was a morally superior path and that religion was a harmful plague on humanity, still came away completely repulsed by him. He just seemed like an egotistical jerk with not very complex thoughts on society. I believe he was almost entirely focused on Islam rather than the more proximally harmful Christianity. It’s not at all surprising to me that he ended up where he is.
Science moves forward one funeral at a time.
Imma steal this, okay? Just letting you know now because this is absolute #facts.
It is called Planck’s principle, so we are stealing from Max Planck.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. — Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97Cool phrasing from him, lots of people have enjoyed it since, and honestly from my exposure to the field it is accurate. The push back against plate technonics was hard, as was the clinging to steady state cosmology. Oh, and miasma as a model of disease. We really are just slightly smart monkeys.
light pedophelia
“That can’t be true!”
Looks it up : “Dear spaghetti monster, what did I just read”.
Basic biology he says? I’m just gonna leave this here
Something about doors and arses.
He lost all credibility and relevance when he piled into the bigotry clown car. Atheism doesn’t have saints.
Richard Dawkins is his own religion.
Man thinks everything he says is infallible.
And unfortunately (and ironically) for too long some of his followers have acted like he is god.
Strong atheism is, in fact, a religious belief: claims of the non-existence of gods are no more falsifiable than claims of the existence of them, so in order to “know” there is no god one must have faith.
In other words, if religion is the faith-based belief in N gods, where N = many for religions like Hinduism and N = 1 for religions like Christianity, strong atheism is simply the religion where N = 0.
Meanwhile, scientific skepticism/disbelief in god(s) due to lack of positive evidence is more like agnosticism/weak atheism.
Edit: see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_atheism
Edit 2: I genuinely don’t understand what the downvoters are so upset about. Could some of you please reply to explain?
How is it any different than claiming with near certainty that leprechauns aren’t real?
I’m nearly 100% certain leprechauns aren’t real. Is my disbelief in leprechauns a religious belief? I similarly don’t believe in the Greek or Roman or Egyptian gods. Is that a religious belief, too?
The Christian god is a positive claim, and my near 100% certainty it’s not real is not a ‘belief’ unless you’re operating from a baseline that assumes it’s true, which is not how anything works. Strong atheism is a strong unwillingness to believe anything for which there isn’t evidence. That’s the opposite of faith – faith being the belief in things without evidence.
The only enlightened path for a Real Objective Thinker is to accept that anything might exist! If not you’re just engaging in the same mystical thinking as those people who believe sky-daddy is all powerful and all good, but is just working in mysterious ways all those times good people need help and nothing happens. It’s exactly the same you hypocrite. /s
Look, I’m just going by the classification system in the Wikipedia article I cited. I didn’t even slightly imply any of the bullshit you just tried to ascribe to me.
How is it any different than claiming with near certainty that leprechauns aren’t real?
Does Richard fucking Dawkins claim to be “near certain?”
?
Sorry, not following you, I couldn’t actually care less what Richard fucking Dawkins thinks tbh.
My comment was in the context of replying to https://lemmy.world/comment/14237089:
Richard Dawkins is his own religion.
Edit: also, funnily enough, it turns out that Dawkins does claim to be “near certain,” not “certain.” That was news to me, given his reputation!
That’s relevant because it puts a finer point on just how fervent the belief needs to be to count as “strong atheism.”
In The God Delusion, Dawkins describes people for whom the probability of the existence of God is between “very high” and “very low” as “agnostic” and reserves the term “strong atheist” for those who claim to know there is no God. He categorizes himself as a “de facto atheist” but not a “strong atheist” on this scale.
I am a dumbass.
Hey, only for continuing to engage with an off the rails discussion. But your arguments are articulate and on point.
That’s okay; it happens to all of us (see my edit).
I find the issue with hardcore atheism is the certainy of a lack of God in a scientific sense instead of an philosophical sense. Also the organization, dogma, and a sense of hierarchy in regards to authorities on atheism.
That being said the amount of atheists who subscribe to the religion isn’t the root of all evil but false vs religion is the bane of all existence, is probably the same statically to jihadist and westboro baptist church
Again, do you believe in leprechauns? How certain are you that mermaids don’t exist?
How dogmatic are you in your lack of a belief in mermaids? Or fairies? How much are you bending to the will of anti-Tinkerbell propaganda?
Do you hear how insane that sounds?
eta: you said:
Also the organization, dogma, and a sense of hierarchy in regards to authorities on atheism.
What authorities on atheism? What dogma? What organisation? Do you mean the clubs such as this comment section? There’s no central group or organisation. Atheism is the opposite of that. Your answer makes me think you don’t understand atheism at all.
If that’s the case, please ask me anything. I love answering questions. :)
You also said:
the amount of atheists who subscribe to the religion.
I’m not going into the rest of what was obviously wrong in the bits I cut off, but I’ll just stop you right there, lol.
There are some semantics at play, reflected in your link. Many atheists take the label to mean simply: absence of belief. That is: atheists require evidence before making a claim. As such, those that “believe” in nonexistence wind up falling into another category: anti-theists. There’s hubris involved in making the leap to belief, so I wager many just want to illuminate the distinction.
Thanks for replying!
Many atheists take the label to mean simply: absence of belief. That is: atheists require evidence before making a claim.
Well, yeah: that’s weak atheism (including “explicit weak atheism”, going by that Venn diagram’s categories). I don’t see any contradiction between that and what I wrote; weak atheism certainly still counts as atheism.
Are people getting offended because they think me calling their atheism something other than “strong” is some sort of judgement against them and not simply a categorization?
As such, those that “believe” in nonexistence wind up falling into another category: anti-theists.
That’s not quite what antitheism is. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitheism :
Antitheism, also spelled anti-theism, is the philosophical position that theism should be opposed.
…
Antitheism has been adopted as a label by those who regard theism as dangerous, destructive, or encouraging of harmful behavior.
In other words, antitheism isn’t so much about the question of god(s) existence directly as it is about considering the behavior of those who answer in the affirmative to be harmful and dangerous. It’s more of an ideological or even political position than a purely philosophical one.
I certainly goofed on my lazy definition of ‘antitheism’. Certainly more logical it’d be predicated upon ‘disbelief’ (webster, 1913). I think I picked up my lazy “belief in absence” from elsewhere on the net where people were defending atheism and, mostly, railing on antitheism. I should be more careful.
I was thinking the response more folks that just didn’t check your link and were operating on their own definition. I do think it a useful link. I’ve only heard these concepts using ‘(a)gnostic’ qualifiers. I should update my vocabulary. My concept of atheism has long been a simple binary: believer | disbeliever.
Strong atheism is, in fact, a religious belief: claims of the non-existence of gods are no more falsifiable than claims of the existence of them, so in order to “know” there is no god one must have faith.
Um… Show evidence that a god exists. Poof, you have falsified the claim that no god exists. Pretty easy, actually.
Well, we can prove the universe exists, but not that it’s some unified, all-powerful thing controlling us all afaik.
It’s why I stick with agnostic atheism. I’m not claiming to know either way on all forms of deism or theism or whatever. There’s enough contradictions and falsifiable claims in all organized religions I’ve been made aware of so far, so I am gnosticly atheist for those specific gods.
Your inability to come up with a way to produce evidence doesn’t make the strong atheist’s stance unfalsifiable. Unfalsifiable isn’t “We can’t produce any evidence that would falsify the claim right now.” That would take us to an absurd definition of the word where any scientific theory that requires more advanced technology than we currently have is “unfalsifiable.” That’s not what the word means.
The difficulty in proving that God exists isn’t what makes theism unfalsifiable. You shouldn’t make any assumptions about what can or cannot be proven true at some point in the future. What makes it unfalsifiable is that there’s no rational way to prove that God doesn’t exist, not because of an inability to collect evidence, but because the logical framework constructed by religious claims forbids it. Strong atheism has forbade no such thing. There’s no equivalence here.
Believing that The Force isn’t real doesn’t make me a Star Wars fan, or even a Sci-Fi fan, even though that’s a Star Wars belief. People can have strong opinions about something without that belief indicating that they are devout zealots about that topic.
People can have strong opinions about something without that belief indicating that they are devout zealots about that topic.
Of course they can! I not only never said otherwise, I explicitly affirmed it myself:
Meanwhile, scientific skepticism/disbelief in god(s) due to lack of positive evidence is more like agnosticism/weak atheism.
Weak atheism is not a weaker opinion than strong atheism! “Weak” and “strong” are just categorical labels, not value judgements. Moreover, I didn’t make up the terms; if you don’t like them, blame the philosophers, not me.
The difference between weak and strong atheism is not of magnitude, but kind: they have different philosophical underpinnings. Strong atheism is a belief based on faith, while weak atheism is motivated by skepticism and confidence in the utility of the Scientific Method as a framework.
Strong atheism is a belief based on faith
My guess is this is why you’re being downvoted, because everything else seems to be accurate.
Saying strong atheism is based on faith is the same as saying that believing dragons definitely do not exist is based on faith. In such a scenario, we all have infinite faith because we all firmly disbelieve in the existence of infinite things. We are so faithful in that scenario that the word faith becomes meaningless.
I’m honestly not sure what your point is in firmly asserting that strong atheism is a faith based belief. At best it seems like dying on a hill of split hairs.
Also for anybody else who is interested, here’s some relevant reading material https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Atheism#Weak_vs._strong_atheism
So I mostly agree with you, except the understanding that most gods must not be real is axiomatically true, based on the beliefs of those religions. Almost every religion claims they believe in the one true god(s), so either all the other aren’t real or theirs is wrong and not real. That leaves mostly only one pantheon remaining at most, with maybe a few other that aren’t exclusive.
Its not a belief that most religions most be wrong, and odds are whatever religion any particular person believes is wrong based on how many competing religions have existed.
This is separate to a statement on a god though, only religions. There is no way to make a reasonable argument on the existence (or lack thereof) of a god. You can rule out particular beliefs, but never the concept itself.
So I mostly agree with you, except the understanding that most gods must not be real is axiomatically true, based on the beliefs of those religions. Almost every religion claims they believe in the one true god(s), so either all the other aren’t real or theirs is wrong and not real. That leaves mostly only one pantheon remaining at most, with maybe a few other that aren’t exclusive.
This feels like a very monotheism-centric argument to me. AFAIK it’s mostly (or only?) the Abrahamic religions that take such an exclusionary view, and I wouldn’t call them “almost every” religion since, although people fight over minor divisions, broadly speaking there’s only three of them. The rest of the world’s religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, shinto, African religions, native American religions, etc.) surely add up to more categories than that.
I’m no theologian, but I would expect polytheistic pantheons not being exclusive to be the rule, not the exception.
And finally, even if we’re just talking about Judaism vs. Christianity vs. Islam, each of their "one true God"s is the same entity anyway so they aren’t nearly as mutually exclusive as their followers would like to pretend.
Others may not be explicitly exclusionary, but they are implicitly. You can’t really take the Greek pantheon and mythos and also the Hindu one. Almost every religion has an origin myth about how the world was created, which you really can’t have two versions of that. Religions typically don’t mesh together well.
With that said, religions tend to evolve and engulf neighbor’s beliefs into their own. This doesn’t mean they weren’t exclusive, rather that religion is malleable because it’s made up and not based on fact.
Well, I guess the trash took itself out.
Whenever I see some educated individual trying to make some sort of ‘credible’ stance against trans rights I just see an overgrown child.
These are grown adults who are angry that the simplistic worldview that they were taught as children doesn’t hold up to reality.
It was challenged by the mere existence of people who are different than themselves and they don’t want to confront the possibility that they were wrong(the people they care about were also wrong), so they the blame trans people for evoking those emotions instead of doing some introspection.
Do you really think that’s all there is to it? Don’t you think your worldview is a bit too simplistic? The one that gets the last word isn’t always that one who is right you know.
I first wanted to ask why the atheism foundation supports any religion at all… then I read the article, then I saw the ’ '… what an asshat.
Richard “Culturally Christian” Dawkins can go meme himself out of the meme pool.
I get, given how right wing, nasty, anti women and anti LGBTQ+ the American church is, why you would want to put Richard Dawkins, who is so nasty and anti trans (probably among other things) into the same bucket, but he’s British, not American, and famously very firmly anti-religion.
He has always been a dick, whatever he was trying to convince people of, and it’s no surprise he continues to be a dick in his old age. It doesn’t mean he’s a Christian. He’s really, really, really not.
“Culturally Christian” is not the same as “Christian“. The man clearly holds on to many of the perspectives he picked up being raised Anglican.
I’m one of those too, not all that voluntarily. I carry a lot of unconscious baggage left over from being raised Catholic. Not all of it is bad: there’s a tradition of critical thinking and cultural engagement that is positive. But I occasionally still get twinges of guilt about things that are not in my control, or that are not things to be guilty about in the first place.
Some context for you: https://skepchick.org/2024/04/richard-dawkins-cultural-christian-or-supremacist-bigot/
Surplus extra-topical context: https://religiondispatches.org/norway-massacre-suspect-anders-behring-breivik-hitler-the-jerusalem-post-editorial/ (you can find his manifesto online)
OK, the first article points out that he has a lot in common with the American right wing churches in that they don’t actually believe a word of it and just use it as a cultural sheild for their hatred, which is a fair point.
The second one doesn’t seem as related.
The second one is about how far [right] “Culturally Christian” can go.
“Why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality,” he wrote. “Instead, in biology ‘sex’ is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells. “It is not ‘transphobic’ to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights.”
As a fellow psychologist, I must regretfully state that this is the stupidest thing ever written by a psychologist. Our entire science is built upon the notion that feelings indeed create and modify (social) reality*. Sex is not gender, and he fumbled the most basic differentiation of concepts.
Heteronormative gender roles, on the other hand, are categorically a form of ideology and to defend them in place of basic human decency is a disgrace, good riddance to both asshats, I say. Specially with such a tenous biological argument that any good biologist can tell you is patently false. Gametes are not binary, there are hundred of thousands of intersex individuals for which this narrow definition doesn’t apply.
Grant is absolutely right, but I don’t expect the mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme” to ever understand social sciences. His book is a pathetic pseudo scientific intrusion in a field he doesn’t understand in the slightest.
*: some philosophers would even argue that there’s no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.
mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme”
He coined the word to mean a thought or idea that spreads through a population. Internet memes are completely unrelated to his usage. It’s not like he created the first insanity wolf meme or something.
Yes, and it is the most useless concept ever committed to text. It’s ironic it was coopted by internet culture and then ridiculed and reduced to absurdity.
He just tried to poorly rebrand the concepts of cultural imagery, and social constructs but with less evidence. It’s akin to me going “I propose the term garggle, it is water that flows down by gravity following the contours of the solid ground”. It’s like, yeah, we call it water and when it does that we call it a river, you would know if you opened a book about it anytime in the past century. You could summarize that book as “better read a book on sociology, it’s more useful”.
Dawkins isn’t a psychologist afaict. I had to check.
He isn’t which is why I called him intrusist there at the end for writing a book about psychology and neurology which he doesn’t understand. But the quote is from Coyne, another biologist who wrote the reply and was supported by Pinker, who is a psychologist and should’ve known better. None of these people know what they’re talking about and are acting in this whole thing from passion instead of reason and evidence. Which is ironic, I believe.
some philosophers would even argue that there’s no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.
Some politicians would argue that social reality is oppressive and must be replaced with social unreality - http://soulism.net/
Richard “cultural christian” Dawkins.
I am reminded of Willian Jennings Bryan, who in his old age advocated for the eight-hour work day, a minimum wage, the right of unions to strike, women’s suffrage, and then Alcohol Prohibition and of course Anti-Evolution.
Even the most progressive will turn to “I am old and don’t like new ideas!” as they age.
I’m seeing that in some of my older friends. Some of them can be manually taught new ideas, but it gets tiring. Well, they still vote for the most progressive option on any ballot, so I’m not bothering with it anymore.
I’m getting older and get weird looks when I tell people I refuse to install apps that can be websites and if a company is going to force me to use their app I am simply not spending money there.
Returning my Norelco shaver and Beats headphones I received for Christmas this year because I don’t need an app for headphones and sure as fuck do not need an app for my shaver!I’m talking more about political prospectives. Your example is about privacy concerns and superficial tech advances, which I’ve never really seen a strong generational bias.
Dawkins is a zionist
Dawkins schtick was pretending he was not racist but hated Islam. Turns out the man is simply racist.
Same with Sam Harris.
deleted by creator
He’s 83 and can’t handle the changing world, he can go spend his last years alone like every old asshole does.
