On 3 Feb 2005, at 6:19 pm, Dan Minette wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2005 4:26 PM Subject: Re: Bill Moyers: There is no tomorrow
* William T Goodall ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
In the case of the Soviet Union and the United States, for example,
there are several overwhelmingly more significant differences than the
matter of religion to consider. So much so that I don't see how any
conclusion at all could be reached about the relative contribution of
religion to the development of science in either.
My point was that the tendency to go with one wishes to be valid instead of
what one sees to be valid if one really looks carefully is not a function
of religion.
Yes it is. That is the basis of religion. Wishful thinking. To believe ridiculous fairy stories for which there is no evidence. Going with what one wishes to be valid instead of what one sees to be valid is one of the defining characteristics of religion. It's called faith.
To establish this, I looked at atheistic states. We can agree,
I think, that it was clearly true for the first state based on "scientific
atheism." Further, this state did not represent a minority viewpoint. For
most of my life, the overwhelming majority of atheists were Marxists.
Atheist is not equal to non-religious. Religious is not equal to theist. Marxism is a quasi-religion with all the evils of any other religion.
I didn't cherry-pick some crazy group that happened to be atheistic. I
picked the uniquely prevalent atheistic system of the last 200 years, that
the overwhelming majority of atheists during that period accepted to one
degree or another.
This argument is *entirely* backwards and utterly ridiculous. Your argument is that the majority of atheists during the past two hundred years chose freely to be communists and this shows that atheists have bad judgement (or something like that). But hardly anybody in those countries chose freely to be a communist - they were totalitarian dictatorships!
And whatever people called themselves in those countries - communist, atheist or little green spaceman - had next to nothing to do with what they actually privately believed and everything to do with expedience.
-- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
'The true sausage buff will sooner or later want his own meat grinder.' -- Jack Schmidling
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