Boing Boing: Dawkins: Why There Almost Certainly Is No God
I grow weary of continual “he said, she said” rhetoric. It’s a major part of why I’ve more or less tuned out politics, why I’ve even, to some extent, tuned out of religious and philosophical discussion recently. This is more of the same.
It’s interesting to me that the religious say this nation was founded on Christian principles and that secularists say it was founded on secularism. In truth, this nation was founded, in part, on religious freedom, granting each citizen the right to worship as they see fit. So it’s increasingly ironic that Christians and secularists alike continue to try to force their way of thinking on others via politics and strong-arm techniques rather than through the power of persuasion and one-on-one discourse. Regardless of who is right and who is wrong, I don’t believe there is any room for anger, hatred, bitterness, and strife in the mutual pursuit of truth. And let’s face it – aren’t both sides looking for truth? Naturally, different people are going to arrive at different conclusions. People are going to disagree, sometimes even violently so. That, unfortunately, is the nature of humanity. It doesn’t make it right, of course.
I guess what bugs me the most when I hear this kind of dialogue being spouted in a public forum is the fact that so much of it is laced with anger and bitterness. I can understand, to an extent; frankly, I find my hackles going up everytime I hear someone harshly criticizing my own beliefs. It’s a natural reaction; no one likes to be told they’re stupid and foolish for believing a certain way. No one likes to be made fun of. But just because those emotional reactions rise up does _not_ mean that we should allow them to rule us and govern our reactions. Just because I’m angry and hurt at what someone said about me, whether directly or indirectly, does not give me the right to respond with anger of my own. Don’t you see? That just makes the problem worse.
“A soft answer turns away wrath…” Words to live by, folks. Do you hear me?
I completly agree, I was quite annoyed by the arrogant angry tone of that blog post on boingboing. (Though I like most of what’s on boingboing)
It’s this kind of material that really interferes with my enjoyment of boing boing. I’m getting to the point where I won’t even read stuff not posted by Corey Doctorow.
As a person of faith with a background in science and technical fields I am insulted by the continual hyping of this Dawkins guy.
I, too, thought the BoingBoing posting to be a bit of an attack. I wish supposed “rationalists” could apply the same amount of objective, laser-like analysis to their own arguments. It is really getting annoying, and quite disruptive to the scientific culture they promote, which I am a string supporter of, I might add.
Ultimately, I have had to recognize that Boing Boing _is_ a blog and as such it is going to espouse and promote the viewpoints of those who own and operate it. It is tiresome, to be sure; I, for one, would most enjoy a science news site that actually promotes just the news, _sans_ commentary from the article writer. Those sites are, sadly, fewer and further between these days.
“grow weary of continual “he said, she said” rhetoric. It’s a major part of why I’ve more or less tuned out politics” – Seriously.
Wow, that comment got mangled by the WordPress gremlins. Sorry ’bout that; I knew I should have just retyped the quotation instead of copying and pasting.
No problem, Jud. I fixed it. :) It’s a small hazard of the Text Control plugin I use – it doesn’t like special characters, so copying and pasting requires a little editing of quotation marks and apostrophes to get them to show up correctly.