Dear DavidF

Curse your pedantry! Just quietly (between us) I knew that the Arabs co-opted numbers as we know them today from India. However, given the vitriol that issues forth on anything remotely Islamic, I used a bit of poetic licence - please forgive.

And yes, I agree that the complexities that were able to be explained and understood through mathematics is one of the most fundamental discoveries without which we would still be in the stone age.

Besides I failed to edify the non-edifiable just witness AGIR's response to my points.

But hopefully I entertained the enlightened.

PS

MJPB

If Philo believes that simple arithmetic is a faith system, then he is confused - extremely. But nice piece of sophistry.

A J Phillips,

"Wow, enough faith to be an atheist? ... exercise reason get to be the freethinkers."

Nah just perhaps too terse to avoid your initial paragraphs. I should have been more expansive. I should have started with "After considering the evidence"

Many people describing themselves as atheists are becoming intellectual slaves to dogmas. Both sides can and do exercise reason and get different conclusions. Given the message promulgated by contemporary powerbrokers only theists are clearly free thinkers. Atheists could just be going with the flow.

"What you need to understand, mjpb, is that theists are the ones making the claim, not atheists. Atheism is simply a response to that claim - no faith involved."

Atheists are making the claim that there is no God. If it is in response to theists than they must have moved past a mere absence of belief.

"If someone were to ask you if you believed in fairies, how much faith are you holding by saying “no”? Is it more than saying “yes”?"

I have never entered the controversy. I accept that there are no fairies purely on faith. I don't believe it is more than saying yes.

"No, Dawkins - like many others - simply accepts the fact that objective reality is all we’ve ever been able to rely on to acquire any real knowledge about reality."

Express it any way you like.

"No faith required."

How do you know that divine revelation hasn't created any real knowledge about reality?

"<<Have you known him to vacillate and consider God?>>

Dawkins once believed in god until it occurred to him that he was only a Christian because of a sheer accident of birth."

But he was an Anglican ... Anyway if the originally Middle Eastern religion hadn't been exported to Europe he wouldn't have been in that position. His ancestors converted. Many people convert today. I am one of them. My parents are atheists.

"Rational thought is religion’s kryptonite."

If you really believe that no theists give the matter any rational thought you need to get out more.

Dear David F.,

Hitler expressed virulently anti-Christian views,
as recorded by his secretary and given by
Richard Dawkins in his book, "The God Delusion,"

The following all date from 1941:

"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity
was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism
is Christianity's illegitimate child...

The reason why the ancient world was so pure,
light and serene was that it knew nothing
of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity...

When all is said, we have no reason to wish
that the Italians and Spaniards should free
themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's
be the only people who are immunised against
this disease...

I could of course be argued that, despite his
own words and those of his associates, Hitler was
not really religious but just cynically
exploiting the religiosity of his audience. He
may have ahreed with Napoleon, who said, "Religion
is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet,"
and with Seneca the Younger, "Religion is regarded
by the common people as true, by the wise as false,
and by the rulers as useful."

However, whatever his real motives for pretending
to be religious we shall never know I guess, as
mjpb points out. But his actions serve to remind
us that Hitler didn't carry out his atrocities
single-handed. The terrible deeds themselves
were carried out by soldiers, and their officers,
most of whom were surely Christian.

Dear Al,

I'll let AJ explain things to you himself.
He'll do a better job of it than I.

As for my apologising to you - for what?
You are responsible by your actions, in
the way that you are perceived. That is something
you have to deal with and no one else.

You're entitled to your opinions - but not
your own facts.

Dear mjpb,

Hitler’s atheism is pure myth. I am sick of Christian apologists assuming that because they don't like the actions of a person that person is not a Christian. Centuries of Christian hatred prepared the ground for the Holocaust.

Page 30 of “The Slave Trade” by Hugh Thomas shows Christianity justifying slavery.

"St Paul, like Seneca, thought that slavery was something external. So he recommended that slaves serve their masters 'with fear and trembling'. He thought that every man should abide 'in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a slave? Care not for it; but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather' (the English Authorized Version curiously translates servus as 'servant', not 'slave'). The apostle believed, it is true, that the slave who receives the call to be a Christ is ‘the Lord's freeman'. But the implication was that that liberty could only be expected in the next world. The Epistle to Philemon the Greek described how the apostle returned a fugitive slave, Onesimus, to his master, though he did recommend indulgence. That action was later used by churches to reject the idea that escaping slaves had the right to sanctuary in their church, as common criminals did; and the eighteen French Huguenot trader Jean Barbot thought that the Epistle gave evidence that, though slavery was lawful, slaves should be well treated. An early Christian bishop, and a medieval one, could comfcrt himself with the reflection that Christ had, after all, come not to change conditions but to change minds - non venit mutare conditiones sed mentes. What, the 'bondsman was inwardly free, and spiritually the equal of his master'? No matter: in external matters, he was a mere chattel. Slaves could of course look forward to freedom in the next world. In time, they should endure their terrestrial condition for the glory of God, whose ways were inscrutable.

St. John Chrysostom advised the slave to prefer the security of captivity to the uncertainties of freedom. St. Augustine agreed.

Thomas cites many other references for Christian acceptance of slavery.

"If Philo believes that simple arithmetic is a faith system, then he is confused - extremely. But nice piece of sophistry."

He didn't say that he believes that simple arithmetic is a faith system? He was discussing the issue of particular arithmetic knowledge being held on faith as was I. He typed:

"Dawkins is a fool. People act in faith every day because they believe unquestionably in certain taught principles. For instance you always believe 12+12=24, you do not have to question it each time you use it. Someone taught it to you."

I think you are missing his point.

David f,

That is the first time Dawkins would probably have been accused of being a Christian apologist.