Tony said, "if we admire somebody, they get elevated to the status of godhood? Are you sure about that, Josephus? I admire the work of Richard Dawkins, are you sure you're happy for him to be granted divine status? Would you like a little while to stop and think about this a bit more?" Posted by Toni Lavis, Wednesday, 31

If you implicitly believe the words and character of Dawkins to be inspired words and your model for life then you have made him your god.

AJ, you said,"Sounds like a bit of a non sequitur, to me. Either way, an omnipotent god could have just simplified things and reduced at least the suffering. There are only two ways in which complexity arises out of design: necessity or sloppiness. Neither of which should be the case where an omnipotent god is concerned. Why, for example, would an omnipotent god create brains that use 20% of our energy, thus requiring us to eat and breath more? Especially if we have souls to do all that for us."

AJ, please tell us what chemical composition and reproduction process you would design so as to avoid decay and cell renewal and the need for reproducing ourselves.

david f, So you do not want storms and floods or the presence of Uranium and the human capacity to kill each other. Search where the problems can be changed for a better world!
Cont,

I found that article by Dalrymple you cited to be rather dishonest, mhaze.

Firstly, the so-called “new atheists” don’t claim to be presenting anything new (although 9/11 did alter the tone somewhat, giving their arguments a greater sense of urgency, compared to the critics of religion who came before them). No, the biggest difference between ‘old' atheists and ‘new' atheists can be summarised entirely by the following image:

http://i.imgur.com/y704dLr.jpg

Which is why I detest the term. It doesn’t warrant a new label, in my opinion. It is a pejorative coined by those who, in response to “The Four Horsemen”, are pushing back under the guise of so-called ‘sophisticated theology’.

Secondly, Dalrymple repeats the tiresome old quote, taken out of context, that the likes of Reza Aslan have perpetuated, to make it sound like Harris is advocating genocide:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/10/13/the-dishonesty-of-some-of-sam-harris-foes-who-clearly-know-better-but-smear-him-anyway
http://samharris.org/on-the-mechanics-of-defamation

Thirdly, Dalrymple misquotes (but at least doesn’t italicise his alteration) the title of Hitchens’ book so that he can introduce a false analogy which speaks of “spoiling" things rather than ‘poisoning’ them:

“Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes, no Rwandan genocide.” - Dalrymple

Dalrymple’s above attempt at an analogy would not have made much sense had he used the word ‘poison’ instead of ‘spoil’. It’s an astonishing level of dishonesty. This guy is hardly “the greatest essayist of our age”, but I can see why you would like him.

They were the most glaring problems in the article, to me. There are plenty more which I simply don’t have the time or post allowance to go into. Clearly you haven’t read any of the four main books criticised in the article if you think that that article gave what was in any way an accurate representation of them. No doubt you’ll claim that you have, though.

The article reminds me of another book on Christianity’s role in the rise of Western civilisation:

Christianity as the Bedrock of Civilisation: How to Transition From Christianity to Atheism Without Feeling Like a Commie, by Tory McCarthyist.

Josephus,

What makes you think that chemicals or a reproductive process would be necessary in the first place, where a god is concerned?

<<AJ, please tell us what chemical composition and reproduction process you would design so as to avoid decay and cell renewal and the need for reproducing ourselves.>>

The fact that these exist, and are necessary, are more consistent with a naturalistic worldview.

Nevertheless, there are many problems in the design of human bodies which could have been done better, one doesn’t need to be a chemist to know this:

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2016/04/the-most-unfortunate-design-flaws-in-the-human-body

If God is so magical that He is capable of performing miracles (but somehow not healing amputees), then there is no reason why He couldn’t just make us magical spirits or blobs of simplistic flesh for which life and consciousness had no rational explanation.

Why would a god bother to make us so unnecessarily complex and appear precisely as though we evolved from simpler life forms and chemicals, when we could have just been like Teletubbies?

//I see it as very uncivil and bordering on dishonest to attribute views to me that I don’t hold and have explicitly argued against. Don’t read it all if that’s your want. But don’t assume that you then understand my views sufficiently well to mock them.
At the least its uncivil…at the most dishonest.//

There is trouble in the gypsy village.

You've got a habit of doing the same things... you're just not as upfront about it.

//How do you know that's my line of argument if you haven't read my line of argument?//

Oh jesus, the tedious little twat wants to start splitting hairs...

Just because I don't read everything, it doesn't follow that I read none of your arguments.

But in the interests of keeping our hairs nicely split, I officially attest that I've read these...

//Why was it that the only civilisation in the whole history of man to actively work to eliminate slavery was Christian?...crickets
Why was it that the only civilisation in the whole history of man to even conceive of human rights was Christian?...crickets
Why was it that the Industrial Revolution occurred in the Christian West?...crickets

Why did democracy arise in the Christian west?...crickets

Why, if Christianity caused the Dark Ages, was there no Dark Ages in the Christian East?...crickets//

And they definitely contain a lot of bollocks. But so do sausage rolls, and people swallow them every day.

//If you implicitly believe the words and character of Dawkins to be inspired words and your model for life then you have made him your god.//

I don't, I just like his books and stuff. But if he can be God, why can't anybody? You're starting to sound more and more like Yuyutsu... I might leave this conversation before you start telling me that I exist because I don't which coincidentally makes me god, but not actually god because he doesn't exist either even though everybody is god even if they don't believe in him but especially if they don't believe him.

And I hate those conversations.

//Are you saying that talking about sin is abusive? Look in the mirror man. See if you can find you'r faults.//

You just don't get it, do you?

If you want to sit on your high horse and tell me that I'm sinful, mucked up, full of faults... you might want to bring some legitimate criticisms to the table instead of vague platitudes. What is it, precisely, that you think I've done wrong - besides not believe in your god? Or am I just a wicked person because I chose the wrong god?

Because the message I've been getting so far is very much the latter: that I'm just wrong because I don't share your faith. Which from where I'm sitting just sounds like you slagging me off in the name of God. And my rebuttal to that is: go fornicate yourself with the rough end of a pineapple.

So if I had to give you a score out of 10 for being a missionary, it'd be about 3. You haven't gone for the fire and sword method of conversion, so bonus points for that... but you lack a lot of basic knowledge about the history of Christianity and the practices of Christians beyond your own small insular community, your apologetics are unconvincing, and you cannot seem to shake your unfortunate habit of airing your views that people are sub-standard human beings unless they share your particular interpretation of Christianity.

To mhaze, thankyou for the links. I'll look into them more when I have more time. (They looked longer then I expected). I'll also look at the books too. Hope I can find one of them at a liburary. Becoming more educated on the history of the Christian church(es) is on my to do list someday. But to consider Christianity's influence on societies, that was a new thought that I now also want to consider and look into more fully. Thankyou for that.

...if there's anything I can do to return the favor, let me know. I'll try to consider it and see what I can do.