Does Dilbert's Scott Adams have a legitimate point about religion?

[Terran1212]

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/

Excerpt:

This has to be an even bigger problem for those of you who have a religion of your own. You’re thinking something along the lines of “My prophet talked to a real angel whereas your prophet was evidently taking a drunken forest wiz and thought a tree stump was talking back to him.”

I also wonder if showing respect for all beliefs is causing more problems than it’s avoiding. The only thing that keeps most people from acting on their absurd beliefs is the fear that other people will treat them like frickin’ retards. Mockery is an important social tool for squelching stupidity. At least that’s what I tell people after I mock them. Or to put it another way, I’ve never seen anyone change his mind because of the power of a superior argument or the acquisition of new facts. But I’ve seen plenty of people change behavior to avoid being mocked.

Many of our biggest world problems are caused by different religious views. But it’s not socially acceptable to even discuss whether those views originate from the almighty or a drunken guy wizzing on a tree stump. At a bare minimum, just to pick one example, either Christianity or Islam is completely and utterly wrong. The beliefs are mutually exclusive. Muslim’s believe all Christians will burn in Hell. Christians believe that the Koran is fiction. They can’t both be right. (They could obviously both be wrong if the Heaven’s Gate guys turn out to have it right.)

I fantasize about becoming President one day and insisting on settling the question of which religion is “right.” I’d assemble all the experts on history and religious and science, and televise them arguing the merits and evidence of their sides, with cross-examination and – most important – mocking. There would be no stop date for this debate. It would continue until even a child could recognize which positions are the most easily mocked. Sometimes that’s as close to wisdom as we can get.


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I responded to his post but it has yet to be put up. I basically told him that respecting one's religious beliefs is very important, and even though you are very intelligent and funny, the way you're talking about it IS disrespectful.

[BlooInBloo]

1. I think that's a legitimate point against ALL who.....

... try to go for the namby-pamby "validate people - don't tell them they're wrong" wussy scared-to-call-a-spade-a-spade crap that gives us a bad name.

[leftofthedial]

2. he's way too kind and patient

when it comes to dealing with the central insanity that keeps people from becoming civilized.

[marbuc]

3. I don't know

but I want a pair of special underpants to ward off evil. 2 and 3 day boxers have the same effect, but they also ward off other people.

[RandomKoolzip]

4. He totally misses the point.

The mere fact that there ARE so many "major" religions all competing to be "the only TRUE religion" kinda makes it as obvious as daylight that ALL religions are bogus.

[BlooInBloo]

6. Especially when major pieces of biblial dogma get falsififed...

(the judas business)

[yorgatron]

8. religion,like government,is a protection racket.

the main difference is,a good government can offer equal protection to all its citizens.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

11. Perhaps what is bogus is their concept of being the only religion

Remember the old story of the blind man and the elephant? How each blind man got hold of one part of the elephant and was insistant that their concept of the elephant was the only legitimate one? In reality, each had a piece of the puzzle, but none could grasp the entirety of the elephant. Such it is with religious aherents that stick to a strick dogma.

[Jigarotta]

5. God's Debris by Scott Adams

free pdf here:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2005/11/free_ebook_of_g.html

quick read and fascinating.
for those who have read it, what's your take?

[Terran1212]

7. I read it and its sequel (The Religion War)

We're actually discussing God's Debris in Philosophy class right now. I'm having a problem with many people just outright missing the points in the book. They take the examples too literally or claim that Adams is using unfair analogies or logic.

I don't agree with everything Scott Adams writes or believes, but it's too bad a lot of people just aren't getting the ideas behind the book.

[Jigarotta]

15. I would like to hear your ideas

on what you think is the idea of the book. ;)

[Terran1212]

17. I definitely think the book spawns from logical tricks

And mostly those alone. However, after learning more about Scott Adams, it might just be an all-out attempt for him to attack the traditional view of religion

[Jigarotta]

24. well, what I got from the book...

and it may be way out there, but what the hey, I'll risk it.

There really is no god apart from us, the god is Us when we develop our collective conscience, when we use that vast part of our brain that appears to be doing nothing much right now according to the sciences. Communication and connection is the important part. Once we gather together, everything is possible. we are in his image, so some people say. ;)

Then we start over, something like the big bang theory. In, out, the breathing universe in seasons. Everything is round.

[Terran1212]

25. You have to remember Adams intentionally uses a lot of junk science

So the later parts of the book about the "physics of god dust" and whatnot are not actually acceptably true in the scientific communities.

[Jigarotta]

31. we are only as wise as the instruments of measure we have at hand.

can't recall who coined that, but it sounds fitting.

[BlueEyedSon]

9. I stand with Dilbert

all faiths are essentially as man-made (and laughable) as scientology

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

13. As science is man made

Both religion and science are, imho, attempts by mankind to better understand the universe around him, and to try to make sense of it. If one looks at religions in the historic context of their various beginnings, one can better grasp the concept I'm trying to get across.

[Terran1212]

14. You can't prove a single thing with science (you're right)

It isn't designed to PROVE anything. It's just another belief system based on upon certain things that helps humans get through their life.

[BlueEyedSon]

21. Nope.

[Dogmudgeon]

37. Science says it, I believe it, That settles it.

--p!

[Warren DeMontague]

47. Actually, scientific claims can be verified.

But if it makes you feel better to believe that religious dogma and scientific fact are equivalently valid, knock yourself out.

[Dogmudgeon]

49. So I'm not a Mighty Defender of Science. That makes me religious?

So I'm not a Mighty Defender of Science, out to smite belief wherever it occurs, and to avenge the sore oppression suffered by "heretics" everywhere.

Therefore, I believe that science and religion "are equally valid", right?

Is that what you're trying to tell me? That you know my mind?

Where did you come up with that idea? I don't believe in religion at all. I am, at the most, an agnostic. Like most of the people who post in Religion/Theology, I am customarily a harsh critic of the practices and history of religion. But I also oppose using Science as its replacement, and when I see "Science" being swung like a baseball bat in the hands of a thug, I cringe.

Somehow, those baseball bats always end up hitting the wrong heads.

This is DU's own little Culture War, but it's every bit as ironic as you'd expect a community of online leftist hipsters to be. Here, it's the religious folks who have the manners, and the scientist-wannabes are in large part the bullies.

It was bound to happen.

--p!

[Greyhound]

32. You are either a philosophy major or the product of the amerikan

public education system. Science does, in fact, seek to prove or disprove many things. This is why there are so many theories and so few laws.

[Terran1212]

34. Is Noam Chomsky also a product of RW brainswashing?

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/20060301.htm

CHOMSKY: When we talk about religion, we mean a particular form of religion, the form that ended up dominating Western society. But if you take a look at other societies in the world, their religious beliefs are very different.

People have a right to believe whatever they like, including irrational beliefs. In fact, we all have irrational beliefs, in a certain sense. We have to. If I walk out the door, I have an irrational belief that the floor is there. Can I prove it? You know if I’m paying attention to it I see that it’s there, but I can’t prove it. In fact, if you’re a scientist, you don’t prove anything. The sciences don’t have proofs, what they have is surmises. There’s a lot of nonsense these days about evolution being just a theory. Everything’s just a theory, including classical physics! If you want proofs you go to arithmetic; in arithmetic you can prove things. But you stipulate the axioms. But in the sciences you’re trying to discover things, and the notion of proof doesn’t exist.

KRAUSS: Science certainly cannot prove anything to be true, in the sense that mathematics might appear to do. However, what science does extremely well, indeed it is the heart of science, is to prove things to be false. Namely, any proposed explanation that disagrees with the result of experiment is false. Period. It is by eliminating the false theories that we make progress. Falsification is the key.

[Greyhound]

41. So it is amerikan education, then?

Nothing to do with RW/LW whatsoever. What is, is. If science is simply another belief system that conforms to the individual prejudice of the observer, then you could simply refuse to believe in gravity and fly to the moon (you would also have to deny your dependence on breathing as well). There are no exceptions or exclusions to scientific laws.

Chomsky was not trying to deny the existence of the floor on the other side of the door, he was pointing out that there is currently no way to prove it without opening the door.

To try to equate religious dogma with the scientific method is ignorance defined.

[BlueEyedSon]

20. one is based on hypotheses, facts , experimentation &revision.

One is based on thousand-years-old fairy stories and blind faith.

Take your pick.

[Terran1212]

23. Neither is rational

Can you prove that what you're seeing is real? What you're standing on is solid?


Just more irrationality that you use to get through the day. It's not higher or lower than anything else.

[BlueEyedSon]

26. nihilist.

The world is shades of gray, come toward the light my friend!

Define "rational" and an endeavor (or way of thinking) that is.

[Terran1212]

27. I'm not nihilistic at all; I come here and fight for justice along side DU

Don't I?

I am just stating the facts of the matter dryly; if you're going to attack religion for being irrational on the point of trying to use some kind of logic, then you're going to have to apply the same standard on science. Now if you believe other as a matter of your human passions, then more power to you.

I'm not anywere near a nihilist.

[Warren DeMontague]

39. "The moon is made of cheese" and "The moon is made of rock"

may be equivalent statements to you.

Unless you completely jettison ALL notions of objective fact, however, the verifiable and constantly updated semantic maps provided by the scientific method prove far more accurate for describing reality than the repeatedly discredited ones promoted by the major Western religions.

So sorry if that particular truth bugs ya.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

10. He is working from a concept of religion

that appears to say that all believers think of their faith as the only faith:

You’re thinking something along the lines of “My prophet talked to a real angel whereas your prophet was evidently taking a drunken forest wiz and thought a tree stump was talking back to him.”

Actually, for many people, this is the furthest thing from the truth. Ask any Christian, even the fundamentalist types, and I doubt if any would say such a thing about the Old Testament prophets. Nor would a pius Muslim-and they wouldn't say that Jesus was not a prophet or mock them, etc. Yes, I know there are some in any faith that put down other religions or even other sects within their own faith; but that doesn't mean that everyone is that way.

In the mystic community, labels such as religion are more of a point of interest, just like where a person is from; nothing to ruffle feathers over. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, summed up the mystical mindset when he was asked by a group of Sufis to explain the difference between Sufism and Buddhism. His Holiness replied: "In Sufism, everything is. In Buddhis, nothing is. Same thing, no difference"

[Terran1212]

12. Dalai Lama is awesome

[Speck Tater]

19. The mysitc communities are where the answer lies

Sufi Muslims, Christian contemplatives, Buddhists, Hindus, all coming togther and all AGREEING that they all believe the same things. Each learning from the others, and each accepting the other's path as equally valid. In that spiritual community you find Thomans Merton quoting the Buddha, The Dalai Lama quoting Alan Watts, and the minister of the local Unity Chirstian Church quoting the Bagavad Gita.

The mystical branches of the major religions are the only rational paths. And for anyone still laboring under the ridiculous notion that "mystical" means occult or supernatural or "spiritualism" or any other such nonsense, you'd better look up "mystical" in the dictionary.

[Dogmudgeon]

40. They're going to hate you for that, you know

You've contradicted their favorite set of beliefs, namely, that everything that is either Religion (no matter how distantly) or isn't amenable to Science (no matter how ideosyncratically defined) is wrong, evil, worthy of Adamsian mockery, or just plain doesn't exist. And, incidentally, you're stupid, like the "Amurikkkun Sheeple", unlike they are.

Get ready for it. They're right, and you're wrong. There are many more of them around here than you. And they're also pissed off that they're oppressed.

--p!

[Terran1212]

42. Anti-Religious Gestapo?

[Dogmudgeon]

44. Gestapo? Naah.

Drama queens? Sure.

Boo-birds? You bet.

Arrogant sophists? Affirmative.

Ridiculers, mockers, Adamsites? Yes indeed.

The process works both ways. The idea isn't to "respect the idea" but to respect the idea-holder. The ideas themselves are trivial.

--p!

[Neil Lisst]

16. no one will kill you faster than someone whose god you don't respect

It's the number one reason religions are generally annoying and detrimental. Almost all religious people become angry, even violent, if you tell them their god is something someone dreamed up, their stories are works of fiction, fable, myth, and borrowed history.

Pray to the sun. Now that's real.

[Warren DeMontague]

35. You want a mystically hard-to-explain entity with strange power to

affect reality?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/

Why "pray to" anything at all? Just look in the mirror. As the great sage Peter Gabriel once said:

"When things get so big, I don't trust them at all.. You want some control -- you've got to keep it small.. D.I.Y."

[chicofaraby]

18. Sounds like he nailed it.

Good job, Mr Adams.

[Gabi Hayes]

22. If you want to find the bible in the library, where do you look

Not counting the reference section

[Warren DeMontague]

30. "drug induced fiction" *

but hey, that category includes some mighty fine works.

*This is my personal opinion, and I am just as entitled to it as anyone is entitled to their belief that I'm going to be cast into some bubbling lake of fire for making fun of Jesus, Mohammed, et al.

[Warren DeMontague]

28. Yes. Cue for religious folk to begin pillorying the "heretic", all the

while squealing about how 'victimized' and 'persecuted' they are by the offensive notion that someone might actually examine their assertions using science and logic.

[Ron Green]

29. "Forgive yourself, forgive the world."

That idea does it all. The problem with religions is that they are used to explain hard things to masses of people, many of whom aren't very bright. Jesus' message of absolute forgiveness (although it's found in other places as well) is often lost on people who want to have enemies, and talk about "the victory." I don't know if Judaism or Islam provide for forgiveness of the "enemy." I suspect not, because they've been going at it for a long time.

[norml]

33. It's also a legitimate point about politics.

Ridicule works.

[Dogmudgeon]

36. Adams' point about mockery

It is currently the reigning Internet/Hipster/Nerd shibboleth. For some reason, millions of us have gotten it into our heads that mockery, ridicule, scorn, and similar forms of rhetoric are acceptable. Good. Beneficial.

They're not. The idea that ridicule is good is itself a version of the drunken wiz, and we're unaware that we've failed to whip it out of our pants before wizzing.

I often hear it repeated as "people who believe weird things deserve to be ridiculed", often word-for-word. I wonder if it's a catchphrase Penn Jillette repeats on his show, or if it's on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine each month now.

Personally, I could give fuck-all about what another person believes. It's their behavior that concerns me. If they try to compel me to accept a religion -- or even to embrace the popular brand of naturalism-humanism-rationalism -- then we have a problem. And if they try to ridicule me into obeisance, then they'll find that they ridiculed the wrong pig. It's already happened. It wasn't pretty. Posts were deleted. Nuff said.

Adams wonders if he should feel obliged to "respect" the Mormon practice of "wearing special underpants to ward off evil", and similar things. He reminds me of the animal-rights people who splash paint on women who wear furs, but avoid bikers wearing leather jackets. He's trendy, he's snarky, he's rich, and he's a 24-karat hypocrite.

For all the bitching and moaning we do about Bush and the Radical Right, we have our own severe problems. We've nearly hipped outselves to death in two presidential elections by repeating "there's no difference between them" so no one will ridicule us for supporting a loser, whoever the loser turns out to be. It is a secular mortal sin now to commit to any particular idea outside of a small group of select toy-breed pseudo-ideologies, all of which are intended to increase one's social acceptability.

Peer Pressure has grown up, learned to fuck and drink and smoke cigarettes, and has invented a mini-ideology for itself, The Doctrine Of Socially Beneficial Mockery. It needs to die a quick, but painful, death -- and soon.

--p!

[seabeyond]

38. mockery says nothing about the person you mock, all about you

for you to seriously feel mockery is the only way to ?get people to shut up? come to your side? whatever is foolishness. you mock me, and i ignore you. give me facts, i will listen. approaCH IT intellectually i am there. mockery is a turn off to me. doesn't make me feel bad. does tell me that i dont have a lot of time for your brand of communication, thru disrespect. so i totally disagree with you suggesting mockery is the way to go. kinda reminds me of bushco's and republicans. not impressed with them either

as far as religion, if you take things literally in bible or koran, than i can see the contradiction. i personally do not believe it was meant to take it literally. if reading the bible or koran thru the heart, meaning allowing spirit to interpret what is read, i would suggest to you there will be ample examples of similarities to the point, the message is the same in all religion, all paths to universal power, whatever it may be for any individual. and i think the story comes in many forms, we all hear the song uniquely. be it bible or koran. Buddha. nature. children. animals. lite. sound.

so i dont agree that we have to not be accepting of other religion. that it does us harm. i believe each form of religion in some way pronounces that we are to be accepting of all.....

inclusive. never exclusive. anytime we are exclusive we walk away from lite, purity.... love. and love ultimately is universal power

hence, why your mockery doesn't work. lol lol

interesting. thank you for opportunity for thought on this.

[Blue_Tires]

43. ttt n/t

[Dogmudgeon]

46. Umm ... what's "TTT"?

It means "World-Wide Web" in Esperanto (Tut-Tera Teksaro), but I'd guess you're not using it that way.

--p!

[Blue_Tires]

48. to the top

i'm just kicking the thread

[kaygore]

45. In the end, there is no right or wrong except

saying that another person's religion is wrong or trying to force your religion on someone else.

For many, religion is their security blanket that enables them to face the most awe-filling thing that we must all face: Death.

The world lived for years in harmony with Islam. Like the Bible, I suspect that passages of the Koran can be read as very hostile to other religions.

At the most basic level, most religions require that their adherents live the best lives that they can. Too many people eschew personal responsiblity for their actions and find it easier to criticize others.

The irony is that if there is a "God" (or gods), then as that God or gods celebrated diversity in this universe so he or she or it or they probably celebrate diversity in the paths that we take to realize our spiritual potential.

If each of us just tried to live on a personal level the best life (best being a life of goodness, a life that truly followed the tenets of the religion that we followed) that we could and stopped trying one upmanship on religion, the world would be SO much better!

A religion is only as good as its adherents!

[BiggJawn]

50. He has a very legitimate point.

Why is respecting religious beliefs very important? and do we respect ALL beliefs, including the beliefs of the Pastafarians with their Flying Spaghetti Monster, or only those beliefs we think of as "traditional"?

I think he has a very valid point. If a given religion is true, it and its Deity should be able to withstand anything we puny mortals throw at it.