by Alan B wrote:I remember using it in DOS.
I remember using it indoors.
Byron wrote:Oldskeptic wrote:The thing to remember when reading anything by Gray is that he is convinced that humans are just fucking awful and nothing can overcome that. Every last one of us is evolutionarily and biologically tuned to be assholes. It is our shared nature never to be better collectively than we have been in the past.
What Gray doesn't like about so called new atheists, secular humanists, liberals, and or any kind of forward thinker is what he see's as unfounded hope that the future can be better than the past. He sees anyone that doesn't accept his dark view of static human nature as deluded optimists. We're all Pollyannas destined to be crushed by a reality only he can see.
Gray, in this painfully overlong diatribe, skillfully sets up all the usual scarecrows and then whips them down in his typical fanciful manner. Never mind that his characterization are trite, hollow, and transparent, on he goes to destroy them right before our eyes. Scientific Nazism, take that! Scientific evalgelical atheism, take this! Scientific secular liberalism, down you go! Racist Haekel, Pow! Racist Darwinism, boom! It's like he's the super hero of knocking down all strawmen in a single go.
Nifty summary.
Gray asks, "Why make a fuss over an idea [god] that has no sense for you? There are untold multitudes who have no interest in waging war on beliefs that mean nothing to them." Bizarrely, he answers it at the end: that idea creates monsters. Yet more bizarrely, he claims this is a non-issue, despite tons of evidence to the contrary (burning of heretics, genocidal antisemitism, persecution of gay people, etc).
Like Oldskeptic so rightly says, Gray objects to the possibility that people can get better, despite offering examples of that change in his own op-ed piece! Presenting a binary between no change and conversion experience is a false choice, picked, I suspect, to enable the hoary "Atheists are just like fundies" riff.
As with so many self-appointed public intellectuals, Gray isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is. That so many prestigious philosophy faculties have employed him says nothing good about the state of the discipline.
It's interesting to note that among the multitudes with a self-declared belief in the possibility of a spiritual redemption many are only too quick to say that nothing can ever compensate for the faults or bad aspects of human behaviour unless one adheres to their particular belief-set. It's a way of declaring, "We are the good ones - you are the bad ones," and it's on this basis that Gray and his ilk take issue with so-called New Atheists for, essentially, simply not believing the same as them. Everything else is just dressing.
As for charges of atheist fundamentalism: what atheist is not a fundamental atheist? What atheist only disbelieves the claims of theism etc only a little bit, or on a temporary basis - say, only on a Sunday or on the second Wednesday of the month? What atheist thinks that only part of God doesn't exist? The charge of fundamentalism is really a charge of speaking out of turn, of speaking when the theists etc would otherwise insist that we should just shut up and accept whatever-it-is that's floating across their forebrain.
