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Post by sandwiches on Aug 20, 2014 18:58:34 GMT
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Post by evangelion on Aug 20, 2014 23:51:01 GMT
Well, he's utterly consistent in his views. Got to give him credit for that. And note that he's talking about aborting a foetus, not an actual baby. |
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Post by merkavah12 on Aug 21, 2014 17:09:06 GMT
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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 22, 2014 11:21:01 GMT
Very nice!  How did you find that? |
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Post by evangelion on Aug 22, 2014 12:58:36 GMT
It's doing the rounds on Facebook.
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Post by merkavah12 on Aug 22, 2014 14:48:51 GMT
Very nice! How did you find that? What Evangelion said. |
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Post by ignorantianescia on Aug 22, 2014 15:25:49 GMT
Ah, all right, I see.
Meanwhile on Twitter:
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Post by sandwiches on Aug 22, 2014 19:07:46 GMT
www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/once-i-would-have-agreed-with-dawkins-then-my-daughter-was-born-with-downs-syndrome-9684199.htmlJamie McCallum
Thursday 21 August 2014
Once I would have agreed with Dawkins. Then my daughter was born with Down's Syndrome
She has opened my eyes to so muchIronically Dawkins wants to start acting like the being who is most commonly in receipt of his vitriol – God.
Solely using genetic superiority as the only mode of selection only goes to show the gargantuan breadth of closed-minded misunderstanding that underpins the Professor’s opinion. It ignores the delightful, happy, contented and fruitful life that people with Down’s Syndrome have and ignores the benefits of acceptance that they bring to everyone who surrounds them.
Mr Dawkins too often assumes that dissenting voices are merely so because the individuals concerned lack the capacity to understand his intellectual reasoning. The truth is that sometimes it’s because they know stuff that you don't. Hard to take, I imagine, when you are a Professor.
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Post by evangelion on Aug 23, 2014 4:00:36 GMT
Ah, all right, I see. Meanwhile on Twitter: That is superb. |
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Post by ignorantianescia on Jun 17, 2015 8:06:16 GMT
I thought this old column said some very sensible things of Dawk and Down. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/aug/29/nobody-better-at-being-human-richard-dawkinsRichard Dawkins has long flirted with eugenics. “If you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability?” he asked back in 2006. “I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler’s death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons.”
...
The one thing one ought to expect from humanists is that they would be good at protecting the human, at defending human life in its own terms and for its own sake. The humanist attack on religion is that religion often places human flourishing second in its cosmological order of importance, and that this leads to human beings losing out to divine command. It’s a perfectly respectable argument. But, ironically, it doesn’t seem that the human is any safer in the hands of humanists. |
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Post by gregmita on Jun 17, 2015 14:22:15 GMT
(Secular) "humanist" is just another term for "atheist" these days. It really has nothing to do with the original aims of Renaissance humanism, or even of the Enlightenment. If anything, the trend is to "dehumanize" humans - from the denial of free will to even claiming that consciousness is an illusion (a self-contradiction if there ever was one), many of the views associated with the hard atheists positively undermine the rational "free actor" view of human beings.
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Post by peteri on Jun 18, 2015 17:17:42 GMT
(Secular) "humanist" is just another term for "atheist" these days. It really has nothing to do with the original aims of Renaissance humanism, or even of the Enlightenment. If anything, the trend is to "dehumanize" humans - from the denial of free will to even claiming that consciousness is an illusion (a self-contradiction if there ever was one), many of the views associated with the hard atheists positively undermine the rational "free actor" view of human beings. There are still some who have much in common with the 1933 Humanist Manifesto. It had nothing to with Erasmus and More, but it had something to do with Comte and his Religion of Humanity. Mary Midgley would qualify as that kind of Humanist. But yes, it seems to be frequently used the way you say. The idea of "free will" is problematic largely because when different people use the term they mean different things by it. The Reformers sometimes denied "free will" and by this they meant that humans are all in slavery to sin. They never denied the reality of human choices. I'm not sure anyone really claims that "consciousness is an illusion." What I have seen claimed is that our experience of making conscious choices is an illusion. This is at least sometimes true: for instance people report having the experience of having made a choice when they made that choice in response to a hypnotic suggestion. I do not think it is always true, but we should realise that our experience of making choices may not match the underlying reality. Apart from Jerry Coyne, do any others really claim that no one is responsible for anything that they do? (Coyne doesn't seem to understand that he is saying that it is impossible for human beings to do scientific experiments, but he seems to be an anomaly.) Peter. |
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Post by gregmita on Jun 22, 2015 7:00:47 GMT
The "consciousness is an illusion" claim is usually based around the denial of the self, by claiming that experiences are fleeting and that there is no continuously existing "stream of consciousness". Rather Buddhist actually, but it's most often put forward by materialist philosophers of mind. As you can see, this is not quite the same as "no one is responsible for anything", but it's highly related.
The entire philosophical field of eliminative materialism is based on explaining away mental phenomena as traditionally accepted. Read the Churchlands (Patricia and Paul), Susan Blackmore*, or Alex Rosenberg for various versions of such ideas.
*I have her rather interesting "Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction", where she ultimately advances what I talk about in the first paragraph. She even talks about Zen meditation for removing "illusions of the world"!
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How did you find that?