Gabs,
Great - so we both agree that an analogy should have "the same underlying arguments".
We do now it seems.
So what was your underlying argument and how was it the same as mine about the benefit Islam has brought me because the ban on alcohol in Islam helped me stop myself drinking?
The point was that a belief need not be either factually true or socially healthy for it to have a therapeutic benefit for some people nonetheless. If Islam keeps you on the wagon all well and good, but it could still be entirely fictional and have poorer consequences than good for all of us despite that.
I agree with your point, which is why I wouldn't claim that helping me stop drinking is some kind of evidence of the existence of god.
No, but approval by association is an old trope: your sobriety because of Islam says nothing to whether it’s universally a force for good or bad.
That's not my point - my point is that the common thread in all this bullying behaviour is the people doing the bullying - some religious people are bullies and some are as sweet as pie, some people with moral beliefs are bullies and some are as sweet as pie, some people who hold political beliefs are bullies and some are sweet as pie, some people who hold cultural beliefs are bullies and some are sweet as pie. So why propose that religious beliefs are more problematic than all these other beliefs if there is a mix of bullies and kind compassionate people in all these scenarios - sounds like prejudice to me.
You really don’t get this analogy thing do you? I was merely pointing out that the defence of “my beliefs may be bad but so are lots of other beliefs” is
analogous to a school bully justifying his behaviour by reference to other bullies in the playground. It wasn’t a discussion about bullying – any other
analogy would have done just well.
Good grief!
Firstly that just seems to be a non-religious faith position or belief you hold that if you present enough evidence and argument all non-theists will change their minds.
Did you actually read what I said? I’m saying you cannot persuade people to change their minds when their minds are made up as a matter of “faith”, whereas – in principle at least – you can when their positions are based on reason and evidence.
That’s the point!
Secondly, that just seems to be a non-religious faith position or belief you hold that theists won't change their mind about their religious values when presented with argument and evidence. They might not change their faith in the existence of god, but there has been no evidence or argument presented that conclusively proves either way about the existence or non-existence of God. What specific faith beliefs are you talking about, that you claim have not changed over the centuries? I see lots of theists and atheists who have changed their minds about their beliefs and opinions about how to treat other people, having been presented with argument and evidence.
We can get to the practicalities if you like, but the principle is simple enough: “But that’s my faith” cannot be falsified. There’s nothing to falsify, no process, no method, no argument, no
anything that can be deployed as a rebuttal regardless of the object of the faith – gods or leprechauns alike.
Now in practice what tends to happen is that when the argument or evidence becomes sufficiently persuasive some of the religious (I’m excluding the TWs of this world here) will tend to re-interpret their holy texts to accommodate that – in respect of evolution or gay marriage for example – along the lines of, “what this book really means is…” (which is why they tend to be so far behind the Zeitgeist) which gets them off the falsification problem and leaves the bits they cling to intact nonetheless.
In brief, “they” change their minds when the cognitive dissonance is too much to bear but not when it isn’t.
Yes I agree that stubbornly held beliefs by violent theists and atheists is a problem.
No we don’t agree.
First, did you mean “violent theists” and “violent atheists” there? While various religious faiths mandate violence of various types, atheism isn’t a belief and it mandates nothing. You can be an atheist and a murderer, but there’s no logical path from atheism to murder.
Second, atheism in any case tends to be characterised by the openness to being wrong if ever someone could produce a coherent argument to the contrary. Any “stubbornness” is a stubbornness about insisting on a supporting logic, whereas the stubbornness of the religious is the insistence that the
object of the claims is true – a qualitatively different thing.
