Well it’s not a full on argument more an observation. He made it around the time he wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test viz Ken Kesey’s road trip with beatniks in the 60s. The bus was wired for sound and there was always acid-spiked kool-aid.
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Wolfe didn’t take any. He was afraid he’d give up writing. But he made the observation often around that time. Interviews etc.
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I suspect Wolfe’s one of those conservatives who believe religion is bullshit but necessary.

I didn’t mention Wolfe, and I don’t know if I read him on the subject. I read quite a bit from then and now, and most informatively those who wrote in the 60s with their views in the 1980/90s. Gotta link or summary of his argument?

The positive link between LSD (and mescaline) use and treatment of alcoholism is controversial. My reading is that it can be very useful in many clinical conditions – not just those battling the booze – though no magic bullet. LSD is superb for people who have never “let go” and/or are not very practised at self-analysis and so on.

A tab of LSD and they’ll be surrending to the Jesus-Guys at AA in no time. But alcoholism is such a complex and broad malady to reduce confidently to any specific treatment strategy.

I put much more store in the clinical power of MDMA. You’re right. It has proven to be very successful with PTSD patients, but fuck, I reckon they should put it in the water supply! :)

Shouldn’t this be either:

I thought Eagletons review hit various nails on the head but of course I disagreed with it.

Or:

I thought Eagletons review hit various nails on the head and of course I agreed with it.

???

LSD has proved very efficacious in treating alcoholism and a recent trial claimed Ectasy some success in treating PTSD. Leary was a moron, his rantings made investigations into LSD and Ecstasy grind to a halt.

I am soooo glad, you raised this. It is one of my galloping hobby horses. I wrote a first year history essay, which included a discussion of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (Suck on THAT weathergirl/wilson/gould), counter-culture LSD use in the 1960s etc. I was discussing the role that said use involed a “religious” experience. My Luvvie tutor (if she is reading this, I mean that with love as she was a fantastic tutor and an otherwise very generous assessor of my musings), crossed out “religious” and wrote “spiritual”. Quite wrong. I really did mean “religious”.

doesn’t understand that Darwinism dealt a body blow not just to biblical literalism (as Orr said, something that literate churchmen had long rejected, though it was good enough to keep the plebeians in their place), but also to the Argument from Design . . .

On the contrary, from the little I’ve read by Orr, he actually spends a fair bit of time arguing strongly against any sort of argument from design. Either of these two articles provides a good taste of his rather merciless style when confronted with some of the more “sophisticated” arguments for interventionist design:

http://bostonreview.net/br21.6/orr.html

http://bostonreview.net/BR27.3/orr.html

As to the notion that the Argument from Design “is the main emotional, as well as the last remaining intellectual, source of deism generally”, this strikes me as far too unequivocal a statement. To quote Orr again:

As it happens, the idea that Darwinism is yoked to atheism, though popular, is also wrong. Of the five founding fathers of twentieth-century evolutionary biology–

You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book

Dawkins’ point is not to argue the merits of the enterpretations of the specific fairy stories of any particular religion. That would be to discuss the merits of the stitching on the Emperor’s new clothes. Or, as Sam Harris says in Letter to a Christian Nation,

The history of Christian theology is the story of bookish men parsing a collective delusion.

Nevertheless is it entertaining to watch believers squirm and, in their inability to believe it possible they are mistaken, trot out yet again their tired old ptolemaically complex rationalisations for their delusions. As someone said,

I contend that we are both atheists; I just believe in one fewer god than you. When you understand why you reject all other gods, you will understand why I reject yours.

And yeah, I can’t understand why people go for all this crap. A cursory reflection on the thousands of religions throughout the world shows they can’t all be right, and its likely they are all wrong.

Why are people so willing to subsume their commonsense for this nonsense? I’ll read Dawkins’ book because he attempts to provide a testable, empiric answer to that.

It’s typical of the disingenous games that the god-botherers play that they shift the philosophical goal posts whenever you try to pin them down. Discussions about the impossiblity of the flood morph into the complexities epistemology and thence into big-bang geometry. The plain fact is that Jehovah is a delusion and we give oxygen to Hillsong zealots by engaging in a serous discussion.

I suspect that Dawkins book will not convince anyone. But it sounds like the kind of stridently superior rant that may appeal to me. And finally, I liked your comments (3) Rafe. The only part I disagree with is “It is “

I don’t have much to add, for the moment at least, save for the stray thought that the experience of fanaticism may bear more than a little comparison to addiction. Certainly, the difficulties of withdrawal from the high it provides appear no less difficult.

I think I meant that there are really good arguments for not being dogmatic enough to call myself an atheist.

That probably means that I am also a bit feeble about making a distinction beween strong and weak agnosticism. I suppose the weak agnostic thinks that refinements in theories and experimental technology may render previously “supernatural” entities observable in some sense, like the array of subatomic particles that we now have to add to the list of the positrons, neutrons and electrons of the nice homely solar system atom that I used to love so much. Still I can’t work out how anything that might be discovered by any means that I can envisage would count as a god in the theological sense.

Andrew Bartlett, or should I say Bartlewheet, has raised an issue that I almost went on about last time. No good deed should go unpunished and so I suppose you are all about to be punished for Andrew’s good deed.

Stated in summary form: If we want to make the world safe for children and other little green things, then the greatest impediment is fanaticism. That is, fanaticism in all forms, not just religious fanaticism.

The root of fanaticism, at least for people who read, write and chatter about things, is the doctrine of justified true belief (justificationism for short). This generally has religous roots but the same structure of thought was taken up by western epistemology and the philosophy of science. So we have justificationist epistemologies, justificationist theories of rationality and justificationist theories of science. And so the spirit of justificationism is perpetuated, especially in schools of philosophy, even after people like Dawkins have given up on religion and theology.

Hence the need for non-justificationist theories of knowledge, rationality and science. However justificationism is a tenacious weed and it (or at least the people who carry it) vigorously resist efforts to replace it with a different modus operandi. I think there was a book or a movie about mind parasites which were adept in blocking messages to the brain that might emancipate the person from the influence of the parasite. It may be that justificationism functions in the same way.

Further, I suspect that people who think that fanaticism can be driven out just by stirring people up without having an antidote to the dogmatic condition are only entrenching the basic problem.

I note your comment about how stridency usually makes a poor impression on those not already converted. Without having read the book, but having heard many people speak about it, this makes me wonder whether that is one of the main aims of the author. Stridency may not convert anyone, but it can fire up on the converts, attract controversy and generally make people feel like their having an impact. One could say the same about fundamentalist Christians and Muslims or deep green environmental zealots. The fire and brimstone is what keeps people fired up, and I get the sense that Dawkins feels that athiests haven’t been fired up enough about putting their case. Thoughtful, well reasoned arguments which acknowledge that other perspectives can have some validity, even while ultimately dismissing them as flawed, rarely attract wide attention.

I ask because there is also “weak agnosticism”. Weak agnostics are those who don’t believe it is possible, now, to know whether or not God exists but believe that it may one day be possible to know.

This book promised more than that. (Bearing in mind some books deliver on the promise of changing your life). It was the possibility of having my faith, earned the hard way and with the claim of being profound as we all can make, uprooted, slammed on its head, and me reinvented by a whole new paradigm which tugged deliciously at me.

For reasons above, and like you say, watched the cricket instead.

What I want to know before crossing the road (or putting my hand into my pocket) is what difference it makes whether you accept the arguments for or against the existence of god or some other kind of supernatural being that may or may not have some relationship to …..what?

Of course religions have been the primary social institutions that transmitted ideas about the way the world is and the way that we should live. And gods or supreme deities are central to most religions. But science (and philosophical cosmology ) have taken over the task of talking about the way the world is, not that this means that the positivist/empiricist versions of science have the last word on the matter because metaphysics will never be eliminated by positivism (it is another metaphysical doctrine itself).

So when we are talking about the way the world is, we are talking about the most robust or durable ideas about science and metaphysics that we have at our disposal. It is not apparent that talk about supernatural deities adds anything more helpful than picturesque language and appealing metaphors in this context. (Appealing to people who want to keep the idea of deities in the game, I mean. Others are happy to consign them to the bench or drop them from the list entirely).

Moving on to the way we are supposed to live, it is again hard to see how the existence or nonexistence of the alleged deity makes any difference. Given the is/ought situation (the dualism of facts and values) it remains our problem how we live and how we choose our moral principles and I don’t see how the deity, even if proved to exist , would assist in working out how to live our lives and relate to other people or form positions on policy issues, great and small.

And remember, how ever many wickets Warnie takes, offspinners are the gentlemen of the game!

As I first came across it, Dawkin’s The God Delusion was promised us (potential readers) something along the lines that it would change our views of religion – in Dawkin’s favour – forever.

Big call; comes at once of course with invoked interest and cynicism alike.

Having read others’ reviews now, including the excellent one above, it’s clear Dawkins hasn’t delivered on that promise. The question remains of course whether it’s worth chewing through a person’s problems (the title itself suggests a problematic) to find expected nuggets of value. But overall, and unusually, not delivering upon his promise as evident in others’ disappointments seems enough to move further along the shelf.

I strongly recommend Wittgenstein to anyone interested in the idea of religious belief – there is at least one book on the subject. His approach is especially interesting on the meaning of religious propositions, somewhat along the lines sketched out in your final excerpt.