

Good And Bad Reasons For Believing (Dawkins letter to his daughter) - twampss
http://members.fortunecity.com/templarser/dawkins2.html

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kls
_People who believe even slightly different things from each other go to war
over their disagreements._

This is flawed reasoning, while men go to war over religion, they go to war
over an assortment of dogma. If religion where eliminated tomorrow, a new
dogma would take it's place and the killing started all over again.

I know it is flawed because I was guilty of it. I despised religion for war,
but after deep reflection I realized that what I truly despised was human
nature. This is hard for an atheist to admit because all their faith is put
into humanity. To place the flaw at humanities feet is to admit faith in a
flawed pillar.

Blaming religion for war and death is akin to blaming cars (with drunk drivers
in them) for death. They are merely a vessel for the actions of humans. How
humans use them is a reflection of that humans nature and without religion
they would find another outlet for those desires. By blaming religion one is
giving credit to the concept of god, for the atrocities instead of just seeing
it as a bunch of dumb ass upright primates doing what humans do.

Anything else is holding out false hope that we are more virtuous than that.
It is a common falsely held belief by the more intelligent of our species, due
to the fact that we reason from our own perspective, those of us with higher
reasoning like to hold out hope that the less intelligent will come around,
when the reality is their are portions of our species that are only slightly
less primal than apes. In some ways more.

The more intelligent project their understanding and their capacities onto the
less and are always disappointed when they lack the capacity. This usually
turns to blaming some dogma rather than blaming humanity.

I am constantly amazed when I watch the news at the primal nature of much of
our fellow humanity, holding out hope of an mass awakening of that portion of
humanity is fanciful at best. They lack the capacity to understand the nature
of their primal ways. But to blame religion for that nature is to a cop-out at
best and delusional.

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smokestack
Seems off-topic for HN

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hc
the funny thing is, this doesn't sound more or less patronizing than anything
else that comes out of richard dawkins

