My Comment on "PZ Myers: Can We Raise the Standard Please?"

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by woozle on July 6, 2010 at 4:11pm

Seconded. "Atheist dogma" is an oxymoron, unless the explicit rejection of dogma is itself dogma -- in which case there is no such thing as a dogma-free idea, making the assertion of atheist dogmatism unfalsifiable.

I've added atheist dogma to my list of troll phrases.

Permalink Reply by Jay A Small on July 18, 2010 at 11:36pm

Dogma? An athiest wanders out of the cold into "the group" on their own, often lonely, accord. Reason alone is often the only evangalism. But the religions can only throw the most disgusting insults in response to solid evidence. Not so ironic that all they come up with is the very thing that makes them so disgusting a social disease.

Permalink Reply by Joe Running on July 19, 2010 at 6:24am

Jay, I am convinced that the religions tag us with their words, like "fundamentalist" and "dogma", because in most cases they simply cannot think outside the godbox. Either that or they simply refuse to try. What I find ironic is that when those terms are aimed at atheists, it's often meant to be insulting, which to me demeans their own position since they happily apply those terms to themselves.

Permalink Reply by woozle on July 19, 2010 at 6:44am

I think PZ made a similar point awhile back: if science is "just as bad as" religion, then aren't you admitting something about religion? (And shouldn't you be looking for alternatives that aren't "bad"?)

Permalink Reply by godfree inseaofred on October 26, 2010 at 11:02pm

Having read the commentary, I understand that not everyone is looking at this as what we can currently do, but rather what we would like to see.

I would like to say that the statement would likely come under the jurisdiction of the Lemon ruling. The judge in Kitzmiller v Dover stated it as "As articulated by the Supreme Court, under the Lemon test, a government sponsored message violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment if: (1) it does not have a secular purpose; (2) its principal or primary effect advances or inhibits religion; or (3) it creates an excessive entanglement of the government with religion."

It would seem to me that the statement would not run into problems based on this criteria. It is a statement made in a textbook being used in a school. As far as I can tell, the statement was not included at the behest of any government agency or official.

I would also argue that schools would also have a very difficult time teaching any thing like folklore or fables, or how to tell the differences between these and other forms of literature, if we are not able to use any bits of literature as examples so long as anyone believes them to be true.

There are many Christian religions that do not view the Genesis take on creation to be true. They are not alone. I think a better way for the writer(s) to have made the point would have been to include other discredited stories of creation, not just the Christian version. That would have made the point that all of the previous versions of creation have been discredited, and this theory that you are about to learn is what we currently understand of how life actually evolved.