WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

Someone sent me this link to an article on the Council for Secular Humanism website that nearly knocked me off my chair when I read it.

No wonder the French were "unwilling". Blimey.

What troubles me is the notion that he might have had the same kind of weird-ass conversation with Tony Blair, and Blair just said "Yes, you are absolutely right, George! We must fight Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, in all his forms!" :eek:

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

i know i shouldn't have, but reading this caused me to laugh:D

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The 'ole fing's daft
I dunno why
You 'ave to laugh
Or else you cry
You 'ave to live
Or else you die
You 'ave to laugh
Or else you cry.

:D

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

"We may be the generation that sees Armageddon."
- Ronald Reagan, in a 1980 interview with Jim Bakker

"For the first time ever, everything is in place for the Battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ."
- Ronald Reagan, commenting in 1971 to James Mills regarding events in Libya

and somewhere I have quotes from the Bush administation members who believed in the rapture.


So much for the Seneca (or was it Lucretius?) quote about religion being regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Still, it supports my 'president-as-puppet' theory of power...

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Puppet of whom exactly, though, Decks?

Are we talking military-industrial complex or the Illuminati?

Seriously though. And these people dare to call Muslims "extremists". They are complete whack jobs.

If someone in this country were to start telling people that we have to attack people because Gog and Magog infests their country and it is a mission from God, they would be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

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See...this is why I never bought the oil conspiracy. I thought it was too flattering to the neo cons. There always seemed to be a more dominant mumbo jumbo angle to the whole thing.

Anyone hear of the book "The Family" by Jeff Sharlet? Members of congress, policy wonks, etc trying to establish a "christian totalitarianism"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3npWdChcGo

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

There was no oil "conspiracy".

But do try to visualize, maybe, a little bit of all of the points mentioned above. The mess we're in cannot be boiled down to one(1) all-encompassing-pin-pointed reason. Life isn't a Hollywood film with a happily ever after ya know.

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

well I guess that was sort of a legitimate retort so I'll bite and respond.

Believing that Iraq was for oil is a conspiracy because it contradicts the stated reasons for the invasion, its not provable, but is nevertheless a reasonable theory.

I don't buy it because I subscribe to yet another conspiracy theory, that is probably no more provable beyond doubt, but I find nevertheless is more justifiable by the evidence. That is, the iraq war was an ideological conflict. The motivating ideology can range from spreading "american values" to a full on apocalyptic crusade. Its not so interesting to me what the exact ideology was. Whether or not Bush told Chirac that the battle of Gog and Magog was upon us is not as interesting, from a perspective of understanding the causes, as it is to simply claim that the causes were religious. Religous devotion to Jesus, religious devotion to "american way of life" or "american democracy" whatever.

If you like I can go back and outline all of the aspects of the conflict that betray the religious, as opposed to the cold, mercenary competition for resources, or strategies of defense in the "war on terror."

Regarding the dangers of christian fascism as a "hollywood movie" conspiracy.... Please read American Fascism by Chris Hedges, Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill, and the family by Jeff Sharlet, and lets talk about whether or not a push for christian autocracy is a sandwich board toting crazy's concern, or if its something worthwhile to discuss.

As an example, from the video I posted, Sharlet referenced the push to build megachurches on all military bases. Do you think the intention is to instill values of brotherly love and forgiveness in the members of our armed forces? Its to theocratize what should be and must be our democratic military.

So I just took your post seriously and responded with sincerity, please don't make me regret it by simply tagging this post with trollish knee jerk nonsense like you do all my other ones.

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Who? Me?

Also, I would never knee jerk you, you're too tall.

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this post offends me, not only in that you make the implication that all religion is a foolish notion, but that you make the implication that everyone who follows a religion must be a fool. now, i'm not sure if this report about bush is true; it sounds like horseshit, but regardless of that, his supposed quote is a different case entirely than Ronald Reagan's. Ronald Reagan expressed his personal opinion that Christ may come again very soon, and to a religious person, the rapid advance of technology to the point that terroristic acts are carried out daily, and the similarity to some events in the bible, may lead a person to think the end times are coming; whether you agree with that or not is irrelevent as it is a personal opinion. Bush's supposed quote is entirely different because that would mean that he based an entire military operation and the welfare of the country on such a personal opinion. The argument should be against Bush risking the lives of soldiers and taking the lives of civilians because of a personal religious belief, not a call for historic quotes from Republicans to bash their personal beliefs.

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Oh man, how do we walk them through this one...?

HMM.

a. Scripted routines?
b. Patterns?
c. desperately random?
d. all the above.


I'm kinda drawn to mark (a). But that may be just because I don't watch the zombie boob tube(as in television) very much and have always had dreams of doing a little song and dance on Broadway. Ya know, like, lights coming down and spot-light on me doing my do. & all, "We're in the Moneeeey, we're in the moneeey!". . . Yeah, right.

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

Why, Dick Cheney of course!

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O.K., yeah, but compliment my singing routine. I've been working on it all week. And my feet hurt too.

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Don't you DARE put words in my mouth.

I'm SO offended! :rolleyes: :D

Seriously, I did no such thing. I held the notion of Bush's (and Reagan's) apparent beliefs up to that quote from a Greek philosopher, with the only implication being to call one or the other into question.

As it happens I do think believing in such things is foolish. I do happen to think that anyone who believes Jesus to be the son of God, Thor to be the god of Thunder or anything else based on one of the world's many and varied creation myths throughout history (including Gog and Magog) is being foolish. I make no apologies for that. To quote your post, "whether you agree with that or not is irrelevent as it is a personal opinion."

However, believing in foolish things does not make someone "a fool" per se, just like acting stupidly does not mean someone "is" stupid. I don't judge someone's entire being based solely on some beliefs I happen to consider foolish. As such, I do not consider you a fool bryant, I just consider your religious belief foolish.

That distinction is not spurious sophistry or passive aggression, it's how I genuinely try to approach people. It would be crazy to go around dismissing everyone who believes in religion as "a fool".

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erm; is there another source for chirac's comments, other than this bloke telling us that he's saying it?

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I've just watched this.

Sends a chill down my (cold, cruel, godless) spine.

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No one ever listens to me...

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I chuckled at your kneejerk quip jOHN.

Everything else you posted went way above my head. (as it were.)

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While I won't be shocked if it's a true story, it does seem slightly dubious in it's anectodal nature.

That aside, as an atheist, I personally find the fact that religion is so crucial to holding office in the first place pretty disturbing. As far as I'm concerned, religion is a purely man-made institution that began as a means to provide answers to scary questions, like "what is that big, bright, hot thing in the sky that flies overhead every day?" and "what happens when we die?" In the past, those questions were answered through deities like Ra, Thor, and Zeus. Now it's God, or Allah, or whoever else other contemporary religions worship, but the motivation and concept is exactly the same. Personally, I would love to see a national leader who can check all of this at the door (or even not be religious - I can't imagine that actually happening though), and govern based on reason, logic, and the basic needs of our society - because to be perfectly honest, powerful people who believe in and govern by using this kind of mythology at all make me extremely uneasy. That goes equally for Republicans and Democrats.

So all of that is basically meant to make the point that if this story is true, it's honestly no more scary to me than the fact that all of our political leaders finish virtually every speech with statements like "God bless America", and base much of what they do on what their religion tells them is right and wrong. Nothing that any political leader does in their job should be motivated by religious ideology, because it will inherently alienate and ignore the beliefs of a significant portion of the population while at the very least appearing to cater only to like-minded religious folks.

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well; didn't that used to happen until regan's mob realised that it was a hitherto unplayed-to audience? a MASSIVE untapped resource. after that proved such a success, there wasn't not a party that dare not woo them as they wouldn't have a prayer (ahem!)

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(shaking both hands with five fingers extended, taps dancing, and all smiles)


Every morning
Every evening
Ain't we got fun
Not much money
Oh but honey
Ain't we got fun?
The rent's unpaid dear
We haven't a bus
But smiles were made dear
For people like us
In the winter in the Summer
Don't we have fun?
Times are bum and getting bummer
Still we have fun
There's nothing surer
The rich get rich and the poor get children
In the meantime
In the between time
Ain't we got fun?


International Group recording. Or something. Oh, all ya'all need to view the lyrics in their entirety. I think Deckard's giving me one of those "hard love" routines, but I will pursue, I WILL pursue... *burp*

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Completely agree and, having grown up in a cultish religion I'd wager I'm more bitter and militant than the average atheist who grew up with out religious pressures.

Having said that I would like to suggest that its quite possible to be secular and still be religous. For example Maoism is a religion, or any kind of fervent nationalism that demands unquestioning loyalty. Just as its possible to believe in God but not be religious. So I guess I would have no problem with a president who had faith in God, as long as that faith wasn't administered by someone like Hagee, Doug Coe, Falwell, that dude who got caught with jOHN rODRIGUEZ in the back of a car and a meth pipe.

To be "religious" is to adhere to an authoritarian, unquestioning mindset that reflect an authoritarian unquestioning social system.

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I wish.

Correction to the song above: It's by International PLAYGROUND. Could not be more fitting.

Wiki dis sht kids: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't_We_Got_Fun%3F


OMG, more fitting: link to cartoon


****

Also, I'm doing all this re-re-re-editing on purpuse. ;)

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

Out of interest, when you say God, are you including the individual beliefs of the religion?

What about a president - of either party - who had faith in Gog and Magog? I'm not being facetious, but would that not make you feel uncomfortable?

And if so, then what about a president who believes that a man was born to a virgin, performed miracles, and was resurrected?

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It honestly would not make me feel uncomfortable, and I'll tell you why.

Your question used the word "believe" which is epistemologically weak compared to "know" or existing in a consciousness of knowing. And that's the point I'm trying to make. I'd rather have a president who believes in burning bushes and noah's ark, than an atheist president who *knows* or thinks they know that global communism achieved by murder and imperialism will usher in a golden age of the working man, or that global capitalism achieved by murder and imperialism will usher in a golden age of freedom.

now if you were to ask me if I would feel uncomfortable with a president who unquestioningly accepts the truth of the bible and acts accordingly then yes. I would have a problem with that.

i'm trying to argue the usage of the word religion to be abstracted from mystical, esp. judeo christian elements and more describe a method of thought, whose opposite is not atheism, but more specifically the scientific method.

edit: just to preemptively defend this. I know religion stricken from anything mystical sounds bizarre. Its only because mystical things, like all unproven things, tend to fertilize in the minds of the religious. Ivan Lenin's tomb is a great example. Here are all these supposed atheists IE anti-religious, who call christianity a tool for the bourgoise, embalming lenin and putting him on display like a fucking pharaoh. The idea is to create a sense of immortality, and eternal existence, which is decidedly "religious" in the sense we take it to mean conventionally. But this shows that religion preceeds mysticism, not the other way around.

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O.K., so to sum it up Deck, after dotting his' "i"'s and crossing his' "t"'s and then crossing our eyes and dotting our teas, his answer to your third question was "yes"...

:D

Man, I can't wait for the new Orb album I'm so fucking bored.

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HAHAHA yes jOHN, exactly. I forget we work in blanket statements around here like "Republicans SUCKX!!!!!' or "HILLARY CLINTONz RULES!!!" so to boil it down to your level of discourse "RELIGIOUS PEOPLE ARE LAMERZ!!! ATHEISTS ARE AWESOME BECAUSE THEY WOULDN'T BURN PEOPLE AT THE STAKE SO THEY ARE PERFECT!!!!"

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

o.k., TRANSLATION: wrrooff, wrrororrrroooofff, wroof, woof, woooofff etc. etc.

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I think I would too.

You said you would feel uncomfortable with a president who "unquestioningly accepts the truth of the bible". But what is, for example, 'believing' in a virgin birth if not unquestionably accepting the truth of the bible? An awful lot of vagueness and embarrassingly undeserved respect is hidden behind that word 'belief' (even moreso 'faith'). And understandably so. We all have friends and loved ones who do subscribe to such beliefs, and most of the time we don't want to make them feel awkward unless they've shown their willingness to get into a debate about it. And besides, subscribing to an organized religion has pay-offs beyond the simple matter of truth, and so we typically don't press home the distinctions of having faith and knowing. It seems untoward. And around this vacuum has grown an (IMO) unwarranted reverence for the concept of religious faith.

But discussing it here in reference to a leader, I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel more comfortable with someone who didn't have faith in superstition and myth (if you'll excuse the triple negative).

Some will insist, 'what business is it of yours what someone's private thoughts are?' Well we all have an interest in someone's driving force, their motivation, and we all judge what we can muster about people's thoughts and opinions and beliefs, particularly belonging to those who govern us. It doesn't make us thought Nazis. Also I don't want to suggest I'm black and white about this. Belief in a Spinozan type of god is barely going to register. Belief in the literal truth of everything written in the Bible or the Qur'an or belief in the Ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses is going to freak me out. And in between is a whole lot else.

But for me it's not just a question of how they administer their faith to others, but also what they have faith in. I think the Spanish philosopher de Unamuno is correct when he writes faith is in its essence simply a matter of will, not of reason. Believing is essentially wishing to believe. And I am going to be more uncomfortable with someone of a mindset that chooses to believe in something so utterly baseless or of highly dubious veracity than someone who does not. About the only saving grace is that they're possibly believing in it because so many other people do too. But I will almost certainly question their judgment and feel uncomfortable if we learn they are having faith in obvious nonsense, even if they never utilize those beliefs to authorize a war or ban abortion.

Sure. The fundamental opposition being between dogma and the scientific outlook. In that sense, Christianity and Communism are on the same side, they are two of the great dogmatic systems, despite being rivals at one time or another. On the other side, the scientific outlook/humanism.

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hmmm. really good question. to be honest I don't have an answer for you. The relationship between faith and knowledge is easily the corner stone of all religious mischief, so its important by those who want to use religion to manipulate to keep the faith/knowledge relationship as complicated and ambiguous as possible, so that you don't know where one ends and the other begins. This is how a person who embarks on an honest spiritual quest with an open mind are so succeptible to be selling magazines on a street corner with a shaved head two weeks later.

Anyway, in terms of faith versus knowledge, my own take is that there is no such thing as knowledge outside of the analytic and the a priori, in other words we can know things in definitions and mathematics, but that's about it. so that our relationship to, for example, the bohr model of the atom is one of faith. i know. its insane, but i'm a little unhinged.

Its interesting, your Unamano quote. the american pragmatists william james took him literally and basically argued that we can "will" into reality truths in which we instill faith. Which is totally awesome and practically useless, but then in the context of modern philisophy its a drop in the bucket of all th attempts to square what we want to know, what we think we know, and what we actually can and do know.


And I agree!! But I think this is because we're all exhausted from all the recent dickheads whose belief in myths were the smoke that indicated the fires of authority, heirarchy, and unquestioning demands beneath.

Yes exactly and that's really the point I was trying to make. I was not attempting to disagree with you or sean, but to expand on it. If we're going to get rid of god fearing politicians, lets get rid of the real problem, not the symptom of the problem. The belief in God is a symptom of the religious but its isn't the only symptom. And its possible to believe in God, like spinoza and the other deists of the enlightenment, without being religious and its possible to be religious without believing in God. My interest is cutting out the totality of the cancer from humanity, not born again christians. But I'd be happy if they fucked off first :D

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And Strangelet's just a theory, LOOK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet


Damn, guy, you're just theory. Are you even really here? Here, put on these red leather chaps, then I'll believe you actually exist.

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That was actually pretty funny, I have to hand it to you.

I mean, you're still an insufferable troll, one with whom I have hard time being in the same universe much less having to negotiate if I want to talk with people I enjoy talking to.

But yeah, that was a good one. Ok, run along to bed. kiss goodnight. you know how angry nurse ratchet gets when she catches you out of your cell and using the staff computers.

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Don't disturb me, I'm watching porn.

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more like making youtube videos. this HAS to be you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYNAXVwn6Tw

play me out keyboard, cat. I need to go do something more constructive like soak my head.

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Not me, but I think he's an adorable kid.

That Keyboard Kitty thing was funny in the beginning, but now the makers are accepting the utmost of drivel and calling it entertainment. I haven't watched one in ages, it's gotten to be very crude and ugly. Not my cup of tea.

You've dragged your* own thread into the gutter ya know?

How about those chaps? Tell the truth, do you wear leather? You do ride the motorbikes, no? Please answer the question, I swear I won't make fun of you. :D


*My bad, you didn't start this one. :rolleyes:

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

I agree. It's also this need to respect that often puts something beyond challenge in many circles. On an individual level, what this often amounts to is avoiding embarrassing people by exposing these outlandish claims for what they are - hope without evidence - letting things go unchallenged in a way that we don't with their 'beliefs' about mathematics or geology. We're expected not to enquire too closely into someone's belief in, say, Armageddon being around the corner, or Jesus being the son of God, or the veracity of claims made by any of the other various religions, even though many believers insist that they 'know' these things to be true and that an ancient book offers 'proof' (and on this, I'm reminded of a past conversation with Myrrh)

I agree to a degree, but this is the point at which the difference between dogma and the scientific method (aka an open mind) comes into play. I think we have to be honest and admit that our 'belief' about the working of the atom has rather more to back it up than the belief that Jesus was born to a virgin. And of course the Bohr model has itself been refined over the decades and I don't doubt that it would be dropped just as quickly as the plum pudding model of the atom a century ago were we to uncover something that falsified it. Additionally, there's usually a clear and honest distinction in science between things of which we are fairly certain (a conclusion reached through repeated experimentation and open, honest and robust peer review - e.g. quantum electrodynamics) and things which are speculation, such as string/M-theory. In other words, there's an honesty about what we know and don't know.

In the sense of faith and worship, or in the sense of pursuing an interest with great vigour?

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you might have noticed, but I tend to not always be so respectful. its not something i'm proud of. But then I don't really find it disrespectful to question or honestly disagree, the people I talk to see it that way, though, unfortunately.

I don't think scientists are as honest as their methods, which is the problem. Being human, and not a computer, they have to dress the probability that something is axiomatically true with subjective descriptors. Unless a theorem is derived symbolically, scientists claiming we "know" its true is converting a numeric probability into an analog english word that expresses the level of that probability. Repeated experiments do nothing more than push the probability to 1, but as the truth value converges to 1 it never reaches the value, unless its proven outside of experiential inference.

For all practical usage, a theory converging to 1 and having the identity value of 1 have been argued to be the same thing, as in the ideas of charles sanders peirce. But even he argues that its still a process of "fixating one's belief". To fixate one's belief I think is the best description of the process we undertake in which to "know" something. But its illusory, because knowledge is no more than just asserted, static belief. I mean this is just my personal philosophy, so take it for what it's worth.


Hmmm. Not really what I was thinking. I think being religious has more to do with being authoritarian, dogmatic, unquestioning, hyper-filtering reality, intellectually inert, not only asserting grand simplistic truths, but being completely unwilling to ever question them. None of these things imply a particular set of dogmas, a particular authority, a mystical set of truths to never question. So I just don't think its fair for atheists to pin these qualities on only those who believe in God, whole sale.

I mean before Richard Dawkins came around, it used to be very respectable to be agnostic, or even deist. And because of him there are an army of scientists who are coming out *religiously* against the existence of God.

I don't personally believe in God, I just don't like people telling me I'm a fool for asking the question, which is what a geneticist did at a party a while back. He was angrily shutting down the possibility of anything remotely non random existing in cosmology and when I brought things like kurzweil's singularitarianism, or gardner's biocosm theories, which is not exactly the fucking bible, mind you, he was literally twitching with rage. I left the encounter thinking: I'm really sorry for you because you're going to let nothing awe inspiring ever happen to you.

just as I feel sorry for the mormons against which I'm now so bitterly polarized.


edit: by the way, interesting article relating how the neurochemical responses in terms of happiness are the same between those who are theists and atheists as long as they both have strong convictions

http://secularright.org/wordpress/?p=2421

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

Thing is, it's not just the religious who do this.

Stiiiillll wondering about the leatha...

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

All people are fallible, that's true. But then once we accept that truth, we still have a marked distinction to acknowledge. When we get into comparing scientists with dogmatists (or rather, those choosing the scientific method versus those choosing the dogmatic one), I'm happy enough that one represents a group of people mostly striving for knowledge in a significantly more honest way than the other. And that's really the difference and why I tend to champion the scientific method (or more loosely, science) rather than scientists, per se. After all, the greatest minds in history have not gone unaffected by stubbornness or pride or simply become too personally attached to an early belief (Einstein, Hoyle). We're all susceptible to dogma to some degree, be it our own or someone else's - but the absolute necessity of dogma in organised religion means there's a definite distinction to be acknowledged, and a red light flashing, right off the bat.

But I'm happy with that. I'm happy with an analog word expressing a level of probability :) I take it as read that the truth value never reaches 1, and that what we call certainty is an abstract idea(l), like the perfect circle. (No doubt believers would jump in at this point and attribute this level of certainty and perfection to 'God' in some aesthetically-pleasing but highly nebulous way!) But the point is, even with the restrictions on attaining absolute knowledge (and the semantic restrictions used to convey it), if religious people could even get to the stage of saying something like "maybe Jesus was born to a virgin" it would be an improvement. Even moreso, "Jesus probably wasn't born to a virgin", or "Jesus almost certainly wasn't born to a virgin", all of which are more intellectually honest than "Jesus was" or "Jesus almost certainly was". With that in mind, I don't feel that the statements at the two extremes ("Jesus was born to a virgin" / "Jesus was not born to a virgin") should be viewed as equally wrong. I think a quest for honesty spurs us to recognise that while both statements of certainty are ultimately illusory, we can still attribute a much greater likelihood to the latter than the former.

Probably a good point at which to quote Robert Anton Wilson:

(the last one made me :D )

In that sense of course it comes down to believing something too willingly and uncritically - the Bible, the Qu'ran, an authority figure, etc. So this is an issue of credulity as well as intellectual honesty. But then religions cater for emotional and social needs so profound that their intellectual shortcomings almost become besides the point - it becomes easy to believe an obvious untruth, and once you've invested so much personal identity into it, difficult to unbelieve it.

Wilson's central tenet, about us being "agnostic about everything", ties in with your point about knowledge being illusory ("because knowledge is no more than just asserted, static belief") which is true but I find myself still coming back to the methodical difference in how we set about forming those beliefs, and the belief that not all beliefs are equal (he says, disappearing up his own backside!)

I'm not sure I agree that people witness those characteristics and define it as being religious tbh, but it's possible I'm missing your point.

In my experience, those qualities are normally attributed to people who go further into their claims than those offered by, say, pantheism. What's more, I sense there's an unspoken acceptance that they are attributed in a progressive, scaling way. For instance, taking two theistic extremes, deism and fundamentalist Islam are blatantly uneasy bedfellows, and in light of that, clumsily talking about religion (or even 'belief in God') is woefully inadequate. But that's only because the current theist-atheist debate is often coarse and the setting rarely conducive to making such distinctions. However, certain prominent (and no so prominent) atheists have certainly made such distinctions, on numerous occasions.

I hear what you're saying. And of course before Dawkins came around, it used to be very unrespectable to be an atheist. It still is, of course, especially in the US, but he has clawed back a little respect, though I don't happen to agree with the method (or the wisdom of the whole 'coming out' campaign, which seems little more than a silly "Oh look, we've got Daniel Radcliffe and Brad Pitt as members, and I've got some new friends" type movement).

On the matter of agnosticism though, Dawkins has repeatedly acknowledged he is 'technically' an agnostic on the question of God's existence, but that he's agnostic about it in the same way as he's agnostic about fairies at the bottom of his garden, and to all intents and purposes it makes sense to round up both hypotheses to "I don't believe". I think he is largely right in what he says about the redundancy of agnosticism, HOWEVER my only two caveats to that being (1) that he needs to define what he means by 'God' (are we talking the falsifiable hypotheses of an intervening God?) and (2) that we need a shared understanding of the words 'atheism' and 'agnosticism' if we're going to choose one over the other.

On the last point, I'm inclined to take the position of George H Smith who insisted it's not only sufficient but necessary to define an atheist as "a person who does not believe in the existence of God" rather than as one who believes God does not exist. (Smith: "Since an atheist need make no claims about God, it is up to the believer to prove her case"). In other words, the 'a' points to being without something, in this case, without theism, without belief in God, similar to how the prefix is used in other 'lacking' words (apolitical/asexual)

Unfortunately, I think the more people like Dawkins (who I still admire a great deal) cultivate a group identity of atheism, the more he risks atheism being unthinkingly dismissed as 'just another kind of religion' or more confusingly, 'faith position' - with the positive belief that 'God does not exist'. Which of course is one of the two definitions that appear in most dictionaries, but is essentially a biased definition because it implies a universe with a god-shaped hole in it. Kind of like, Atheism [noun] = a belief that God (who exists) doesn't exist. It's always interesting to me that self-described atheists, in my experience, almost always choose the looser definition to describe themselves (lacking belief in God) whereas theists and agnostics more often choose to define atheism as a positive belief (certainty that God does not exist). I sometimes wonder if we could agree on the semantics, we might come closer to agreeing on the philosophy.

He just sounds like an insecure dick!

Re: WMD? Nope. Oil? Nope. Try Gog and Magog...
 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the religious....

(will respond in more detail in a bit...)