Starboy

Welcome johgalt! I guess it all depends on what you mean by ignorance. Certainly religious leaders encourage their followers to study and know about their particular religion, and they are against ignorance of what they deem to be necessary knowledge. To the extent that a particular religion has labeled other knowledge as wrong or forbidden and encourages its adherents to disregard such knowledge then I guess you could say that such religions do foster ignorance. You could definitely accuse any religion of fostering ignorance that freely categorizes knowledge as good or evil.

Starboy

emotional

Priestcraft fosters ignorance. All religions began as open studies of the universe until the priests declared teachings as etched on stone. Priests: Jewish priests, Christian priests, Muslim mullahs, and modern materialist priests such as Richard Dawkins.

(sorry, I couldn't resist )

Kimpatsu

Richard Dawkins says nothing that can't be verified independently by experiment. When has religion ever stood up to such scrutiny?

Vitalij

At present moment, there are too many pseudoreligions. They are very convenient to the false priests and huge masses of people and they do foster ignorance. Earlier I posted the thread BIBLE - THE ROTTEN FOUNDATION OF FALSE RELIGIONS that goes into some details on the subject. Enjoy the reading!

Vitalij
shock-site "Earth - the planet of biorobots"

emotional

Boy, are you gullible! Haven't been reading enough of Dawkins, have you? All the pseudoscientific stuff of "memes", all the metaphysical tirades against religion all over his books, saying such things as "religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end" (this from his Religion's Misguided Missiles) -- Dawkins makes plenty of statements that are metaphysical, outside of science, cannot be verified by experiment. He's a dogmatist just like the fundy ministers he derides.

Let also Rupert Sheldrake speak about Dawkins and his kindred:

Kimpatsu

Aren't you the literalist! A meme is used to describe the way tastes in fashion, music, etc. filter through a community. Dawkins does not, and never has, said they are a real virus. Attacking them as such is just a strawman on your part. Memes are certainly not pseudoscience.
Nor is it incumbent upon Gould, Dawkins, et al, to disprove ID. It is incumbent upon IDers to prove their hypothesis, which none of them have ever done. Further, as Dawkins often points out, the universe has no need for the supernatural to explain its origins or existence, so to postulate the existence of said deity is to add an unneccessary extra layer, which violates the principle of Occam's razor. Sheldrake is an ass, which fact we've discussed here on these boards before.

emotional

You can't touch memes, you can't do controlled experiments on memes, you can't prove their existence empirically. Memes may therefore be an appropriate construct when doing a soft science such as sociology, but they are not appropriate for a zoologist like Richard Dawkins. When he talks about memes, he is stepping outside his area of jurisdiction. Let Dawkins talk about wildlife, that's his job. But to wed science -- yes science, that innocent search for truth, wherever it may lead -- to a philosophy of blind, purposeless materialism is a desecration of it. Dawkins should not be complaining about the unattractiveness of science when he does all in his power to make it unattractive. He's made science into a religion, he's gone and blasphemed the pure name of science by syncretising it with philosophy.



I wasn't talking about ID, I was talking about materialist philosophy. Dawkins has committed the sacrilege of wedding science to a philosophy. Science should not be wedded to any philosophy -- not theism, not materialism, not anything.



AHAHAH! I just new Occam's Razor would be coming! All Hail Occam's Razor! That key to the truth! All Hail the One True Idol! But may I remind you: simplicity, or parsimony, is not, repeat not, the key to truth. Universe without God is simpler? Certainly. But that doesn't make it true (or false).

Sheldrake is an open-minded scientist (and before you say "so open-minded that his brains have fallen out", I shall counter with "Dawkins is so close-minded that his brains have squashed inside"). Sheldrake, unlike Dawkins, does not see any imposed limitations on what science should be exploring. Sheldrake explores, whereas Dawkins merely preaches dogma. The future innovations of science won't come from dogmatists such as Dawkins. They're orthodoxy. Innovations are going to come from such mavericks and "crackpots" and "loonies" as Sheldrake. Because they haven't closed their minds.

Kimpatsu

Memes are empirically verifiable, which is all Dawkens ever said they were. They are a way to describe a sociological phenomenon. Dawkins isn't closed-minded; Sheldrake, however, starts from the supposition that god just has to be true, and then casts around for evidence to back up his faith. That's not science.

emotional

You realise how that could be inverted and be true? Here:

Sheldrake isn't close-minded; Dawkins, however, starts from the supposition that God just has to be false, and then casts around for evidence to back up his faith. That's not science.

Kimpatsu

But Sheldrake's the one making the extraordinary claim, so the onus is on him to supply the extraordinary evidence. Consequently, the claim cannot be inverted.