{"id":187,"date":"2007-05-02T22:35:03","date_gmt":"2007-05-03T04:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/?p=187"},"modified":"2008-06-29T10:38:12","modified_gmt":"2008-06-29T16:38:12","slug":"the-dog-is-dead-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/?p=187","title":{"rendered":"The Dog Is Dead, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thinking a bit more about my diatribe on atheistic fundamentalism, the thing that creates bloodshed, horror and oppression in our world is not religion — as ably demonstrated by atheistic mass-murderers like Mao. What creates suffering is dogma<\/em>, the absolute conviction that one is correct and all others are wrong. Dogma certaintly plays a part in religion, but it is not unique to it. Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot were plenty dogmatic on, respectively, culture, economics, race and all three.<\/p>\n

What we are seeing in the vilification of all religion and the pronouncement that the religious are objectively disordered while the areligious are enlightened is something truly frightning — dogmatic atheism. I’m not saying Richard Dawkins will be loading people into boxcars anytime soon (he’d call ’em a taxi). I’m saying the intellectual process<\/em> is one guaranteed to produce stupidity from otherwise smart people.<\/p>\n

On a related note, the dogmatic atheists often use the oft-quoted by usually misquoted and misunderstood Occam’s Razor<\/a> to “prove” that religion is silly.<\/p>\n

Occam’s Razor is a useful tool in the “did terrorists fly planes into buildings or did George Bush [insert insanely complicated conspiracy theory here]” sense. But it is a blunt instrument and not a fantastic one at that. The theory of evolution and our understanding of physical cosmology are insanely<\/em> complex. To be honest, Occam’s Razor favors the religious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thinking a bit more about my diatribe on atheistic fundamentalism, the thing that creates bloodshed, horror and oppression in our world is not religion — as ably demonstrated by atheistic mass-murderers like Mao. What creates suffering is dogma, the absolute conviction that one is correct and all others are wrong. Dogma certaintly plays a part … Continue reading The Dog Is Dead, Part II<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BzKF-31","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelsiegel.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}