It continues to amuse me that within 10 years of the New Atheism movement's rise to prominence and their declaration that religion was the root of all strife, the Atheism+ faction had split off from the New Atheist movement; and members of the two factions hated each other.
And a lot of these people were 50+ years old and didn't have youth and inexperience as an excuse.
The rank and file were (disclosure: I was one of those "20-somethings", though I wasn't raging against my parents and had moved on from caring about most of this shit by the time Atheism+ became a thing), but the people a bit higher on the food chain like PZ Meyers and Richard Dawkins were more than old enough to know better.
They lack both granularity and actually adhering to their philosophies.
Religion is a source of some strife, but also has positive effects on society. Nothing is all good or all bad, isn't that the whole point of moral relativism?
Having spent approximately half my life in a religious right part of the country and the other half in a secularist left part, I can comfortably say that the main problem is that people do not put enough thought into whatever philosophy they spend their time around. It's the "fish don't know they're in water" problem.
Many lay Christians (and many in church authority) have trouble providing any practical justification for why someone should adhere to the faith. To an engineer sort like myself, if something is true it should also be useful (and more useful than things that aren't true); and I had trouble getting good answers as to the utility of church teachings. Especially when "uncomfortable" truths like "women should not be in positions of leadership" were raised.
Secularists spend too little time actually thinking through their personal philosophy. If you reject all the pre-packaged ones and believe it's possible for all moral positions to be reasoned into, it's incumbent on you to do so. Yet almost no one does this or even attempts to do so, or even really understands that's something they need to do. Instead it's just minor tweaks to whatever the mainstream at the time is, which leaves one directionless when that mainstream changes.
It continues to amuse me that within 10 years of the New Atheism movement's rise to prominence and their declaration that religion was the root of all strife, the Atheism+ faction had split off from the New Atheist movement; and members of the two factions hated each other.
And a lot of these people were 50+ years old and didn't have youth and inexperience as an excuse.
Pretty sad. I was thinking it was mainly 20-somethings still raging against Mom & Dad
The rank and file were (disclosure: I was one of those "20-somethings", though I wasn't raging against my parents and had moved on from caring about most of this shit by the time Atheism+ became a thing), but the people a bit higher on the food chain like PZ Meyers and Richard Dawkins were more than old enough to know better.
They lack both granularity and actually adhering to their philosophies.
Religion is a source of some strife, but also has positive effects on society. Nothing is all good or all bad, isn't that the whole point of moral relativism?
Having spent approximately half my life in a religious right part of the country and the other half in a secularist left part, I can comfortably say that the main problem is that people do not put enough thought into whatever philosophy they spend their time around. It's the "fish don't know they're in water" problem.
Many lay Christians (and many in church authority) have trouble providing any practical justification for why someone should adhere to the faith. To an engineer sort like myself, if something is true it should also be useful (and more useful than things that aren't true); and I had trouble getting good answers as to the utility of church teachings. Especially when "uncomfortable" truths like "women should not be in positions of leadership" were raised.
Secularists spend too little time actually thinking through their personal philosophy. If you reject all the pre-packaged ones and believe it's possible for all moral positions to be reasoned into, it's incumbent on you to do so. Yet almost no one does this or even attempts to do so, or even really understands that's something they need to do. Instead it's just minor tweaks to whatever the mainstream at the time is, which leaves one directionless when that mainstream changes.