No one is free from criticism. Harmful ideas should be condemned, when they are demonstrably harmful. But theist beliefs are such a vast range and diversity of ideas, some harmful, some useful, some healing, some vivifying, and still others having served as potent drivers of movements for justice; that to lump all theist religious belief into one category and attack the whole of it, only demonstrates your ignorance of theology, and is in fact bigotry.

By saying that religious and superstitious beliefs should be disrespected, or otherwise belittling, or stigmatizing religion and supernatural beliefs as a whole, you have already established the first level on the “Pyramid of Hate”, as well as the first of the “10 Stages of Genocide.”

If your religion is atheism, that’s perfectly valid. If someone is doing something harmful with a religious belief as justification, that specific belief should be challenged. But if you’re crossing the line into bigotry, you’re as bad as the very people you’re condemning.

Antitheism is a form of supremacy in and of itself.

"In other words, it is quite clear from the writings of the “four horsemen” that “new atheism” has little to do with atheism or any serious intellectual examination of the belief in God and everything to do with hatred and power.

Indeed, “new atheism” is the ideological foregrounding of liberal imperialism whose fanatical secularism extends the racist logic of white supremacy. It purports to be areligious, but it is not. It is, in fact, the twin brother of the rabid Christian conservatism which currently feeds the Trump administration’s destructive policies at home and abroad – minus all the biblical references."

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/5/4/the-resurrection-of-new-atheism/

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/2/21/can-atheists-make-their-case-without-devolving-into-bigotry/

  • myslsl@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    Dogma is something that is “incontrovertibly” true. Science doesn’t work that way, you can’t just believe gravity doesn’t exist and then the Earth stops orbiting the sun. You can’t just decide water only freezes at 0°C regardless of pressure. But you can believe that abortion is a grave sin and murder a doctor for it.

    I think I’m just misunderstanding what you mean, but that’s not what dogma means at all. Dogma does not have to be true (incontrovertibly or not).

    People can believe scientific things dogmatically. Attempts at scientific work can lead you to wrong conclusions in certain senses. Small sample sizes, biased samples etc. Science as a whole is not a foolproof thing. People make mistakes, false conclusions and so on. Ideally we work things out well enough that these issues are rectified over time but mistakes happen.

    What you’re saying is when people attempt to twist data to support their preconceived beliefs. For instance Belgians used phrenology to confirm their belief that Tutsis were superior to Hutus and fuel the Rwandan genocide. They already believed their racist dogma and attempted to use “science” to prove it. But science doesn’t have a bias, and it has no dogma.

    My issue isn’t with the science itself but the people who fail to interpret scientific results in sane ways or that twist and abuse scientific works (like you mention).

    And no, it’s not a typo. Darwin purported the idea that offspring of sexual organisms received their traits through gemmules shed by each organ of the body. Another scientist reviewed this theory by analyzing rabbit blood and found no gemmules, because those only exist in asexual reproduction, sponges specifically. The lack of evidence of gemmules essentially proves the theory of pangenesis wrong.

    My apologies, my confusion is this: “because one has evidence and peer review to back it up, and one lacks evidence because it was peer reviewed”. Peer review doesn’t remove evidence. At best it adds confidence or allows people a chance to say “Hey! This work is not correct because …” Your point is that a work by Darwin was peer reviewed and later found to be lacking right?