11:57am August 13, 2013

➸ A Stormborn in a teacup: what is it about Richard Dawkins that attracts such fierce cultish devotion?

ateacupinastorm:

Check out any critical article about him or his ideas (of which their has been many recently- after the Nobel/Islamophobia controversy) They all seem utterly flooded with rabid opposition in numbers that are uncommon for pretty much every publication in question. That’s just one example of the…

First - Dawkins is pointing out some things about religion that hurt people. And that bother people - sometimes he’s putting voice to real concerns.

He also does play into the “intellectual superiority” thing too. There’s a strong strand in US and UK culture saying that being “smart” in certain ways makes you a better person or more deserving of respect. Think about how he claims that religious people have temporal lobe epilepsy or some other neurological disorder.

Another thing about Dawkins is he’s not actually that different from Protestant Christianity in a lot of ways:

1. He says that what you believe in (or don’t believe in) is the most important thing. Which echoes “he who believeth in me shall have eternal life”.

2. Polytheism as a serious religious path is sort of invisible, ridiculous, a thing of the past.

3. Less God(s) focused religious approaches (as in many native american and animistic/pantheistic paths) don’t even exist/count.

4. He seems to be particularly vehemently dislike Islam and Catholicism.

5. Most of the things he argues against as “religion” are from monotheistic, Abrahmic religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) so there is where his views on what religion *is* come from.

6. Fear of a bad afterlife (Hell) or concern about what happens after death is a main part of why people do religion. (which is not true of many religions)

So he points out real problems people are having, makes people feel superior because they have “the right kind of brains”. And he isn’t actually changing worldviews that much. What he’s saying doesn’t seem *weird*. Instead he’s tapping into the same worldviews that are strongly present in the culture around him and saying stuff that taps into them.

Just my thoughts, I’m not sure on everything.

(some people call these extremely christian/abrahamic focused atheists “jack chick atheists” because their focus seems to be on disproving “jack chick” style christianity)

I can’t stand the temporal lobe epilepsy argument.

Spiritual experiences are not just an emotion. Temporal lobe epilepsy induces in some people the EMOTIONS and SENSATIONS of a spiritual experience.

The first seizure I remember involved a hallucination of a doll and a sense of dread.

The doll really exists. Just because I hallucinated her doesn’t mean the real doll isn’t real.

Just because I felt a sense of dread out of nowhere, doesn’t mean that there are no things in the world to dread.

A REAL spiritual experience creates lasting positive change to character, personality, and ethics. Seizures don’t do that.

A real spiritual experience isn’t just some kind of glorified psychedelic drug trip. And you can’t induce one with a magnetic stimulator.

Anything you can induce that way or by seizures, is not the real thing. Just because seizures exist that create the same emotions, doesn’t mean spiritual experiences are seizures. That is like saying my doll was a seizure just because I hallucinated her in a seizure.

That people who pride themselves on being ~ever so much more logical~ than the rest of us, can’t tell the fucking difference, infuriates me. That these people would invalidate my spirituality because I’m epileptic, infuriates me even more.

I’ve never had a “spiritual” seizure. Migraines yes. Seizures no. And those ecstatic migraines? Not the same as the real thing. Not by a long shot.

Atheists who can’t tell the difference bug me as much as new agers who can’t tell the difference. Both groups see spiritual experiences as about the emotional and sensory experience, not the actual depth that makes the whole thing have a point to it. This distortion of the facts makes me angry. And so does the ableism of the whole TLE thing.

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