Mehdi Hasan vs Richard Dawkins on flying horses

[Judge_Joe_Brown]

lol'd hard

[boseador]

You have to be open minded and irrational to believe in this brah. Just have faith and believe.

[NWDub]

Lol

[NWDub]

Only watched the first few minutes right now:

In regards to "Can you prove he didn't fly on a horse...etc"


It shouldn't be up to the scientists to disprove something that has no evidence and is based in nothing but imagination.

We don't believe that fingering your arse hole creates portals to other dimensions where u fuk hookers, do blow and fly on the millennium falcon to other planets, snap your fingers and your back in this dimension living your life.

Nobody has to prove that doesn't exist and has never happened because there is no real evidence to prove it in the first place.


"Hey guys, you can all travel to this fantasy land if you want to"

Prove you can't do that. I'm waiting.


Fukking illogical.

[_AdaM_]

Flying horses could be an analogy for anything mechanical or organic that flies.

I'm sure if we took one of these 747s back in 3rd, 4th century, they'd call it dragons, birds, flying horses etc

[Mr Beer]

Flying horses could be an analogy for anything mechanical or organic that flies.

I'm sure if we took one of these 747s back in 3rd, 4th century, they'd call it dragons, birds, flying horses etc

But they didn't have 747s back then either so I'm not seeing how this makes any difference.

Plus, I doubt 'flying horse' is how they would describe a 747. "Terrifying metal dragon that roared louder than the strongest thunderstorm" or something like that would be more likely.

[Intergrase]

scary to think how easily people can be manipulated back then

brb suck my dick or you'll go to hell

[Mr Beer]

scary to think how easily people can be manipulated back then

What's worse, people who don't know any better believing in flying horses or 100s of millions of people today who have no excuse? I think modern people being so gullible is much stupider.

[boseador]

What's worse, people who don't know any better believing in flying horses or 100s of millions of people today who have no excuse? I think modern people being so gullible is much stupider.

This.

Why is it that no one witnessed Mohammed ridding a flying horse? Mohammed had psychotic disorders so it could have been a dream.

In Islam the more faith they have the more dumb they are. Just look at the jihadis killing themselves for their beloved prophet. Imagine how much they believe that they will get 72 big breasted virgins in paradise. Irrational beliefs makes people do irrational things.

[_AdaM_]

But they didn't have 747s back then either so I'm not seeing how this makes any difference.

Plus, I doubt 'flying horse' is how they would describe a 747. "Terrifying metal dragon that roared louder than the strongest thunderstorm" or something like that would be more likely.

"Terrifying metal dragon that roared louder than the strongest thunderstorm" is a mouthful

I like "Flying horse" better. It has a ring to it.

Come to think of it, it could literally mean a flying horse. Since it could have been the soul that travelled and we "theists" know afterlife is a whole new world, who knows if flying horses are the main transport in the afterlife

Anyway, since anything can be wished for in heaven, I personally wouldn't fancy a flying horse. I can barely cope with bird poos on my car's windshield, I don't want to imagine flying horse poos!

[chimburgandy]

What chance do we have as a species when half the planet thinks magic is real in some way or another? It's hard to watch a full grown man say that he thinks these things really happened simply because if they didn't happen then the story is all made up and the religion is bullsh!t. Great reasoning.

[Xhat1]

Whoa, I just flew back from a trip to the moon on my own winged horse, what a coincidence to find this thread!

[boseador]

Whoa, I just flew back from a trip to the moon on my own winged horse, what a coincidence to find this thread!

Me too, I went to Jupiter in Air Buraq. (Buraq is the name of this winged creature)

[Mr Beer]

"Terrifying metal dragon that roared louder than the strongest thunderstorm" is a mouthful

I like "Flying horse" better. It has a ring to it.

"very loud metal dragon" is much closer.

Come to think of it, it could literally mean a flying horse.

I agree, it probably literally means 'flying horse". Of course, that doesn't literally mean there was a flying horse.

[trollspooge]

Here's the thing. The guy probably doesn't actually believe that stuff about the flying horse. He just realizes that if he goes on Al-Jazeera (in front of the entire Middle East) and says he doesn't believe it someone will literally chop his head off*.







*They would probably do worse than chop his head off but I'm not up-to-date on the latest punishment for that (maybe I'm wrong).

[GregariousWolf]

All religions are wrong. God does not exist. We're all mad.

/thread

[Myriad88]

Happy to debate random no name muslim about flying horses......
















.......runs away from professional philosophers.



Enough from this faux-intellctual, please.

[Mr Beer]

Happy to debate random no name muslim about flying horses......
.......runs away from professional philosophers.

Enough from this faux-intellctual, please.

You know that debating is not his day job and his intellectual credentials rest upon his long and respectable scientific and teaching career, right?

[Myriad88]

You know that debating is not his day job and his intellectual credentials rest upon his long and respectable scientific and teaching career, right?

noone relevant to this discussion has a day-job as 'debater'

[Mr Beer]

noone relevant to this discussion has a day-job as 'debater'

[Myriad88]

Which individual do you think works solely as a "debater"?

[Mr Beer]

Which individual do you think works solely as a "debater"?

How is Dawkins' a "pseudo" intellectual as opposed to a "real" intellectual? I guess those all those science awards just jumped into his lap.

[Mr Beer]

LOL, the career of a "pseudo" intellectual:

"Awards and recognition


Dawkins receiving the Deschner Prize in Frankfurt, 12 October 2007, from Karlheinz Deschner
Dawkins was awarded a Doctor of Science by the University of Oxford in 1989. He holds honorary doctorates in science from the University of Huddersfield, University of Westminster, Durham University,[129] the University of Hull, the University of Antwerp, and the University of Oslo,[130] and honorary doctorates from the University of Aberdeen,[131] Open University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel,[8] and the University of Valencia.[132] He also holds honorary doctorates of letters from the University of St Andrews and the Australian National University (HonLittD, 1996), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and the Royal Society in 2001.[8] He is one of the patrons of the Oxford University Scientific Society.

In 1987, Dawkins received a Royal Society of Literature award and a Los Angeles Times Literary Prize for his book The Blind Watchmaker. In the same year, he received a Sci. Tech Prize for Best Television Documentary Science Programme of the Year for his work on the BBC's Horizon episode The Blind Watchmaker.[8]

His other awards include the Zoological Society of London's Silver Medal (1989), the Finlay Innovation Award (1990), the Michael Faraday Award (1990), the Nakayama Prize (1994), the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year Award (1996), the fifth International Cosmos Prize (1997), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (2001),[citation needed] the 2001 and 2012 Emperor Has No Clothes Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Bicentennial Kelvin Medal of The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (2002),[8] and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest(2009).[133]

Dawkins topped Prospect magazine's 2004 list of the top 100 public British intellectuals, as decided by the readers, receiving twice as many votes as the runner-up.[134][135] He was short-listed as a candidate in their 2008 follow-up poll.[136] In 2005, the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded him its Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his "concise and accessible presentation of scientific knowledge". He won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science for 2006, as well as the Galaxy British Book Awards's Author of the Year Award for 2007.[137] In the same year, he was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007,[138] and he was ranked 20th in The Daily Telegraph's 2007 list of 100 greatest living geniuses.[139] He was awarded the Deschner Award, named after German anti-clerical author Karlheinz Deschner.[140]

Since 2003, the Atheist Alliance International has awarded a prize during its annual conference, honouring an outstanding atheist whose work has done the most to raise public awareness of atheism during that year; it is known as the Richard Dawkins Award, in honour of Dawkins's own efforts.[141]

In February 2010, Dawkins was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.[142]

In 2012, ichthyologists in Sri Lanka honored Dawkins by creating Dawkinsia as a new genus name (members of this genus were formerly members of the genus Puntius). Explaining the reasoning behind the genus name, lead researcher Rohan Pethiyagoda was quoted as stating that "Richard Dawkins has, through his writings, helped us understand that the universe is far more beautiful and awe-inspiring than any religion has imagined [...] We hope that Dawkinsia will serve as a reminder of the elegance and simplicity of evolution, the only rational explanation there is for the unimaginable diversity of life on Earth.".[143]

In a poll held by Prospect magazine in 2013, Dawkins was voted the world's top thinker based on 65 names chosen by a largely US- and UK-based expert panel.[144]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard...#Personal_life

[Mr Beer]

Damn, it must be great being a "pseudo"-intellectual, it's totally indistinguishable from being a vastly respected, multi-award winning scientist.

Hey Myriad, why don't you make a couple of Youtube videos with spurious arguments? As a newly fledged pseudo-intellectual, I imagine Oxford University will be keen to award you a Doctorate of Science.

[Myriad88]

How is Dawkins' a "pseudo" intellectual as opposed to a "real" intellectual? I guess those all those science awards just jumped into his lap.

In the field of biology/evolution, he is not a pseudo-intellectual. He is an excellent writer.


Now you know as well as I do that Dawkins left biology and entered someone elses hometurf when he wrote the God Delusion, which is primarily philosophical. He dripped pseudo-intellectualism all over the place-caricatured arguments, gave rants/bluster/polemics instead of proper logical arguments, cast his opponents in the worst possible light, appeared utterly disinterested in academic honest and proper scholarly critique (evidenced by how he deemed his woeful central argument 'unrebuttable', when simply asking a philosophically trained colleague to review it would have highlighted its fallacies), and how he has consistently tucked tail from defending his argument against proper intellectuals who work in the field like WLC. Instead he hides on the internet and launches ad hom and insulting potshots.....when he previously claimed 'noone can refute my arguments despite numerous opportunities and invitations to do so!!!!!'

These are all classic hallmarks of the pseudo-intellectual. Why would you defend him? Dudes dug himself a hole so deep not even other atheists want anything to do with him. We can only hope he digs so far he disappears for good and we dont have to listen to him again.

[trollspooge]

In the field of biology/evolution, he is not a pseudo-intellectual. He is an excellent writer.


Now you know as well as I do . . .

I basically agree with what you're saying. Here's why I like what he does. How many theist speakers are there out there who preach all over the place about religion? I'm talking about Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggert, James Dobson, Billy Graham, etc..

There are about 350,000 churches in America. These are meeting halls where local church representatives sell the idea of religion.

Now, how many well-known atheists are there that will stand up and explain why they think religion sucks? The answer is not too many. How many meeting halls are dedicated to having atheist speakers tell audiences about how religion is bunk?

So Dawkins isn't an expert debater or philosopher. That doesn't matter to me as an atheist. The types of debates that WLC engages in are not widely popular with mainstream audiences.

I appreciate that as a well-regarded scientist, Dawkins is willing to stand up and express his views on religion. I think that if he were to give up talking to mainstream audiences so that he could focus on serious academic debates he would be shooting at the wrong target.

[Myriad88]

I basically agree with what you're saying. Here's why I like what he does. How many theist speakers are there out there who preach all over the place about religion? I'm talking about Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggert, James Dobson, Billy Graham, etc..

There are about 350,000 churches in America. These are meeting halls where local church representatives sell the idea of religion.

Now, how many well-known atheists are there that will stand up and explain why they think religion sucks? The answer is not too many. How many meeting halls are dedicated to having atheist speakers tell audiences about how religion is bunk?

So Dawkins isn't an expert debater or philosopher. That doesn't matter to me as an atheist. The types of debates that WLC engages in are not widely popular with mainstream audiences.

I appreciate that as a well-regarded scientist, Dawkins is willing to stand up and express his views on religion. I think that if he were to give up talking to mainstream audiences so that he could focus on serious academic debates he would be shooting at the wrong target.

I dont know about that- If I were an allied solider, I would take down the Nazi's by assassinating Hitler. Not by cutting a bloody swathe through foot soliders. Isn't that just an appeal to popularity?


Dawkins is a populariser. It is precisely the job of the populariser to take advanced, abstract concepts and disseminate them to the laymen in an accessible format. Caricatures, burlesque, mockery and invective are intellectual crimes-especially when you pronounce yourself as a champion of reason, truth seeker etc and ardently claim there is no reasonable or rational defense for religion. Appealing to ones popularity is no excuse because he is misleading impressionable minds and replacing one form of intolerant bigotry with another.

[trollspooge]

I dont know about that- If I were an allied solider, I would take down the Nazi's by assassinating Hitler. Not by cutting a bloody swathe through foot soliders. Isn't that just an appeal to popularity?

I hate to break this to you, but barely anyone knows who WLC is. Taking a shot at WLC may get noticed by sophisticated theists who have read fifteen upper-level books on theistic arguments. Meanwhile, Ray Comfort just sold 3 million books to Target shoppers (I'm making that number up).

Dawkins is a populariser. It is precisely the job of the populariser to take advanced, abstract concepts and disseminate them to the laymen in an accessible format. Caricatures, burlesque, mockery and invective are intellectual crimes-especially when you pronounce yourself as a champion of reason, truth seeker etc and ardently claim there is no reasonable or rational defense for religion. Appealing to ones popularity is no excuse because he is misleading impressionable minds and replacing one form of intolerant bigotry with another.

I think what he's doing is showing that it's "normal" for an intelligent, rational person to publicly question religion in front of a large audience. That's a pretty big step for atheism. Was there something he said in the clip in the OP that you thought was intellectually dishonest?

[Myriad88]

I hate to break this to you, but barely anyone knows who WLC is. Taking a shot at WLC may get noticed by sophisticated theists who have read fifteen upper-level books on theistic arguments. Meanwhile, Ray Comfort just sold 3 million books to Target shoppers (I'm making that number up).




I think what he's doing is showing that it's "normal" for an intelligent, rational person to publicly question religion in front of a large audience. That's a pretty big step for atheism. Was there something he said in the clip in the OP that you thought was intellectually dishonest?

For starters, anyone who has an interested in atheism/theism knows who WLC is. The whole 'WLC is a loser nobody who noones heard of' was a tactic invented by Dawkins himself, that little trick fails.


Of course its ok to question religion. But you don't make your case with ridicule, mockery and insults and cast your opponent in a bad light intentionally. Because, obviously, the intellectual theists will skewer you for it and you wont make a dent in theism.

[trollspooge]

For starters, anyone who has an interested in atheism/theism knows who WLC is. The whole 'WLC is a loser nobody who noones heard of' was a tactic invented by Dawkins himself, that little trick fails.

Of course its ok to question religion. But you don't make your case with ridicule, mockery and insults and cast your opponent in a bad light intentionally. Because, obviously, the intellectual theists will skewer you for it and you wont make a dent in theism.

So what did he say in the OP's clip that you objected to most strongly?