In God We Must

[Malthus]

And what if they can't get a 9 to 5 job, or the one they can get isn't enough? That's when the second parent would come in especially handy.

Certainly, all kinds of people have all kinds of problems which makes generalizations difficult.

Yup, which is why no doubt social workers would have some sort of 'score card' looking at a bunch of factors when deciding who should be matched up for adoption.

This will never of course be a perfect system, because of the lack of perfect information. Hence, reliance on approximations and generalities.

[Neil]

So because it's poltically charged we rule it out as a red flag?  That doesn't make any sense to me.  I say we look at the science and let the chips fall as they may.

Social sciences are too complex and not conclusive enough to address in those sorts of ways.  We must make moral decisions, not scientific ones.

[Razgovory]

You asked "What some Athiests have done", not what Dawkins has done.   I think it's fair to say that Mexico's anti-religious campaign was an act by atheists motivated by atheism, and it resulted in thousands of deaths.

That's a pretty bad anti-atheist argument.  It isn't too hard to think up of relgious campaigns that take death tolls well over "thousands"

I could pick out ones that have millions.  But the cry from the atheist camp is 'oh, but there this was done because they were communists or whatever'.  So I picked a situation was where the only factor was fighting religion.  Of course, religious campaigns almost always have other aspects as well, such as the 9/11 attacks or wars against Israel.

[The Brain]

A prominent Catholic journalist here said recently that technically there is no difference between gay marriage and a marriage of a man to a goat - since both are unnatural perversions. He was sued by a gay rights organisation for defamation and won.

Oh fuck no! That shit ain't right.

[Razgovory]

Actually, that's not a death camp.  That's Mexico during the Christeros war.  You asked "What some Athiests have done", not what Dawkins has done.   I think it's fair to say that Mexico's anti-religious campaign was an act by atheists motivated by atheism, and it resulted in thousands of deaths.

Yeah, I asked what "some atheists have done" because that's what you replied to Gups when he claimed you were mischaracterizing Dawkins, and when Gups said he - and mosts atheists - are not like you characterize Dawkins and do not have any issues with religious people except when they impose their religion on the body politic.

And to that your answer is some minor Mexican civil war from almost a century ago? It's still not really making any sense.

Also I didn't say Dawkin's leads the New Atheist movement, I said he was a leader in it.  Dawkins of course has no political power, but if he really believes that religious education may be worse then child abuse and calling a child a "Christian child" or "Muslim child" qualifies as child abuse then I shudder to think what he would do if he had political power.

But what does that have to do with the Cristeros war? Or the Spanish Civil War where apparently some nuns were shot? Or any of the other bits of exciting political history of the last century?

Gups made the point that right now people are killing themselves and others in the name of religion while no one is doing so in the name of atheism. If your best counter is something that happened almost a century ago in an entirely different context then that's not much of a counter at all.

Gups made that point?  I thought it was Marty.

Here's what I was originally responding to

Assuming that your summary of Dawkins' view is correct (it's not but that doesn't matter), he is just a single atheist, hardly representative.

Atheists don't turn up a soldiers' funerals waving placards about fags and the army.

They don't force women to wear burquas or children to strap on explosives.

They don't protect priests who abuse children or blame that abuse on liberalism

They don't make their followers take poison.

We don't really do anything. I've never been at a meeting for atheists. Never knocked on someone's door to bore them about the good news that God doesn't exist. Never made my kids go to atheist school. Never struck up a conversation with a total stranger to tell them they aren't really saved.

I'm not smug or sanctomonious about Christians or Jews or Muslims. I don't really give a shit what you believe in as long as you don't bang on about it.

Gups is giving the impression that Atheists are harmless and don't care what anyone else does.  So I suggest he is naive about Athiests have done in the past.  You ask me what atheists have done.  So I point to a series of persecutions and atrocities committed by a government for the purpose of suppressing religion.  You are saying this makes no sense because it happened in the past and in another place.

[Valmy]

What is the point here Raz?

It sounded like you were coming at it that people were correct to hate Atheists in this country....and now you have moved the goalposts to some Atheists have done rotten things in the past...or not all of them are completely tolerant people as Gups suggests.

Well so fucking what?  Lots of all sorts of groups have done rotten things in the past I do not see why it is right to hate them.

[Razgovory]

What is the point here Raz?

It sounded like you were coming at it that people were correct to hate Atheists in this country....and now you have moved the goalposts to some Atheists have done rotten things in the past...or not all of them are completely tolerant people as Gups suggests.

Well so fucking what?  Lots of all sorts of groups have done rotten things in the past I do not see why it is right to hate them.

No, I merely shifted to meet a separate argument.  Gups seemed to be suggesting that Athiests were harmless, I point out that this isn't really the case.  Atheists can murder and slaughter with the best of them.

I didn't say that it was right to hate atheists, but one the main reasons that atheists are disliked is summed up in that little cartoon at the beginning.  The  smug 'I take enjoyment in mocking the things you hold sacred' attitude that reminds me of a the older kids on the playground who tell the younger ones there is no Santa Claus just so they can get them to cry.

I also touched on Dawkins and his ilk (the New Athiests), who hate religion and view it as either an illness or something that should be treated as criminal.

[Jacob]

I think the evidence* against single parents are predicated on two things:

- American political code speak meant to invoke poor Black mothers receiving welfare.
- the repercussion of divorce.

I rather expect that if you looked at kids who grew up with a stable single parent as their baseline, rather as a result of cataclysmic changes in the family structure, you'd find that there's no real difference between those kids and those of stable two parent families. In fact, I'm rather certain that the kids growing up with one single, stable parent are better off than those growing up with a pair of flaky unstable ones.

*and I don't know how much of it actually exists and how much of it is simply "common sense".

There is a reasonable literature on the subject.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2003.00876.x/full

Recent debates have emerged about the advantage of marriage for adults and children (e.g., Waite & Gallagher, 2000). Adolescents in married, two-biological-parent families generally fare better than children in any of the family types examined here, including single-mother, cohabiting stepfather, and married stepfather families. The advantage of marriage appears to exist primarily when the child is the biological offspring of both parents. Our findings are consistent with previous work, which demonstrates children in cohabiting stepparent families fare worse than children living with two married, biological parents (e.g., Acs & Nelson, 2002; Brown, 2001; DeLeire & Kalil, 2002; Hao & Xie, 2001).

Obviously this is a generality, not a rule. But it does make intuitive sense. Two-parent families are more likely to be stable, they will on average have more resources in terms of both money and time.

Interesting. Though I don't think that the conclusion that two-biological-parent families being the best are that relevant to adoption discussions since there are no biological parents involved at all.

[Jacob]

Interesting.

Not sure what that implication of that kind of research is when discussing adoption though, since the big factor mentioned was being with "biological parents".

I was just gonna say that.

Oh wait... I did 

[Jacob]

Interesting.

Not sure what that implication of that kind of research is when discussing adoption though, since the big factor mentioned was being with "biological parents".

Fair enough.  I'm not certain how not being biologically related to the kids would affect matters, but there is probably more specific studies out there that address the question - I'm simply too lazy to look.

Well apparently it does, because the conclusion you quoted says that two biological parents are better than one biological parent and a step parent.

[The Minsky Moment]

I could pick out ones that have millions.  But the cry from the atheist camp is 'oh, but there this was done because they were communists or whatever'.  So I picked a situation was where the only factor was fighting religion.  Of course, religious campaigns almost always have other aspects as well, such as the 9/11 attacks or wars against Israel.

Seems to me the better move for the anti-atheist is to argue that the "people have killed X in the name of religion" is not in fact a good argument against theism.  It is not an argument at all against the existence or qualities of God.  And it is not even a good argument against religion generally or specifically because people have always killed people for whatever reason they happened to have at hand.    But accepting the premise and trying to argue body counts seems like a losing fight.

[Razgovory]

Why, may I ask?  The New Atheist movement is not interested in proving or disproving the existence of God.  They are confident in their answer.  Their arguments aren't really concerned about the existence of God, but that the belief in religion is actively harmful to society.  That Religion is destructive 'Mind-virus', that must be stamped out.

[crazy canuck]

Why, may I ask?  The New Atheist movement is not interested in proving or disproving the existence of God.  They are confident in their answer.  Their arguments aren't really concerned about the existence of God, but that the belief in religion is actively harmful to society.  That Religion is destructive 'Mind-virus', that must be stamped out.

No, Dawkins is pretty active in arguing that the Christian God does not exist and that it is foolish to believe in creationism - he wrote a whole book on that topic alone.  He also goes on to say that Christian theology is flawed in a number of ways.

[dps]

So your issue is that Poland doesn't have freedom of speech?

It has freedom of speech when it comes to religious people spouting their nonsense, but it doesn't when it comes to atheists criticising religion.

Saying this is not an issue of discrimination of atheists but an issue of a lack of freedom of speech is like saying that gay marriage bans are not an issue of discrimination of gays but an issue of "freedom of marriage". It obfuscates the discrimination at the heart of the problem.

The problem with making that argument to Americans is that if Poland had US-style freedom of speech, there wouldn't be any discrimination between the two cases.

[Razgovory]

Why, may I ask?  The New Atheist movement is not interested in proving or disproving the existence of God.  They are confident in their answer.  Their arguments aren't really concerned about the existence of God, but that the belief in religion is actively harmful to society.  That Religion is destructive 'Mind-virus', that must be stamped out.

No, Dawkins is pretty active in arguing that the Christian God does not exist and that it is foolish to believe in creationism - he wrote a whole book on that topic alone.  He also goes on to say that Christian theology is flawed in a number of ways.

Which one is that?  Lots of people are athiests, but few go so far as rant about 'viruses of the mind' and the like.  It's this type of antipathy that has raised eyebrows.  I don't know how much theology Dawkins actually knows about.  In fact he doesn't seem to care, when pointed out he doesn't know a great deal of theology he mere said 'would you need to read learned volumes on Leprechology before disbelieving in leprechauns?'