GnashEquilibria said:
First, you can't always know what the last thing said was before any given statement; heavy editing is obvious. So you are assuming a lot when you say that Dawkins' reactions were to calmly presented opinions.
I was hoping that you would have paid closer attention to the documentary (the video itself is freely available and easily navigable) and realized that, with only one exception, the above is entirely incorrect, rather than forcing me to spend time elaborating further when that time might have been saved simply by your conceding the point. But since you do not, will you now ask that I spend a post thoroughly and incontrovertibly showing that you can know, and indeed do know, the things said before any given statement in the examples I mentioned, and others which I might present, such as Dawkins' unprompted comparison of Haggard's congregation with Nazis, a remark "[URL[/URL] suited to a 12-year-old Internet troll[/url] than learned man who should know that fair interview technique does not mean merely prefacing incendiary remarks with "if you'll forgive me"? Will you force me to note time markers of individual scenes, and prove that, given the fact that the documentary was shot with a single camera, there is no point at which its edits are not transparent?
[quote]More importantly, your critique is invalid in principle: why would calmly presented appalling statement call for any different reaction than an emotionally presented one?[/quote]
Critically, Dawkins needed to contain his affect (I would not call it emotion) to maintain the consistence of presentability and credibility of his narrative. A karate master does not respond to a credible threat with anything but the cool precision of a controlled counterattack; a hotheaded response is an uncoordinated response. One must "Know thyself" in order to "Control thyself".
[quote]Dawkins is - as he should be - reacting to the ideas, not to the psychological state of the interviewee.[/quote]
This is unascertainable, but even if true, it defies the wisdom of transactional analysis. You are suggesting it is appropriate to react to both mature and immature stimuli with immature responses. Who's supposed to be the adult here, our Virgil, Dawkins, or his supposedly inferior-worldviewed interviewees? Whatever one is reacting to--ideas, psychological states, funny moles--a person in Dawkins's position must take the high road and respond with [i]ideas[/i], note psychological states, not empty challenges, not indignant interjections, not arrogant pronouncements, not comparisons to Nazis, not funny moles.
[quote]And, lastly, I couldn't find a transcript online, but in all cases you mentioned, the interviewees were clearly saying offensive and/or preposterous things.[/quote]
If you want to continue to push this point, I trust you will back up your perspective in detail. The complete video is available for free online and is easily navigable. The meaty bit with Pastor Haggard begins at 25:41 in Part 1 (though the Nazi comparison comes earlier); Rabbi Gluck begins at 6:20 in Part 2; Headmaster Hawkes at 11:14 in Part 2. You can throw out the "offensive" criterion--nothing can effectively offend ([i]i.e.[/i], provoke the vanity of) the well-grounded, and anyway, you will not find anything offensive said by these men--and no need to quote the "preposterous"--I will be satisfied with the "demonstrably false".
[quote]You are grossly misrepresenting those situations.[/quote]
No, I am quoting them, and I would be happy to provide the time markers and the immediately preceding comments if you continue to insist otherwise.
[quote]How would you respond in his place?[/quote]
Good-humoredly, forcefully, and in a way that doesn't stymie the flow of the discussion, which hopefully I would have been able to do if I were properly prepared for the interview.
[quote]Haggard says something like "maybe in 50 years people will laugh at your evolution thing", which is completely ridiculous[/quote]
It is possibly ridiculous from some perspectives--such as the one Haggard probably intends--but not from all perspectives, and Dawkins's response, as the response of an ostensibly thoughtful person, should account for this. To give a hypothetical example: our present understanding is that the mechanisms for gene mutation include only random processes (copying errors, environmental disruptions, and the like). But what if further investigation revealed that the mechanisms for mutation are much more variegated and complex, and one was discovered that involved "deliberate" control, [i]à la[/i] somatic hypermutation, but in cells that would ensure transmission to descendants? In such a case, our present understanding of evolution would indeed be laughable to a future generation, and would be much closer to Haggard's naive conviction that evolution "happened by accident" (inasmuch as all of the natural mechanisms for transmitted mutation are indeed accidental and not matters of "choice" on any level, personal, cellular, chemical, or otherwise). This hypothetical example, made up off the top of my head, is given only to illustrate the selfsame point that Haggard makes, justly, and that Dawkins would not (or should not) disagree with: arrogance about one's credences is the recipe for perpetual ignorance and perdition.
[quote]...a somewhat responsible statement - bet on the outcome.[/quote]
It was not responsible, since there was no reasonable expectation of receptiveness to the bet, since the bet could not be settled in a reasonable timeframe, and since such a bet would not in any way serve the purposes of the documentary. The empty challenge to wager short-circuited the interview, shortchanging Dawkins's viewers of any dialectic. It was an affective and senseless thing to say in the context of a television presentation.
[quote]Would it be an "arrogant pronouncement" if you responded that I obviously didn't know anything about the people from your city?[/quote]
Yes, it would, since you may know quite a bit about people from Cleveland, Los Angeles, or Paris, but might possibly be mistaken on that one point, and since I can easily disabuse you of your misapprehension within the timeframe of my documentary by presenting my complete testical pair and showing the lack of anything approaching the amount of facial hair on my lady friend that would be required to designate it a mustache. A few whiskers, maybe, sure, but nothing you could Pinaud-Clubman into anything twirlable.
[quote]As for "we better leave it at that", Hawkes had made such a morally damning statement about himself that continuing the conversation might have made him look like a psychopath.[/quote]
Any more than Dawkins's confrontations with any of his other subjects may or may not have made them out to look like psychopaths? Hawkes was presenting his philosophy in a distinctly non-personal way. But he came off as too nice a guy. Could it have been that Dawkins was too charmed to stay firm?
[quote]This is not some academic exercise in debunking proofs of God's existence or whatnot.[/quote]
You're right. It is instead a confused academic exercise that takes as its mistaken premise that the errors and persuasions of religious dogmatism are sufficient to explain fanatical behaviors that carry to the point of violence. They are not sufficient; in the final equation, they are not even the dominating term.
[quote]You can't mean this seriously. He didn't even have a say in the title (well, he managed to get the question mark appended), and you assume he controlled the editing?![/quote]
I do not know whether or not Dawkins assisted in the editing of the piece. However, I do not believe that he would have allowed the piece, on which he puts his face and his name, to be aired if he did not believe it accurately portrayed him and his ideas. (The alternative, that he would have, is more shameful.)
[quote]Dawkins would probably answer you that the main characteristic of his subject is urgency. People are killing each other, driven by their religious beliefs. Patience is not what you need to deal with urgency.[/quote]
To your third sentence: as a game theorist, you ought to be aware that work demonstrating the opposite was not too long ago awarded Nobel. And to your second: you will have to work much harder to convince me that the brainwashing of religious dogmatism alone can override the weakest conscience and the frailest pulsion for self-preservation. The pseudoreligious and socially-dysfunctional milieu in which the killer is reared has no small impact on the unhealthy formation of his psyche, but if you tell me it is the promise of paradise and virgins alone that motivates him to murder or to blow himself up, I will respond that further investigation will prove he has bigger issues that are interrelated with but distinct from whatever "religious" dogmatism he may subscribe to, and that a similarly troubled killer could have followed the same path with a different set of "religious" dogmatic principles, or under the influence of dogmatic principles that were not "religious" at all.
[quote]"Solemnity" is mainly the instrument for shouting down skeptics and rationalists.[/quote]
It is a matter of terminology, but no, you are referring to "sacredness". Personal mortality is a solemn subject; is it only through dogmatism that the bodies of the dead (or whatever symbol for the solemn--it could be the peaceful cow) are considered sacred.
[quote]While I'd challenge your claim that the foundation is "symbolically veracious", that is not central here.[/quote]
I think it is central, and am interested in challenging it. It is ultimately my only interest in this debate, as I (presently) think it is the only line of attack that can satisfactorily resolve the "culture war". And this is the key piece that I believe both Dawkins and O'Reilly are missing, which is why it is easy for me to put them in the same boat (on this issue).
[quote]Dawkins is not attacking myths. I dare you to find any evidence that he opposes teaching any myths - Biblical, Greek, Hindu, whatever - as stories. But he does oppose "false advertising" - presenting myths as facts, or using them to build authority for immoral acts, teachings and social structures.[/quote]
No disagreement with that.
[quote]It is not a perversion, either, but a useful adaptation.[/quote]
This is a contradiction, if you mean what I think you mean: the perversion of profound and veracious mythical symbols into various senseless and disprovable dogmas is a useful adaptation for ordering a religious system which in turn structures a society. But then, the propagation of such dogmatism is a virus that ends up destroying the society. Which is it? Is unregulated replication a "useful adaptation" for a cancerous cell? (Maybe I am misinterpreting. I will try to read the Dennet book.)
[quote]Your argument is equivalent to an apology for Communism that insists that the totalitarian regimes in various Communist countries were perversions, and the essence of Communism was the philosophy of Karl Marx, interpreted in the most humanistic way possible, and free of all the parts that Marx himself eventually repudiated. I think it would be absurd to say that Western leaders during the Cold War should have focused on finer points of Marxism rather than the "perversions of dogmas" actually practiced in its name.[/quote]
The analogy is superficially insightful but, upon reflection, inapplicable, since it suggests the appropriate response to a wrongly motivated threat is solely to pontificate on the sources of the threat's wrong motivation without doing anything to combat that wrong motivation. But both comprehension of a problem and solutive action are required to completely sublimate the problem and fully neutralize its menace. It is not enough to know that its fear is the cause of a rattlesnake's rattle, without proceding to stop disturbing the rattlesnake (or, less humanely, kill the rattlesnake) in order to avoid being bitten. Perverted communism was justly combated in the 20th century; false and murderous religious doctrines must be combated in the 21st [i]but the more effective and more permanent way to do so will involve understanding the psychological mechanisms behind their powers of their seduction[/i].
The Amazon.com review of the Dennett book says that the book makes a plea "for religions to engage in empirical self-examination to protect future generations from the ignorance so often fostered by religion hiding behind doctrinal smoke screens." The words "empirical self-examination" are significant because they suggest that there can be such a thing as a methodically guided introspection. If values could be understood to be immanent to life, and could be taught rather than preached, critically evaluated rather than indoctrinated, would not the need for structuring dogmatism be obviated? Is this not a more sensible approach than the one Dawkins seems to propose, which is just to throw out all religions, without making any effort to comprehend the validity and potency of their underlying myths?
[quote]You cannot know ... where the limits of human competence are... [etc.][/quote]
Of course we can know of a limit: the prime cause. No cause is determined from its effects, thus the origin of existence cannot be determined by the manifestations of existence, even the most developed ones, without devolving into a pseudological [i]causa sui[/i]. As you rightly discern, "any question that turns out to reach beyond such limits is a meaningless question." This is the very definition of the limit of human competence.
[quote]Dawkins is a man who deeply cares about what is true and what is good, and has worked all his life to advance both...[/QUOTE]
But as the documentary demonstrates, he is also still at times a victim of his own vanity, which does no good for his cause when he puts himself in front of the camera.
I would be happy to continue, but I fear we will face an impasse if we are operating under different sets of definitions, premises. We often may even be agreeing when it looks like we're disagreeing, as it seems we are when we talk about the limit of human competence. I mentioned earlier a reading list. I'll find and read your recommended reading if you make an effort to take a look at mine. Deal, or no deal?
