I’m wrestling with the term ‘bigot’ in relation to Richard Dawkins’ now infamous remark about Islam

[rrneck]

40. I was talking about religion.

Last edited Wed Aug 14, 2013, 12:18 PM - Edit history (1)

Facts is facts and faith is faith. We can amass facts about the universe, and we can have faith in anything. We can have faith that we will have the facts that we need to survive, and our successful survival confirms our faith.

Ability and god, confidence and belief are all the same thing. You say tomato, they say tomato. The "thing" to which you, me, and everybody else refers is the projection of emotion into the future. Learn to make fire, and a warm fire feels good. Make nice and promise to help her survive and you'll get laid. Treat everyone well and don't be an asshole and you'll go to heaven. Take the ring to the mountain of fire and Gandalf won't chew your ass out every fifteen minutes.

Humans spontaneously anthropomorphize everything around them and project themselves into infinity. So science figures out zero, string theory, and the magic of ice in scotch while religion cooks up the concept of pearly gates, bevys of hot virgins and the grease of societal cooperation. It doesn't always work. Sometimes we get Hiroshima and the Inquisition, both of which produced human barbeques.

As far as I'm concerned it's just form and content. In art, form is anything in a work of art you can point at like line or color. Content is what it is about or why it is made. You can't have one without the other, and parsing the objects of faith into into inherently good or bad is an exercise in futility.