Rabbi Sacks (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 01, 2013, 20:08 (4345 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW: For all their faults, I do not recall Messrs Harris, Dawkins or Hitchens ever once calling upon their followers to go forth and kill the "fidel".-TONY (quoting Dawkins:) I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.-and on and on and on and on... is killing the mind any different than killing the body?-As you will know from the "brief guide" and from many of my posts, I have little time for Dawkins and his fundamentalist atheism. However, he is not inciting people to kill theists, and he is not inciting anyone to kill the mind ... unless you wish to argue that missionaries, and indeed those whom Christ himself sent forth to spread the word, also set out to kill the mind. Trying to convert people to your way of thinking does not constitute killing the mind, and your next comment is, in my view, out of all proportion:
 
TONY: As a soldier, I have seen this same tactic employed by governments as a means of making it possible to send one man to kill another man. You dehumanize the other person until they become a faceless non-entity, a disease, a parasite, and then you eradicate them without remorse or guilt.-For all his bombastic arrogance, Dawkins is not talking of eradicating (i.e. killing) Creationists, but of eradicating an idea. No doubt Sacks, the Pope, Jesus, and God himself would like to eradicate atheism.-TONY: I think it is unfair of you to lay that solely on the feet of religion, though they most certainly are guilty of it as well, despite the admonitions against such in their own holy books.-I think it is unfair of you to say that I am laying such brain-washing solely at the feet of religion. I am pointing out that while Sacks rightly praises religion for creating communities, he conveniently ignores the manner in which it also divides communities even to the extent of advocating murder. Dawkins does not advocate murder.