Tuesday, March 2, 2010

What if your wrong, south park style.

It's considerably better than the previous South Park style Richard Dawkins that was actually done by the South Park folks. And has a lot to recommend it, but the strangest thing is why do people like this? I saw this years ago as part of a Q and A in a pretty straight forward talk/reading. It sounded boiler-plate to me but it seems to have be rehashed and rehashed and is much beloved.


1 comment:

Sparrowhawk said...

Yeah, this one is a classic. Good refutation of Pascal's wager. I'm not comfortable with the argument that a Christian knows what it's like "not to believe" in Thor or JuJu or whatever, at least they definitely don't in the same sense that a skeptic or an atheist does. I can't speak for ALL atheists of course, but I think it's safe to say that most lack belief in god(s) because they've thought about it and realize that there's no good reason to believe in it.

I don't know that I'm willing to say that's the case with, say, a Christian. A Christian can take Allah or Thor or JuJu and say "Well, that's not god. My god is god, so that's just silly."

Yes, yes, of course if you press them to give a reason other than that for not believing in Thor or JuJu you can most likely find that they aren't convinced either exists because there's no good reason too. But I don't know that it's a good analogy for the reasons atheists lack belief in god(s). I find it hard to believe that a significant number of Christians have genuinely sat down and weighed any arguments for/against Thor and said "Well clearly that's silly, I'm not convinced." I'm not even sure they feel they're "permitted" to even ponder it, depending on the strength of their particular dogma.