Dawkins in Lynchburg VA (part 1) The God Delusion

PART 1: Richard Dawkins reads excerpts from The God Delusion and answers questions at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia on October 23, 2006. This Q&A features many questions from Jerry Falwell's Liberty "University" students.

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[11danyboy11]

"if atheism is a religion then not playing baseball is a sport"

[kortenful]

If Liberty is a real university then Captain Crunch is a real naval officer. Getting a diploma from there is a bad cv move.

[SamCroSOA2012]

The dark ages started do to the fall of Rome. that is correct. However, religion saw this as an opportunity to take control of the populace through fear, because the general population was uneducated. Religion then held this grip with an iron fist for 1000 years repressing all scientific progress. These same religious forces preformed some of the greatest atrocities of human history, either in the name of god, or in an attempt to diffuse any kind of free thinking.

[SamCroSOA2012]

If you truly believed in god, heaven, and hell, you would never wish anybody would go there, you would in fact, try to save him from his unfortunate fate. your statement proves everything that is wrong and hypocritical about religion. Religion is for people who aren't smart enough to think for themselves. It's a lot easier to be told how to live your life than finding the meaning to live it on your own. your ignorance is astounding.

[SamCroSOA2012]

why do you say that? there is no delusion in atheism. only evidence. athiests don't believe in anything. we observe the actions of the physical universe and use the collected data to determine certain outcomes. Our problem with religion is that it spits in the face of human progress. Religion is in actuality a fear of intelligence. If we could plot a graph of intelligence to religious belief it's obvious the smarter a person is, the less religious they are.

[SamCroSOA2012]

your complete lack of insight is disturbing. that there is a large portion of the population as disconnected from reality as you are is frightening. Science never said it can disprove god, science never said it would cure all disease, science has helped with better energy resources, global warming is not a conspiracy, and your inability to be smart enough to do the research and think for yourself disqualifies you from intelligent discussion.

[Guillermo St]

And which god do you recommend then? Yahweh, Allah, or any of the other thousands of phony gods made up by humankind since the dawn of time? Gods are like fashions, that come and go over longer periods of time. The only difference is that no one has ever imposed a rigid moral system or killed other human beings in the name of a famous designer.

[sarah thompson]

lol I love the comparison. About ten kids that I graduated high school with went to college there. I can't imagine someone actually going there to get any kind of science degree.

[jazzx251]

So THIS is Christianity.

NO THANKS!

"You are my friends if you do what I command you"

That's not what I understand "friendship" to be; nor any other well balanced human being.

I feel sorry for you - your best friend is an imaginary being whose commands you follow, because he's threatened to not be friends with you if you don't ... resulting in you being dumped into the terrifying fires of hell.

Love does not come from threats. That's why your religion is so false.

[jacopman]

If objective truth is to be found, it will not be found outside of ourselves within our imagination of the supernatural, for it if existed at all, it would reside in our species as a concurrent and ubiquitous understanding. As it is, we've had 1,000's of religious world views over history with 38,000 denominations of Christianity alone. That is all the evidence needed to understand their subjective failures.

There has been only one method of science in all of history because it works.

[jacopman]

The subjective personal revelation from a supernatural entity has accomplished nothing in our understanding of reality. It is a hopeful desire rooted in superstition and magic that attempts to find meaning for a species that is only capable of asking that question but has never found such a concurrent solution beyond our own meaning we prescribe to life. It is about time the human species face reality to realize that we alone are the caregivers of purpose and repudiate where there is none.