Dawkins stumped by seemingly simple question

Why single out these "delusional freaks" Wilso for starting drivel? Have you a prejudice.

It's all drivel. Everything. An atheist can't think of anything in any other way.

Our Chancellor has been on TV in a dramatic photo-op reassuring investors in our 5th or 8th largest bank, in effect nationalising the banks, and that's dramatic, that their money is safe and guaranteed by his government. (I use small-case "g" there in order to register my batsqueak of protest about all the drivel our governments of recent years have foisted upon our already bowed-down shoulders.)

Most of the queues have vanished as a result of his statement last night but one remains. At the Golders Green Branch in London. There were about 80 in the queue. A 6 hour wait they said. All those people were saying the chancellor's statement was "drivel" and doing it with a bit more effort that it took you to blurt it out again like a shutter banging in the wind.

No intelligent design and it's all meaningless. Everything. The name on that shack you must live in at a decent distance from your next door neighbour. I've tracked your rants and they coincide with the tic-biting season so I make allowances.

Meaningless is the same as drivel isn't it? So an atheist has no choice. Everything is drivel.

So why do you keep picking on A2K's delusional freaks when, to an atheist, everybody is a deluded freak and like we all have different curtains and teacup styles we are all deluded in different ways. The suspicion arises that A2K is useful to you for venting your rage at knowing that your atheism logically means that you are deluded without the risk of losing cachet, such as it is, in your immediate vicinity. We are a "rage sink". Like a "heat-sink". Except that there's no such thing as heat to an atheist. It's an anthropomorphic concept.

When a moth flies into a flame it doesn't know it's hot. "Hot" is a word coming out of a language refined under spiritual imperitives. So is "drivel". How would atheists arrive at language. They would still be grunting. Gorilla's are atheists.

I could undertake a refutation of your assertion which will explicitly put the very legitimacy of the act of speech itself at stake. But I see no chance of explaining post-structuralism to you. To an atheist it is self-evidently drivel. Like everything else. An atheist is a epidermal bag responding in predictable ways to stimuli with a view to maximising pleasure and reducing pain sometimes having to suffer pain in order to reach pleasures deemed worth the suffering. The fat clubs represent a failure to put up with any suffering.

But so what? Fat clubs are drivel too.

It seems obvious to me.

Something that began with no meaning and ends with no meaning has no meaning in between.

Why prove it anyway. That would be meaningless too.

Religions are an attempt to provide meanings for an organism which is an epidermal bag responding in predictable ways to stimuli with a view to maximising pleasure and reducing pain just as a rat is. Rats have no religion because they have no need for meanings.

As there is no known society of humans without a religion surely the onus is on the atheist to prove there is meaning. To the religious meaning is self evident.

Nobody knows what meaning means according to linguistic philosophy. Trying to find out is a nice comfy job though.

What's the difference between 300 people getting killed in an aircrash and 300 earwigs getting killed when you dig a patch of land up. If a difference exists it can only be due to an empathy with one or the other and not anything objective. In our ordinary activities we kill billions of life forms by the hour, often cruelly. We obviously ascribe no meaning to them. An atheist must say that man is an animal and is in a simple power relation with all other animals including others like herself. And equally meaningless.

I don't see how a large and organised society of atheists could survive. I respect people who are atheists but not when they try to persuade others to be the same. The word "atheist" has come to have two meanings to people. That there is no God of any sort or that there is no Christian God.
The latter is the one that is generally adopted here and it is an implicit attack on Christian society at its foundations. A very easy target when selecting cases and ignoring others.

Atheism is a style choice. A pose. A "Hey- I'm different" position defended by the mundane meanings of words. Put it under a microscope and it's rubbish. It's a selfish strategy. Preaching it I consider subversive and especially when no alternatives are described in which case, the usual case, it is gratuitous and, as far as I know, unacceptable to the ruling elites of every nation of the western world and the majority of their populations.

To just decide on a bit of a whim that "I'm an atheist" and to then jump straight into attacking religious people in the most intemperate terms is the action of an out of control ego. And there is no reason why an atheist shouldn't have an out of control ego with only fear of punishment limiting its actions when it's a bit wimpy. The repression of the ego urges of an atheist may well be the cause of rage outbursts when safe opportunities for a tantrum appear.

All this stylish unfairness and wit is tremendously good fun. As with Voltaire, his scornful laughter is a powerful weapon. But as with Voltaire, his demolition of traditional religion is finally missing something, which you find, say, in the poetry of Thomas Hardy: a sense of the deep psychic wound caused by the rupture with our immediate past and our forbears when we wave goodbye to our religion: and the subsequent pathos of our post-religious cosmic loneliness.

animals are atheists