It's difficult to say right now there is a lot of poles around which people are congregating: abortion, darwinishm, and so forth.
Part of the issue is the questions touch deeply into the heart of religious beliefs, and that's not a very rational thing to touch, and the responses are equally irrational unless there's a well-disciplined mind about.
If you take a man like Richard Dawkins, who(from what I understand, I haven't studied him myself), he wants to see all religion abolished, and the supernatural removed from life. That is a central fear of the amorphous political-religious movement in the US- one of the genuinely uniting factors in its disparate parts. This fear arose back in the early days of the 20th century with the rampant atheism of the Bolsheviks and what they did to their subjects. Dawkins scares the crap out of religious people, and they want his ideas essentially surpressed or permantly shelved. Even the more raational religious people would rather see tolerance than the gross intolerance he displays.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-18 10:25 pm (UTC)Part of the issue is the questions touch deeply into the heart of religious beliefs, and that's not a very rational thing to touch, and the responses are equally irrational unless there's a well-disciplined mind about.
If you take a man like Richard Dawkins, who(from what I understand, I haven't studied him myself), he wants to see all religion abolished, and the supernatural removed from life. That is a central fear of the amorphous political-religious movement in the US- one of the genuinely uniting factors in its disparate parts. This fear arose back in the early days of the 20th century with the rampant atheism of the Bolsheviks and what they did to their subjects. Dawkins scares the crap out of religious people, and they want his ideas essentially surpressed or permantly shelved. Even the more raational religious people would rather see tolerance than the gross intolerance he displays.