I haven't come across much of Richard Dawkins work, apart from the documentary "Root of All Evil". While I didn't find much to disagree with, I did feel it was a little too much "preaching to the choir" in how it was presented.
To successfully target and expose fundamentalism, I think there really needs to be more education on both the silliness of the supernatural myth and that this myth can be separated from some of the good things that people still like about their faith: the ethics stuff.
As it is, with a lot of these people, if they lose their faith in the Vengeful God then they lose inhibitions against doing things they know to be wrong: kiddy fiddling, theft, greed, intolerance (which would normally be forbidden under Do Unto Others), etc. There needs to be some sort of easy slot-in replacement ethical structure for them or they'll feel lost (or unduly freed to do terrible things to others).
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Date: 2008-04-18 01:21 pm (UTC)To successfully target and expose fundamentalism, I think there really needs to be more education on both the silliness of the supernatural myth and that this myth can be separated from some of the good things that people still like about their faith: the ethics stuff.
As it is, with a lot of these people, if they lose their faith in the Vengeful God then they lose inhibitions against doing things they know to be wrong: kiddy fiddling, theft, greed, intolerance (which would normally be forbidden under Do Unto Others), etc. There needs to be some sort of easy slot-in replacement ethical structure for them or they'll feel lost (or unduly freed to do terrible things to others).