"Science and Religion are Philosophical Viewpoints"

[DPDarkPrimus]

You're laughing with the staff over tantrums the staff threw? Are they laughing at themselves?

"Over the tantrums some of the posters threw", it should read.

Ah, I see. Off topic: do you know how to stop Protest Warrior from flooding your inbox with e-mails on watched topics? Is there any way to turn off that function? I stopped posting there partly because of the dumbasses, and partly because my inbox had aroun 200 new messages a day.

Should be in your profile options, the same as every single other message board.

[McC]

Wee, and the craziness continues.

On one front, there's a question regarding the correlation of religion and heinous crime (i.e. murder/rape and such). I haven't been able to find statistics that clearly delineate offense by religion, though, only prison population by religion and prison population by crime. Someone posted an article not unlike the recent posting here from a rabbi that claims atheism is necessary for heinous crime. Even without the statistics I'm looking for, using just Massachusetts' available records, if every atheist and agnostic incarcerated committed a heinous crime, they'd still only comprise 12% of heinous offenders.

Anyway, if someone can find better statistics than these, that'd be awesome.

On the other front, we're discussing (another atheist and myself, that is) the internal logic (i.e. A exists; if A, then B; if B, then C; etc.) of fundamentalism and science, herein represented by creationism and evolution, respectively. Specifically, he's saying both require a preliminary premise, from which they're both internally consistent. I'm playing the angle that Fundamentalism's initial premise is an Appeal to Authority fallacy, but I think there's a logical way to destroy this argument too. I just don't know how to go about it.

[Darth Wong]

Someone posted an article not unlike the recent posting here from a rabbi that claims atheism is necessary for heinous crime.

Does he believe that all of the Nazis suddenly turned atheist when the Holocaust began, despite the whole country being majority Christian beforehand? Does he believe that all of the Catholic Crusaders and Inquisitioners were atheists too? Does he believe that all of the 9/11 hijackers were atheists? Does he believe that the fundamentalist Mormon pedophile group out in Utah (whose leaders is on the FBI Most Wanted list) is entirely composed of atheists? Does he believe that the Lebanese Christian militias who slaughtered women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were all atheists?

On the other front, we're discussing (another atheist and myself, that is) the internal logic (i.e. A exists; if A, then B; if B, then C; etc.) of fundamentalism and science, herein represented by creationism and evolution, respectively. Specifically, he's saying both require a preliminary premise, from which they're both internally consistent.

That would be possible for a hypothetical religious text which did not contradict itself, but it is completely false in the specific case of Christian fundamentalism.

I'm playing the angle that Fundamentalism's initial premise is an Appeal to Authority fallacy, but I think there's a logical way to destroy this argument too. I just don't know how to go about it.

Religious fundamentalism does not draw upon sources external to itself for its premises. The premises of science are empirical observations; regardless of whether you believe that objective reality is in fact real, you cannot deny that objective reality is a wholly separate entity from science itself, and was certainly not created by science. Religious texts, on the other hand, are created by members of that religion, even if those members lived thousands of years ago. In that sense, religion is an intellectually incestuous philosophy; it begets its own premises. All of religion is naught but a gigantic circular logic fallacy.