Beautiful guy tho. His argument for supporting the invasion of Iraq is intelligent and reasoned. When you're arguing against the removal of Saddam you've got yourself in quite a tangled position. Tho I understand the reasoning for not going to war.
how am i different or better than a religious person?
Didn't Dawkins say that if the bloke down the road believes there's fairies at the bottom of the garden why would you give it any validity?
and if anyone else knows with certainty
Bit of a pointless argument tho - we don't know if there's an invisible monster sat inside the washing machine eating all our socks do we. But we can make a best guess.
The iraq war was just the usual great-game imperialism though, and anyone with access to the facts (like you'd hope CH did) would have to make an effort to call it a moral thing to do (half a million children had died at our hands before he gave his support) - nothing to do with sadddam being a baddie either - he was our baddie at his baddest, and we had/have worse baddies on the payroll.
on certainty, i don't thinnk the argument is pointless ; it just applies scientific thinking (as i vaguely understand it) - 100% certainty leaves no room for a further falsification -the argument often used against religion. it's semantics i suppose, but athiest seems too certain to me - i think it's very unlikely, but maybe someone will invent a crafty experiment that discovers something that we could refer to as god (if only in some vague acid-head sense of the universe being intelligent or something), or at least makes it less certain. While i obviously think this is unlikely, at one time proper clever people would have laughed quantum physics ideas that are common now (and someone came up with some crafty experiments...).
And @SHM - i agree with nearly everything you say about organised religion, but that's a social thing really (most relgions seem to start all nice and tolerant, but descend into organisations with their own inherent power struggles).
....
Anyway to get back ot: i think the most important division people should focus on is class/power relations - far more joins us in our position in the pyramid than anything else (eg we could eliminate world hunger with just the profits of the top few corporations (even we could afford it on our own out of our budget) - that would surely reduce economic migration somewhat).
The biggest con is the way the elite have convinced everyone that there's no money, when there is (keynes blah-blah) - we've actually got loads of money - and we can create it (and do, but only for banks); as long as it's spent on infrastructure, inflation wouldn't be a problem. Even the imf now admits that public spending has a 1.5 multiplier (so we could create money, spend it on making our country decent, and growth would pay it back and then some)
