re faith and dogma tgk cs toronto edu todd kelley writes faith and dogma are irrational the faith and dogma part of any religion are responsible for the irrationality of the individuals i disagree in the end the individual is responsible for his her own irrationality the individual s belief in some dogmatic religion is a symptom of that irrationality have you noticed that philosophers tend to be atheists atheists and agnostics i would imagine but yes that was my point an atheist would theoretically be just as ill equipped to study the philosophy of religion as a christian and yet there is a persistence of atheists among the ranks of philosophers therefore the conflict between one s religious beliefs or lack thereof and the ability to be a philosopher must not be as great as you assert the fact that most philosophers may be non religious was a secondary point science as would be practiced by atheists in contrast has a built in defence against faith and dogma as opposed to science practiced by theists be careful here science does have a built in defence against faith and dogma skepticism unfortunately it is not foolproof there is that wonderful little creature known as the theory many of us believe in the theory of evolution we have no absolute proof that this theory is true so why do we believe it because it makes more sense than there is quite a bit of faith involved here a scientist holds sacred the idea that beliefs should change to suit whatever is the best information available at the time and and and a scientist understands that any current beliefs are deficient in some way well not all current beliefs are deficient but basically i agree can you see the difference science views beliefs as being flawed and new information can be obtained to improve them ideally this is true in reality though you have to acknowledge that scientists are human scientists have egos and biases some scientists assume a particular theory is true refuse to admit the flaws in that theory because of ego problems or whatever and proceed to spend their time and money trying to come up with absolute proof for the theory remember cold fusion by the way i wasn t aware mass suicide was a problem waco and jonestown were isolated incidents mass suicides are far from common clinton and the fbi would love for you to convince them of this it would save the us taxpayer a lot of money if you could not really i agree that we spent far too much money on the waco crisis i believe especially considering the outcome my point was that mass suicides in the u s are rare jonestown was in guyana incidentally although we footed the bill for the clean up and the u s has far more important issues to address compare the number of u s citizens who have died in mass suicides with say the number of u s soldiers who died during one week of the vietnam war and you will see my point kevin marshall computer science department virginia tech marshall csugrad cs vt edu blacksburg virginia
