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The answer is 1 – let me explain. There is a temple* every 1km in India (it’s not a law, but it’s sort of like Starbucks – if you missed one, keep driving the next one is coming).

Upon arrival in the vicinity of a temple, your 2 choices are:

1. Keep driving, ignore the temple and risk the wrath of the specific God that inhabits that temple – since God (like Mrs. Neo) can also be offended by the things you didn’t do!

2. Drive at 1km/hour.

Now you know everything you wanted to know about Indian traffic.

-Neo
* Not counting cows, which apparently are not as holy as they were once. I have seen many of them being rudely asked to vacate the middle of the road! Next thing you know, we’ll be legalizing gay sex!

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Your point about irrelevance to my primary blog title is taken (although India is so steeped in tradition/culture/religion whatever, its sort of hard to escape it).

And all of you can debate whether it should be called agnostic/secular/pseudo/disco/trance/applied-physics etc., I’ll just stick with the following: “Religion: none”. :-)

-Neo

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Thanks for the compliment about “one” of the nicest readers’!, I simply don’t believe in hurling insults and expletives over the virtual world :)

Just as someone was once confused on “so many levels” by the street planners and address-makers of Bengaluru, I am too, on many levels , by your blog post and replies !!
For one, why this blog post on a R2Ish, really funny, filled with urbane wit blog column?
There is almost no way that such a blog post, regardless of any funny references to desserts and alcohol, would generate any other type of discussions other than what is being posted.

Unless of course, you are widening the scope of your blog (perhaps an atheism missionary??) , which would be a sad demise to the “original” Neo blog (IMHHHO)!!

So, you are fundamentalist atheist/agnostic/non-believer/ :), maybe even a tinge of pseudo-secularist (is there such a thing as reverse pseudo-secularist) , eh, (I am referring to the “temple” reference, which I had assiduously desisted from pointing out, till now). Well, ok. Great. Or not great….or good for you. Whatever.

So we agree to disagree on moderates, extremists, God, the word “God”, and more :)

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You forgot Procrasteneists – Those (like gauri above?) who are atheists, but are putting off admitting it. :-)

-Neo

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So agnosticism is only about your beliefs on what is knowable or not. You can be an agnostic theist (i.e. you don’t think it’s possible to know for certain whether a god exists or not, but you choose to believe) or you can be an agnostic atheist (same thing, but you choose to believe that god doesn’t exist), or you can simply be an agnostic, and wash your hands of the whole discussion, saying that you just don’t know (and neither do the rest of the fools arguing over the topic).

Søren Kierkegaard is probably the most famous agnostic theist (at least in philosophy circles), and Hume is the most famous all-over agnostic (his Dialogues on Religion are a great read, for anyone interested in his stance on religion).

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You’re one of my nicest readers, even when we disagree, and I know you’re trying to end our discussion on a conciliatory note, but I simply have to point this out because I know you’re making a genuine attempt to understand:

Atheists do not have faith in non-faith, they simply have NO faith.

If all the religions were hobbies like stamp collecting, ballet dancing, … Atheism would be “none”.

If all the religions were sports, then atheists would not be “cricket”, they would be those who don’t play any sport.

Atheism is not a religion or a faith system, just like “not collecting stamps” is not a hobby, or “not playing football” can not be a sport.

Atheists are not those who have a different religious belief system than yours, they are simply those who don’t HAVE a religious belief system.

-Neo

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This is one of those conversations that has no beginning or end !!
Certainly faith in “non-faith” and faith in “faith” are two sides of the same coin…..

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That’s a great point – the moderates claim that religion is like the iPhone in your example, but the overwhelming proof that we see around is today suggests that religion behaves more like alcohol – a fun and marginally useful social custom, but a deadly poison if taken to extremes.

-Neo

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Well, all things being equal many more moderates would probably have been lost to extremism.

But all things are not equal – enter science and the “men of the mind” (Ayn Rand’s term). 1000 years ago, we would have been discussing “moderate belief in blood-letting”, or “moderate belief in astrology”, or “how non-believers in alchemy are extremists in their own way”.

Can we at least agree that science has laid waste to vast swathes of ground that was once the sway of religion ?

(And epiphanies do occur. Keep the faith – I was once a believer! Thank God I’m an atheist now.)

-Neo

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Well of course you’re right – this isn’t a rigorous argument, it’s just poking fun – think of it as a quick fix “pop atheism” for my busy-beyond-”belief” readers who really don’t have the time to read my 500-page book on the subject. :-)

If you were looking for a rigorous treatment of the subject you’d be reading Hitchens, Dawkins, Sam Harris, and then the thousands of papers they in turn cite, many of which you’ve probably read already.

The other point is that (just like with say, calculus) it is for the believers to make the argument. If you think that we should be at some other point other than “0: Disbelief” when it comes to any specific religious claim or behavior of any of the 3500 religions (or you know something that us (superficial) disbelievers don’t) well then that claim is yours to prove, not ours to disprove!

-Neo

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Sorry, still confused :)
The opposite of moderate is extreme, and if what you and Sam Harris say is true, “moderates” should have already gone out of existence (or will become extinct soon) since they’d all “become” extremists (at whatever it is they are moderate at).
Will surely let you know if a super-belated epiphany does strike me regarding this post though!

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In contrast, you have a continuum of tastes and behaviors (economists have fancy math ways of describing the shape & nature of your choice sets and preference sets, but they almost always taken to continuous). So you can vary your drinking activity from none to some to everyday, etc. You can vary your religious activity from none (however you choose to define “religious activity”) to some to crazy-ass monk level. Your enjoyment of chocolate cake can go from dislike to mild enjoyment to deep passion.

As far as your main argument goes, I’m not convinced beyond a very superficial level. Yes, the presence of alcohol in a community means that that community is more likely to have alcoholics than a community that has NO alcohol whatsoever. Likewise, a person who has some religious beliefs (*waves hand at defining religion*) is more likely to be a religious fundamentalist than someone who has NO religious beliefs of any kind. These sort of conclusions are not rocket science.

But this isn’t any sort of argument against religion or alcohol or *any* other activity or belief which has costs. And ALL activities and beliefs have costs, since there’s always at least opportunity costs, if nothing else. You’ll have to go a lot further than the “argument” you’ve made here.

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