Comments by "Joe Madden" (@joemadden4160) on "The Guardian" channel.

  1. One last thought. The idea that properly educating the masses or that high intelligence automatically leads to morality or ethical reasoning is specious at best. How many highly educated male individuals have left the confines of their democratic nations just so they can go to Syria to rape women and cut off heads? Education is no guarantee.
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  2. Another point that Dawkins and Hitchens was/were seemingly unwilling to make(although it is the point of their main argument) is that People are Deluded and People Are Not Great. Titles of books like the aformentioned would preclude making money and/or "converting" the masses. If one is to argue that God or whatever deity is said to have been created sorely by the imagination(or delusion) of a select group of people and that the masses as a whole decided to follow said belief, then it stands to reason that it is humanity's fault(and sorely humanity's) for the eventual murderous habits of said beliefs, and not any imaginary God created by said selected group of creators/leaders/followers. When was the last time you heard of someone blaming Mary Shelley for the creation of the A-bomb? Exactly. Still, the planet is filled with deluded people. However, you cannot blame the Bible or any other religious or philosophical tome for the state that we are in. The fault lies not in the stars...
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  3. What can be annoying about Hawkins and the late Hitchens(although I have a great amount of admiration for both of them) is that nowhere is it mentioned that the two greatest mass murderers in history, Mao and Stalin, were both atheistic psychopaths whose "scientific" experimentation on their citizenry caused tens of millions of deaths. Although can successfully argue, I believe, that Maoism and Stalinism are cut from the same deistic cloth as Christianity and Islam, there is little proof that these philosophies have caused the same amount of death and destruction as the aformentioned political philosophies -"religions"-have. That said, if one looks deep into our ancestral past, one may see that religion and scientific exploration and invention have often tread the same path, sometimes for peaceful reasons and sometimes not. Beside every deistic leader of the past sat his weapons builder and/or creator, more than willing to have his new device tried on unwilling victims or the next enemy. On a final note, I find it fascinating that the majority of biologists, specifically evolutionary biologists like Dawkins, are so fervently atheistic and yet others in other scientific fields like chemistry and physics less so?
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