flog

butt sex with a mouse or something:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ2q09xrTXE

"One fewer god" at first struck me as a well-put argument, but after some reflection it didn't seem very convincing. David Friedman gives a rebuttal in point 3.

I've always taken the "one fewer god" to be a rhetorical device. "Why don't you believe in Thor? - well, I don't believe in your god for the exact same reasons". I'm not sure it was intended to be a rigourous deductive argument.

Since I bristle at a deep, visceral level at the suggestion there is any legitimacy to religious belief, I offer my responses. That's a little indulgent, but, hey, it's my blog.

1. >both of them hold their beliefs not because of rational investigation but because the people around them told them those things were true.

True, but there is an important difference. Scientific statements are verifiable in principle. If one is not lazy and sufficiently non-stupid, one can verify the mathematics of relativity or quantum physics. There is no corollary with religious nonsense. That something is written in the believer's holy book of choice or was uttered by a revered prophet is the sole justification for a belief.

2. >What he [Dawkins] is ignoring is that religious labels identify communities as well as systems of belief.

True, but being French does not necessarily entail brainwashing a child into believing in things that don't exist. A child's being French is exactly a function of a) the child's parents' nationality and/or b) the location where the child's mother was at the point of birth.

(It's worth noting that D. Friedman appears to miss the main point of Dawkins's label argument (as I read it in The God Delusion). Small children are incapable of holding the requisite beliefs of X or Y religion so it is at best inaccurate to call them Christian or whatever.)

3. >Similarly, it might be that religious truth is too difficult for us to fully understand.

Possibly, but there isn't any evidence yet that there is any god or gods about which various religions' truths are partially right. At least when science discusses things we haven't discovered yet (like tachyons or the Higgs boson), there is a well-supported theory pointing us in that direction and we are collecting evidence and conducting experiments to find out empirically whether they exist. Once again, religion offers nothing of equal value to show why the discussion is worthwhile in the first place.