I prefer to avoid the expression "beg the question" it's misused so often that you can't guess reliably which meaning the speaker intended, (or which meaning the reader will assume).
I thought one point of the essay was to express your belief that humanity needs to create a new 'community that is based on logic, reason, science, and compassion.' My point is those qualities already exist in the church I attend.
Bacon was silly on my part.
Another point I found in the opening paragraph places the blame of many conflicts in the world on Christian beliefs. If you see someone killing another in the name of Christ then they taking teaching from a confused source.
From my perspective the quality of life for us is ever increasing. The cause behind these improvements can be found within the influence religious doctrines have held on the minds of each successive generation. If our human nature is naturally so good how do we explain all the suffering we subject each other to everyday?
My main thesis is that we needed religion, God, the threat of eternal damnation in hell, and the promise of bliss in heaven for all these centuries because the population was illiterate. They needed to be told stories to get the message across, to scare them into behaving themselves.
I said several times in the article that I agree with all the moral teachings of all religions - which, by the way, are almost identical in all religions.
My main point is that we no longer need the "stories" in each religion because the vast majority of the population is literate now. The stories are what cause religions to attack each other. "My God is better than yours", "My prophet is right, yours is wrong". Those stories are no longer relevant or necessary. Instead, they cause strife and bloodshed.
Nowhere in the article do I single out Christianity as the only problem. All religions have this problem equally - because they are based on two thousand year old stories.
Can I ask where you got the "2-4 million" number? Offering references for your numbers would be appreciated.
To counter your claim, Wikipedia (just to name one source) claims that 1.7 million people were killed in the crusades, 5.9 million killed in the Thirty Year's war, 1.5 million in the Armenian genocide. That's just three wars.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were evil and noone is defending them. But it is a non sequitur to argue that their actions were motivated by atheism. I doubt a little atheist angel or daemon was sitting on their shoulder telling them what to do. In the case of religiously motivated warfare, however, the perpetrators were indeed taking orders from their imaginary friends.
Also, why are we limiting ourselves to "deaths"? Does that mean torture, imprisonment, sexual abuse, and other atrocities in the name of religion are acceptable?
I am the original author of this article. I just found out that a friend had posted it on HN and found these comments. Most seem to fall into a few categories:
"If I'm not paying attention, it's because your meeting is boring or irrelevant."
I am not talking about people who open their laptops in a few (or even most) meetings where the content is boring. I'm talking about people (including myself until recently) who open their laptop or pick up their phone in every single meeting they attend. If you are not that person, no reason to be offended. If you are, then please explain to me how every single meeting can be irrelevant.
"I have ADHD, I can multitask. In fact, I work better when I multitask."
Somewhere between 5% and 11% of all children in America are believed to have ADHD. Even if quadruple that number for people in the computer industry, that still leaves the majority of the population as non-ADHD sufferers. Those are the people I'm talking about. The majority. Also note that I'm not just talking about people in the computer industry, but all information workers. The incidence of ADHD in the general population is not nearly large enough to explain the epidemic I'm describing.
"But I use my laptop to take notes."
The second sentence in the article clearly states that it is fine to do so "for the purposes of the meeting - to take notes..." I guess you must have been multitasking and missed that sentence. :)
"Maybe you should make your meetings more interesting if you want me to pay attention."
I will just quote from the article again: "As the meeting organizer, I should, of course, strive to make the meeting relevant and the decisions concrete. Otherwise, I deserve to be ignored for the latest tweet or alert."
