Posted on 01/07/2006 10:26:53 PM PST by LibWhacker
Scientist compares Moses to Hitler, calls New Testament 'sado-masochistic doctrine'
Controversial scientist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins, dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler," calls religion a "virus" and faith-based education "child abuse" in a two-part series he wrote and appears in that begins airing on the UK's Channel 4, beginning tomorrow evening.
Entitled "Root of All Evil?," the series features the atheist Dawkins visiting Lourdes, France, Colorado Springs, Colo., the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and a British religious school, using each of the venues to argue religion subverts reason.
In "The God Delusion," the first film in the series, Dawkins targets Catholicism at the pilgrimage site in Lourdes. "If you want to experience the medieval rituals of faith, the candle light, the incense, music, important-sounding dead languages, nobody does it better than the Catholics," he says.
Dawkins, using his visit to Colorado Springs' New Life Church, criticizes conservative U.S. evangelicals and warns his audience of the influence of "Christian fascism" and "an American Taliban."
The backdrop of the al-Aqsa mosque and an American-born Jew turned fundamentalist Muslim who tells Dawkins to prepare for the Islamic world empire – and who clashes with him after saying he hates atheists – rounds out the first program's case for the delusions of the faithful.
In part two, "The Virus of Faith," Dawkins attacks the teaching of religion to children, calling it child abuse.
"Innocent children are being saddled with demonstrable falsehoods," he says. "It's time to question the abuse of childhood innocence with superstitious ideas of hellfire and damnation. Isn't it weird the way we automatically label a tiny child with its parents' religion?"
"Sectarian religious schools," Dawkins asserts, have been "deeply damaging" to generations of children.
Dawkins, who makes no effort to disguise his atheism and contempt for religion, focuses on the Bible, too.
"The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist," he says. Dawkins then criticizes Abraham, compares Moses to Hitler and Saddam Hussein, and calls the New Testament "St Paul's nasty, sado-masochistic doctrine of atonement for original sin."
John Deighan, a spokesman for the Catholic Church, took issue with Dawkin's denunciation of religion, telling the Glasgow Sunday Herald, "Dawkins is well known for his vitriolic attacks on faith, and I think faith has withstood his attacks. He really is going beyond his abilities as a scientist when he starts to venture into the field of philosophy and theology. He is the guy with demonstrable problems."
Madeline Bunting, a columnist for the Guardian, who reviewed the series, wrote: "There's an aggrieved frustration that [atheist humanists] have been short-changed by history – we were supposed to be all atheist rationalists by now. Secularization was supposed to be an inextricable part of progress. Even more grating, what secularization there has been is accompanied by the growth of weird irrationalities from crystals to ley lines. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, the problem when people don't believe in God is not that they believe nothing, it is that they believe anything."
Dawkins, perhaps best know for his much-cited comment that evolution "made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist," appeals to John Lennon in a commentary he authored for the Belfast Telegraph on the eve of his program's premiere: "Religion may not be the root of all evil, but it is a serious contender. Even so it could be justified, if only its claims were true. But they are undermined by science and reason. Imagine a world where nobody is intimidated against following reason, wherever it leads. "You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one."
He appears to be responding specifically to your post.
OK -- tell us what your logical criticism means. You state that Hitler was a) evil, and b) a theist. What are we to make of this?
I notice you haven't bothered to address the point that was addressed to you, for that matter. Are you comfortable with the double-standard that we musn't blame religion when someone acts badly in its name, but when someone acts badly for other reasons, it's entirely proper to blame evolution?
And that was post 54 for anyone interested in looking it up. Thanks for bringing the discussion into proper focus.
I merely point out the creationist hypocrisy - I did not make it.
Yes, yes, this has been posted ad nausium. This isn't Darwinian. The idea of a struggle for resources in nature long predates Darwin. It is also correct. This is not natural selection. It also doesn't negate Hitler's belief that the Aryan race was the perfect special creation of God. His invoking *evolution* is a cartoonish version of the theory. It is a distortion along the same lines his Christian imagery is a perversion of Christianity. There is simply no such thing as a *higher* or *lower* organism, evolutionary speaking. From what I can gather, he believed that the *lesser* races were a product of evolution, and that the Aryan race was most certainly NOT.
Good question. If Dawkins' presuppositions were correct and he actually followed through with them consistently, that is, if people are just animals that have evolved from lower forms of life and are battling it out in history -- then it follows that there isn't any moral difference between allowing our children to decide for themselves about religious issues, or not, or for that matter, grinding them up for use as fertilizer. His subjective moral posturing about the chemical epiphenomena he calls "abuse" has about the same level of intellectual consistency as that of an incoherent drunk.
Cordially,
How about you first read what Rand said, and then get back to me. You are coming at this from a completely ignorant position. I don;t have the time to educate you.
" So was Ted Bundy. See his final interview. He knew what he was doing, and he knew the consequences. But Ted Bundy was also crazy."
If he knew what he was doing, and knew it was wrong when he did it, he was not insane.
"Hitler was no doubt an atheist."
Based on what evidence? Your wishes that it were true? There is no evidence he was an atheist.
It was a more general comment than just that one post -- I just like Diamond's style. Perhaps it should have been FReepmailed instead.
Are you comfortable with the double-standard that we musn't blame religion when someone acts badly in its name, but when someone acts badly for other reasons, it's entirely proper to blame evolution?
I wasn't aware that that point had been "addressed to" me at all. Still, I will address it now.
First: suppose I claim to be doing something in the name of Christianity, and yet in so doing I violate the tenets of Christianity. I'm sure you'll agree that it would be hard to blame Christianity for the fact that I violated its tenets.
Second: I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't blame "evolution" for the actions of somebody like Hitler. I do note, however, that many -- you included, I presume -- denounce things like Social Darwinism or Nazi racial theories, despite the fact that they can be justified by explicit reference to the mechanisms by which Darwinian evolution is supposed to work.
Some attempt to get around this by saying that evolution has no moral content; others claim (unconvincingly, as it turns out) that one can use logic and reason to derive moral principles from what we can observe. And yet there's the problem that nature is a rather violent place, which conflicts with the fact that most people agree that such violence is "evil" when humans do it.
The logic of this situation is concise and compelling.
First, if we cannot objectively derive our version morality from what we can observe (and we cannot); and if we hold that our version of morality is nevertheless true; then the truth of that morality must be established outside of what we can observe. This boils down to a statement of supernatural origins for morals and rights; e.g., that we are "Endowed by our Creator" with certain moral rights.
Second, if we reject any such supernatural explanations -- as an atheist must -- then the only logical result must be that there is nothing objectively immoral about such things as initiation of force. One must resort to utilitarian, and thus morally relative, arguments to justify the "non-initiation" principle and, when push comes to shove, that's how objectivists often end up arguing the point. The problems with utilitarian are legion, among which is the problem of trying to explain why Nazism's eugenic arguments are intrinsically wrong.
Er, no. You stated the following:
1) Hitler was not an atheist, he was a theist. He used Christian imagery to build his race religion, and believed that the Aryan race was the perfect special creation of the Creator.
2) He wasn't *insane*, he was evil.... Hitler knew damn well what he was doing.
What point are you trying to make here?
And you'll huff, and you'll puff, and you'll bloooooowwwww my house down.
Or as Ludwig von Mises put it to her face: "So, you are the silly woman who thinks mankind can be free without God!" This occurred at his 75th birthday party in New York. He proceeded to attack for fifteen minutes or so until La Rand fled the premises in tears never to darken movement conservative doors again.
That you who believe so are apes, I do not doubt. Good to know that I can agree with even you once in a while! Don't use the term "we" without permission, though, if you are referencing thee and me as some sort of collective entity.
I merely point out the creationist hypocrisy - I did not make it.
If the Dawkins form of atheistic evolution is true our thoughts are one thing, if it is not, they are entirely a different thing. The former position presupposes some standard beyond nature (for which it cannot account) by which to assign praise or blame, but under such a scenario notions as as "good" or "evil" are necessarily meaningless. They are nothing but empty sensations created by chemical reactions of the brain. Complaining of a "double standard" or of "creationist hypocrisy" implies the existence of some objective standard by which to judge, a standard for which atheism can give no account. At least Christianity provides the foundation needed to critique the behavior of its own. Christians can condemn the actions of the Spanish Inquisition. An atheist like Dawkins, however, cannot even give a coherent reason for why something like the biological experiments of the Nazis were unethical, yet he compares Moses to Hitler. Go figure.
Cordially,
Simple nonsense. I'm rather suprised, actually. The laws of physics tell you what will happen if you throw a puppy from a moving car. Do you imagine then that the laws of physics justify throwing puppies out of cars?
First, if we cannot objectively derive our version morality from what we can observe (and we cannot)
I really think you'd better prove that statement, rather than simply asserting it.
Nevertheless, even assuming it to be true, for the sake of argument, how does the assumption of a Creator lend itself to "objective" morality? You've simply set the problem back a bit - now we argue about which of us is "objectively" correct about the nature and desires of the presumed "Creator", and the inherently subjective interpretations of two thousand year old texts.
Given that there are - at least - tens of thousands of Christian sects and denominations alone, which one of them is "objectively" correct? Yours? Would be convenient, wouldn't it? How about the thousands and thousands of non-Christian faiths? Are any of them a candidate for "objective" morality? Why or why not? Why is your version of morality "objectively" correct, and the Nazis not?
While I realize it's rather convenient to claim that atheistic moral systems suffer from the crippling handicap of subjectivity, the reality is that all moral systems have that in spades.
" What point are you trying to make here?"
Not the one you are trying to pretend I made.
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