Dawkins: Religion equals 'child abuse'

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.

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."

"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."

I used to think this way a bit when I was younger...
but I didn't quite have Dawkins' evangelical zeal.

But as I slaved my way through a graduate degree in biochemistry,
I learned a lot about "selective reading".

Sounds like Dawkins, for all his brilliance, has forgotten that
absolutely necessary aspect of making investigations and observations.

But then he sounds like he's pretty stressed, given some of his
statements, so maybe he just forgot about how "selective reading"
will only lead you to "the truth" if you are just very darned lucky.

Nothing there about Hitler supporting evolution, sorry. He was not an atheist either.

"Human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe. The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise."

" It is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions."

"What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproductionof our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purityof our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that ourpeople may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the Creator of the universe."

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord. Compared to the absurd catchword about safeguarding law and order, thus laying a peaceable groundwork for mutual swindles, the task of preserving and advancing the highest humanity, given to this earth by the benevolence of the Almighty, seems a truly high mission."

"Historical experience offers countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood. The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following: To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the Eternal Creator."

"...finally to put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created."

"The folkish-minded man, in particular has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will."

"Then, from the child's story-book to the last newspaper in the country, and every theatre and cinema, every pillar where placards are posted and every free space on the hoardings should be utilized in the service of this one great mission, until the faint-hearted cry, "Lord, deliver us," which our patriotic associations send up to Heaven to-day would be transformed into an ardent prayer: 'Almighty God, bless our arms when the hour comes. ' "

No mention of Darwin or natural selection.

As for Haeckel, he wasn't an atheist really either. He was Monist. The second quote from him is entirely innocuous; we ARE a part of nature. Again, do some homework.

You wrote: "Both Europe and North America are being overrun by foreigners who refuse to assimilate into our culture, bringing their 3rd world religions, morals and values to take root and conquer us through supplanting our way of life with theirs."

Yeah, but the difference here is that Europe has Muslims on their southern border, and we have Mexicans.

Mexicans are about 60% Catholic/40% Evangelical or Pentecostal, actually Western culturally (if not Northern): Spain being Western Europe, and Central America being Western Hemisphere and Christian for the past 400+ years, and Spanish and Portuguese being closely derived from Latin, the classical language of the West.

Suppose (and this is not theology, not prophecy, and certainly not politics, just a "supposal") suppose, --- since demography abhors a vacuum--- God is allowing us to experience the logical consequences of aborting 50,000,000 American babies, by replacing them one-for-one with Mexicans.

If that's the case, I'd say thank God that what we face is higher fertility, more kindergarten kids, more taxes, more tacos, more Jesucristo--- and not shari'a, dhimmitude, and jihad.

"CarolinaGuitarman: Why do I get the impression that, since your homepage suggests admiration for Ayn Rand (serial adulterer and atheist), that you may be an atheist or agnostic offended by the suggestion that the Friedrich Nietzsche disciple Hitler might have been (horrors!) a materialistic agnostic or atheist?"

Because you like to wallow in logical fallacies? :)

BTW, Nietzsche was not a proto-nazi. He was against antisemitism and against nationalism. Other than that, I certainly am not a Nietzsche follower in ay sense.

"La Rand and her self-serving ideology were read out of the conservative movement by Bill Buckley, Whittaker Chambers and, tada!, Ludwig von Mises (!!!) nearly fifty years ago."

Rush Limbaugh still advocates reading her book Atlas Shrugged. You need to email him that he is committing a conservative heresy.

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