>>When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software. <<
Wow! I mean, WOW!
I guess it is true about "book learnin' vs. common sense.
Let me know when you get a computer endowed with a free will.
That's justice. You murder another human being, you pay with your own.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour.
I'm anxious to read the rest of this thread and see if any evols comment negatively about Dawkins attempt to blend his moral views with science.
I still say that Dawkins wouldn't be nearly as brazen with "indigenous pipples" and their quaint (and totally valid!), non-western worldviews. It's easy to push redneck American Protestants around, but that's because Dawkins and his ilk (including those here on FR) are cowards and bullies. But of course they know that already.
And btw, in the absence of G-d, "the truth" has no moral superiority whatsoever to falsehood, which means neither Darwinism nor scientism even justifies its own existence.
If I understand the point of this gibberish, I suppose he is correct..IF..you accept his premise that man is skin sack of bio-chemicals that were configured into a system as the result of time and chance.
The problem with his silly analysis is that in a "scientific, mechanistic view" of man's being you cannot define anybody as a "faulty unit" as there is no objective basis for the definition. If, for example, I want to kill Richard Dawkins, drag his family off as slaves and take his stuff, he may view it as faulty behavior but evolutionary science would view it a just another survival strategy that I undertake because it was hard wired into my brain by my Viking ancestors.
I have no problem with regarding them as faulty units that need scrapping. Any useful parts can be harvested in the process.
Now I know what this scary fascist Dawkins is: a faulty unit! But I can't find any parts at Home Depot to fix him.
My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car.
But wouldn't there be a judgement behind that laughter? And wouldn't that judgement be based on certain illusory constructs that are just irrational relics from our developmental past? And if this is the case, shouldn't we then laugh at the laughers? And shouldn't someone else laugh at us for laughing at the laughers, for a similar reason? Eventually there can be nothing but laughter.
</Sarc>
So murderes are not evil, they are just rocks that have fallen in the wrong direction. This is the ultimate end of evolutionists. To prove that men are nothing more than random chemicals and have no more intrinsic value or responsibility than rocks or water.
If an Islamic terrorist blows up a bus full of children then he should no more be punished than if he was a boulder who fell on the bus on a mountain road.
At least this guy is willing to admit where evolutionary theory is taking all of us. It is the road to hell.