Category Archives: Atheism

Christopher Hitchens: on the way out

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Because he is dying, Christopher Hitchens doesn’t make many public appearances these days, but he did manage to attend the 2011 Texas Freethought Convention to receive the Freethinker of the Year Award.

His tenacity to hang on a little longer is overshadowed only by his determination to continue to reject God: by the benighted insights of his overweening ego, to reject God is to embrace freedom.

The closer Hitchens comes to death the more determined he seems to be to revile God’s greatest revelation of himself in Jesus Christ – an act both profoundly foolish and, from my perspective, terrifying.

I’ll miss him; God have mercy on him in spite of his monumental arrogance.

The Immanent Dawkins

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From the Android Market:

Finally, the wit, passion and intellect of the author of “The God Delusion,” “The Greatest Show on Earth,” is available right at your fingertips.

With the Richard Dawkins App you’ll have access to the latest news, audio, tweets and even HD video all within one app.

Never before has there been a Richard Dawkins app, and this is will be one you’ll surely love.

This is the application I have been waiting for: since I have an Android tablet, I will be able to take Dawkins with me wherever I go. I’m so excited. I think I’ll have to break out in song:

What a friend we have in Dawkins,
All our doubts with him to share.
What a privilege to carry
Disbelief to Dawk in prayer.

There, that feels better.

 

Richard Dawkins debates William Lane Craig from the safety of the Guardian

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Richard Dawkins has stated as one of his reasons for refusing to debate William Lane Craig that Craig is a “Christian ‘philosopher’ [who] is an apologist for genocide”.

He then goes on to quote Craig’s understanding of the Biblical passage on the destruction of the Canaanites – and labels Craig as “ an apologist for genocide”. In doing this, Dawkins is debating Craig, without giving Craig the opportunity to respond.

Two can play at that game, of course. So here is Richard Dawkins smiling cheerily at the idea of cannibalism:

And here he is advocating infanticide:

But would he eat the murdered babies? Can we look forward to another article in the Guardian where he might enlighten us further on his culinary experiments?

Perhaps Craig would be doing Dawkins a favour by being willing to share a platform with an apologist for infanticide and cannibalism.

 

Richard Dawkins explains why he refuses to debate William Lane Craig

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And he does it with insults and petulance:

This Christian ‘philosopher’ is an apologist for genocide. I would rather leave an empty chair than share a platform with him.

Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either. Perhaps he is a “theologian”. For some years now, Craig has been increasingly importunate in his efforts to cajole, harass or defame me into a debate with him. I have consistently refused, in the spirit, if not the letter, of a famous retort by the then president of the Royal Society: “That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine”.

Craig’s latest stalking foray has taken the form of a string of increasingly hectoring challenges to confront him in Oxford this October. I took pleasure in refusing again, which threw him and his followers into a frenzy of blogging, tweeting and YouTubed accusations of cowardice.

A few points:

Craig isn’t the person trying to cajole Dawkins into a debate, it’s the debate organisers and many of Dawkins’ atheist friends who want it.

Dr Daniel Came, a philosophy lecturer and fellow atheist, from Worcester College, Oxford, has not only heard of Craig, but has written to Dawkins suggesting that, since he has debated the intellectual heavyweight,  Pastor Ted Haggard, perhaps he should take on the “foremost apologist for Christian theism”, William Lane Craig.

Dawkins’ own link to the Wikipedia article on Craig describes him as an “American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion”. Funnily enough, it omits to mention that Craig is someone who parades himself as a philosopher.

Calling Craig “an apologist for genocide” is damning evidence that while Dawkins is happy to use insults against Craig, he is less confident in using reason.

Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris both debated Craig and were routed. That points to the real reason why Dawkins won’t debate Craig: cowardice.

 

Hi, my name is Pastor Jack and I’m an atheist

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Not unlike AA, there is now an organisation whose purpose is to support clergy addicted to unbelief. It is called The Clergy Project. It boasts a hundred members who:

use it to network and discuss what it’s like being an unbelieving leader in a religious community. The Clergy Project’s goal is to support members as they move beyond faith. Members freely discuss issues related to their transition from believer to unbeliever including:

  • Wrestling with intellectual, ethical, philosophical and theological issues
  • Coping with cognitive dissonance
  • Addressing feelings of being stuck and fearing the future
  • Looking for new careers
  • Telling their families
  • Sharing useful resources
  • Living as a nonbeliever with religious spouses and family
  • Using humor to soften the pain
  • Finding a way out of the ministry
  • Adjusting to life after the ministry

The organisation is sponsored by Richard Dawkins who devoutly encourages apostates who have, as he says, seen the light to join in a koinonia of disbelief with other faithless victims trapped in pulpits of pretend piety.

I’d love to get a list of the names of members to see if they include an Ingham, Hiltz or Bird.

 

Christopher Hitchens in his foxhole

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Christopher Hitchens received the “Richard Dawkins Freethinker of the Year” award on Saturday, partly, I suspect, for staunchly maintaining his rejection of God while staring death in the face.

Fairly recently I had a long discussion with a young friend who has just emerged from years of university theological training. He is a universalist (he wasn’t before entering university), believing that all will eventually be saved: anyone confronted by the living God after death, he maintains, would be sufficiently overwhelmed that they would accept salvation – which would come through Jesus Christ. No amount of protesting that this would remove a person’s God-given free will would budge him.

In the case of a person like Christopher Hitchens who is determined to reject God come what may, universalism definitely can’t work since, for Hitchens, being compelled to inhabit heaven with God would be… hell.

From here:

During the convention, Dawkins praised Hitchens for his continuance of atheism even in the face of death and for proving that there were indeed, “atheists in foxholes,”….

[….]

“We have the same job we always had,” he told the crowd, “to say that there are no final solutions; there is no absolute truth; there is no supreme leader; there is no totalitarian solution that says if you would just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you would just give up, if you would simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss can be yours.”

If, as Hitchens says, there is no absolute truth then the rest of what he had to say in that last paragraph can’t be absolutely true, including the very next thing he says: there is no supreme leader.

A call for the church to take on the new atheists

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From here:

Clergy are to be urged to be more vocal in countering the arguments put forward by a more hard-line group of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have campaigned for a less tolerant attitude towards religion.

A report endorsed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warns that the Church faces a battle to prevent faith being seen as “a social problem” and says the next five years are set to be a period of “exceptional challenge”.

It expresses concern that Christians are facing hostility at work and says the Church could lose its place at the centre of public life unless it challenges attempts to marginalise religious belief.

The rallying call comes amid fears that Christians are suffering from an increasing level of discrimination following a series of cases in which they have been punished for sharing their beliefs.

I agree.

However, if the church is to create a bulwark against the onslaught of God hatred from the ilk of Dawkins and Hitchens, it will have to ensure its own belief is robustly Christian. The kind of wishy-washy liberal Christianity of someone like Tony Blair will not withstand the typical diatribe of the anti-God brigade, as evidenced by the Hitchens vs. Blair debate in Toronto.

William Lane Craig, has sent Dawkins and his cohorts scurrying for the hills, whimpering excuses, although Dawkins says he is quite happy debating a bishop or archbishop. This is not surprising; since many bishops and archbishops dither on what the resurrection is or what the gospel is, they aren’t going to stand much of a chance defending something whose truth they themselves doubt.

 

Atheists running scared

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From here:

Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist and president of the British Humanist Association, had agreed to debate the existence of God with the Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology, California, Dr William Lane Craig, at Westminster Central Hall in October, during Professor Craig’s “Reasonable Faith” tour.

[.…]

The humanist philosopher Pro­fessor A. C. Grayling also refused to debate with Professor Craig

[….]

Professor Richard Dawkins has been invited to debate with Professor Craig in Oxford, on 25 October. If Professor Dawkins refuses, the organisers say that Professor Craig “will lecture on the weakness of Dawkins’s argu­ments in his book The God Delusion”.

Why don’t atheists like debating William Lane Craig? Because he uses logic and, as Polly Toynbee noted, that is not her kind of forum.

Peter Atkins, Pro­fessor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, must have more guts than the others because he is going to debate Craig. If this 1998 exchange is anything to go by, it should be a rout.

Where have all the atheists gone?

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Received via email:

The President of the British Humanist Association has pulled out of debating renowned Christian apologist William Lane Craig.  Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist and prominent critic of religion, initially readily agreed to a debate on the Existence of God with Craig in April but withdrew her involvement last week saying “I hadn’t realised the nature of Mr Lane Craig’s debating style, and having now looked at his previous performances, this is not my kind of forum”.

Dawkins and Grayling (who have also refused to debate with Craig on his forthcoming UK Tour) are both Vice-Presidents of the British Humanist Association which describes one of its core values as “engaging in debate rationally, intelligently and with attention to evidence”.

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, California.  He has debated leading atheists the world over including Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, who described him as “the one Christian apologist who has put the fear of God into my fellow atheists.”

More information can be found at the Reasonable Faith Tour 2011.

The press release goes on to note this comment from Richard Dawkins:

Richard Dawkins, who has been publicly accused of cowardice for refusing to debate the arguments he presents in The God Delusion, recently described Craig as a “deeply unimpressive…ponderous buffoon”, who uses logic for “bamboozling his faith-head audience.” Yet he still has not responded to the actual content of the arguments presented by Craig.

Dawkins, the self proclaimed champion of reason, doesn’t want to expose himself to logic for fear of being bamboozled. What does that remind me of? Oh, I know: