Tag Archives: Richard Dawkins

Atheists Anonymous

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“Hello, I’m Jerry and I’m an atheist.” Nothing unusual about that, you might think – other than the fact that when Jerry drifted from Christianity to disbelieving in hell to universalism to God is our inner dialogue, to atheism, he was a Pentecostal minister.

Since he wasn’t an Anglican minister, this presented Jerry with a bit of a dilemma which, on hearing of his new-found lack of faith, his congregation helped him resolve by firing him.

From there, he fell into the welcoming arms of The Clergy Project, a “confidential online community for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs”: TCP, the spiritual formulation, guaranteed to disinfect the bacteria of Faith, Hope and Charity from contaminated souls.

Having come out, Jerry has been photographed with Richard Dawkins and become executive director of Recovering from Religion; that’s about as transcendent as it gets for an atheist.

A brief perusal of this clip will confirm that, although Jerry has abandoned Pentecostalism, it hasn’t entirely abandoned him: his intonation, gestures and stagecraft are all standard Pentecostal minister fare. I was expecting a “preach it, brother” from the audience; Jerry needs to attend a few more Reason Rallies to purge the remnants of what used to intoxicate him from his system.

From here:

In the span of just a few months, Jerry DeWitt went from a respected pastor with a vibrant congregation to an atheist without a job.

DeWitt, 42, is the first “graduate” of The Clergy Project, a program supported by several atheist organizations that assists pastors who have lost their faith to “come out” as atheists to family, friends, congregations and communities.

DeWitt, who lives in Southern Louisiana, went public last October when he posted a picture of himself with the prominent and polarizing atheist Richard Dawkins, snapped at a meeting of atheists and other “freethinkers” in Houston.

Richard Dawkins to Reason Rally: 'Show contempt' for faith

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Because, after all, there is little that is more reasoned and logical than contempt….. hang on a minute, contempt is a feeling.

From here:

About 20,000 atheists gathered within shouting distance of the Washington Monument on Saturday for a Reason Rally hell-bent on damning religion and mocking beliefs — and believers, too.

[….]

Dawkins didn’t appear until five hours into the event, but few seemed discouraged by the near-constant rain or drizzle. They whistled and cheered for his familiar lines such as:

I don’t despise religious people. I despise what they stand for …
Evolution is not just true, it’s beautiful …

Then Dawkins got to the part where he calls on the crowd not only to challenge religious people but to “ridicule and show contempt” for their doctrines and sacraments, including the Eucharist, which Catholics believe becomes the body of Christ during Mass.

 

Rowan Williams admits he is “not always very good with words”

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Who knew?

To reinforce the point, he went on to note that when he met Richard Dawkins in the recent debate at the Sheldonian, it was “the same sort of experience [as] last October when I went to meet President Mugabe.”

I’m sure Robert Mugabe will be cut to the quick by this comparison.

From here:

Dr Rowan Williams said that he struggled with nerves before squaring up to the man nicknamed the “high priest of atheism” over the existence of God and asked friends and supporters to pray for him during the encounter.

He added that, despite having a grasp of 11 languages, been an Oxford professor and the leader of 77 million Anglicans worldwide, he was “not always very good with words”.

Speaking during a visit to Springfield Church in Wallington Surrey on Sunday he was asked about his recent debate at Oxford University with Prof Dawkins about the origins of life which captured attention around the world.

“I was quite nervous about hat really because I never feel I’m at my best in debates, you have to be quick on your feet and clever and slick and I always feel anxious about that.

“I want to think about what I say and I’m not always very good with words.”

He added: “I had the same sort of experience last October when I went to meet President Mugabe.

 

 

On hating God

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The ten commandments popped up as part of my regular Bible reading this morning and Ex 20:5-6 struck me:

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

“Who”, I thought to myself, “could possibly be stupid enough to hate God?” Even though I now believe atheism to be illogical, I can empathise with being an atheist, since I once was one; being oblivious to God I can understand because even after I thought the idea of his existence was at least plausible, I didn’t want to have much to do with him. But who could hate God? If nothing else, a sense of self-preservation ought to keep one from such folly.

Not so, however. The so-called new atheists don’t so much disbelieve in God as loath him. Christopher Hitchens, shortly before his death, paraphrased the famous C. S. Lewis proposition: “if Jesus isn’t the Son of God, he is a hideous wicked imposter; his words were vane, empty and intended to deceive.” Lewis concluded that Jesus, therefore, was the Son of God, Hitchens that he was…..  a hideous wicked imposter. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris et al echo similar sentiments.

Blinkered fools!

Rowan Williams debates Richard Dawkins at the Sheldonian

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The archbishops of atheism and Anglicanism have a polite chat in which Dawkins does a Bertrand Russell and declares he has really been an agnostic all along and Rowan says he doesn’t believe God “intervened” when humans came to be or, by implication, in miracles.

 

The Richard Dawkins family slave business

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Richard Dawkins’ ancestors were slave owners it seems and some of his inherited wealth came from them.

From here:

He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism.

Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against “intolerance and suffering”, must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.

One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.

The Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership.

Over Norton Park, inherited by Richard Dawkins’s father, remains in the family, with the campaigner as a shareholder and director of the associated business.

Dawkins is a bit upset about this revelation and this was part of his exchange with the journalist who wrote the Telegraph article:

“Darwinian natural selection has a lot to do with genes, do you agree?” Of course I agreed. “Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”

“You obviously need a genetics lesson,” I replied. Henry Dawkins was my great great great great great grandfather, so approximately one in 128 of my genes are inherited from him (that’s the correct figure; in the heat of the moment on the phone, I got it wrong by a couple of powers of two).

Setting aside his scientific illiteracy and his frankly defamatory insinuation that I might condone slavery, the point about powers of two is interesting enough to warrant a digression.

Much as I enjoy witnessing any discomforting of Dawkins, this particular exercise seems rather silly, since with sufficient digging we would probably find that Mother Teresa had slaver ancestors and Christopher Hitchens was remotely related to Thomas Aquinas.

Nevertheless, Dawkins’ indignation is instructive since he obviously thinks his moral credentials have been called into question – yet he believes in no morality other than that derived from genetic accident. He has no way of proving that not owning slaves is morally “better” than owning them: by his lights, if a society is more likely to survive because of a thriving slave industry, it is a “better” society than one which perishes because of a lack of slaves. For Dawkins, survival is the only “good” there is.

Richard Dawkins believes that a gay gene exists even though there is no scientific evidence for it. Why could there not also be a slaver gene even though no scientific evidence exists for it? And why would Dawkins be upset to find he possessed it – after all, it’s only a gene?