Tag Archives: Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins adulation: is there no end to it?

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On April 26, 2010, I posted a video on Youtube of Richard Dawkins explaining how the “gay gene” was preserved. I posted it only because on the site I used to house Anglican Samizdat, the only video I could embed was from Youtube. And I wanted to point out how preposterous Dawkins’ remarks were.

Now, just under a year later, the video has had 26,174 views, 327 comments and 209 “likes”.

It’s popularity has persuaded Youtube to invite me to make money by including advertising with the video.

My attempt to expose Dawkins’ culturally induced banalities seems to have earned him yet more sycophants.

Richard Dawkins claims doing good to strangers is a “misfiring”

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Starting at around 10:00 in this interview, Dawkins illuminates the CBC interviewer on the subject of right behaviour by claiming that to help a homeless person is the misfiring of a Darwinian impulse.

From Dawkins’ perspective this is a logical, if bleak, conclusion. He rather lets his side down, though, by backpedalling: he reassures the interviewer that this does in no way belittle attempts to help those less fortunate than ourselves.

Rubbish. According to Dawkins’ Darwinian lights, “belittle” is a moral evaluation and has no meaning in the context of pitiless, indifferent evolution.

Richard Dawkins sues an employee

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From here:

GLENDALE, Calif. (CN) – Evolutionary biologist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins claims an employee of his Foundation for Reason and Science embezzled $375,000 from the online store he ran for Dawkins’ charity, by claiming it made only $30,000 in 3 years.

Dawkins says he founded the charity to “support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.”

Dawkins hired Josh Timonen in 2006 to run his website and produce videos for him, according to the Superior Court complaint. Timonen began working for the Foundation in 2007.

As we can see, scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world doesn’t make a person honest. And why would it? If the employee’s critical thinking led him to conclude that he would get away with it, pilfering $375k would be a satisfying example of the fittest acquiring the means to improve his likelihood of survival.

Dawkins should be able to see that and is just being an old meany-pants for suing Timonen instead of applauding his Darwin inspired initiative.

A foetus feels no pain before 24 weeks

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From the BBC:

There is no new evidence to show foetuses feel pain in the womb before 24 weeks, and so no reason to challenge the abortion limit, doctors say.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ review said foetuses are “undeveloped and sedated”.

Brain connections are not fully formed, and the environment of the womb creates a state of induced sleep, like unconsciousness, they add.

Anti-abortion campaigners are likely to challenge the reports.

The issue of whether a foetus of 24 weeks or below can feel pain had been raised in the debate over whether the current time limit for abortion should be reduced.

In the absence of an objective moral arbiter, pain seems to have become the contemporary yardstick for determining what is good and what is evil: pain is evil, but nothing much else. This allows for not only the disposal of inconvenient unborn babies, but just about anyone else too – providing it doesn’t hurt.

The aged are eased comfortably into meeting their maker prematurely; Richard Dawkins nods cheerfully as utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer advocates infanticide for babies whose future may not be entirely pain free; Singer, following his logic to its conclusion,  speculates that non-existence for everyone might be preferable to existence because not to exist is not to feel pain.

The comedy in all this is that atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins appear to think that atheism is capable of producing a coherent moral framework: the sum total of what it actually has come up with is the clodhopping “pain is bad” – a concept whose sophistication could be surpassed by a fraternity of socialised chimpanzees.

Vatican to evangelise atheists – some atheists

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From The Independent:

The Vatican is planning a new initiative to reach out to atheists and agnostics in an attempt to improve the church’s relationship with non-believers. Pope Benedict XVI has ordered officials to create a new foundation where atheists will be encouraged to meet and debate with some of the Catholic Church’s top theologians.

The Vatican hopes to stage a series of debates in Paris next year. But militant non-believers hoping for a chance to set senior church figures straight about the existence of God are set to be disappointed: the church has warned that atheists with high public profiles such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will not be invited.

As a Christian I believe that no-one is beyond redemption: Christ died for all sinners. It is interesting, then, that the Catholic Church – which presumably believes the same thing – is planning on excluding some atheists from their evangelistic endeavours. The only sentient creatures whom we would normally view as excluded from Christ’s offer of salvation are the demons of hell led by Lucifer himself – in whose company the Catholic church seems to have placed Dawkins and Hitchens. A satisfying thought, but perhaps a tad harsh.

A new proof for God’s existence

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Until recently the popular proofs for God’s existence have been the ontological, teleological, cosmological, and moral arguments.

Now we have the new atheists’ proof:

The best proof of God’s existence is the urge some writers feel to deny it. Since the instinct of writers is to make a noise, and denying something that isn’t makes none, they wouldn’t waste their time quarrelling with a nonexistent God.

Hitchens declares himself an anti-theist: he is against God; he hates him as the ultimate tyrant. Dawkins exhibits much the same loathing. None of the contemporary atheists have the grace or wit of their forebears like Bertrand Russell who, when asked what he would say to God if he was proved wrong said, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.” – a demonstration of wilful ignorance, but not hatred.

You can’t hate something that much if it isn’t really there, so it’s hard not to see the excessive protestations against an allegedly mythical Deity as anything other than the recycling of the age old rebellion: a proof, not a denial of God’s existence.

A new proof for God’s existence

Until recently the popular proofs for God’s existence have been the ontological, teleological, cosmological, and moral argument.

Now we have the new atheists’ proof:

The best proof of God’s existence is the urge some writers feel to deny it. Since the instinct of writers is to make a noise, and denying something that isn’t makes none, they wouldn’t waste their time quarrelling with a nonexistent God.

Hitchens declares himself an anti-theist: he is against God. If it turns out God is really there, he would hate him as the ultimate tyrant. Dawkins exhibits much the same loathing. None of the contemporary atheists has the grace or wit of their forebears like Bertrand Russell who when asked what he would say to God if he was proved wrong said, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.” – a demonstration of ignorance, but not hatred.

You can’t hate something that much if it isn’t really there, so it’s hard not to see the excessive protestations against an allegedly mythical Deity as anything other than the recycling of the age old rebellion : a proof, not a denial of his existence.

At last, a cogent argument from an atheist

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Well, maybe not.

Dawkins seems to think that there is a role for the bovine excrement argument: some people respond to it, apparently. This scatological underpinning for the beliefs of cranially constricted atheists has inspired a great deal of huffing and puffing – as is evident in this speaker – but it doesn’t pass for rationally convincing thought.

Roman Polanski, celebrity child rapist

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From here:

A British woman came forward Friday alleging sexual assault against director Roman Polanski, who is currently under house arrest in Switzerland for the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

In a press conference at her attorney Gloria Allred’s Los Angeles office, Charlotte Lewis, an actress who appeared in Polanski’s 1986 film “Pirates,” alleged that Polanski sexually abused her in the “worst way possible” when she was 16 years old. Lewis claims the attack took place in Paris in 1982, four years after he fled the U.S. to escape sentencing for the sexual assault of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer.

According to Lewis, now 42, Polanski was aware that she was 16 at the time when he “forced himself” on her in his apartment. The legal age of consent in France is 15.

“He took advantage of me,” Lewis said. “What I want is justice.”

The renowned defenders of the sexually innocent, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, are busy organising lawyers to force the extradition of Polanski so that he can face charges in the US and Britain.

No they’re not, I made that up.

The uncaring atheist

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Anti-theists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins take considerable delight in declaring that atheists can be as moral as theists. They remain obstinately impervious to the observation that atheistic morality has no objective standard by which to be judged, no frame of reference, and no foundation other than the vapours generated by the heat of Dawkins’ rodomontade; they prefer to ignore this and proclaim stoutly that they are just as good as the God crowd. It turns out that they’re not:

These are not the brightest days for organized religion. Pope Benedict XVI has come under sustained scrutiny for his role in the investigation of sex abuse scandals tarring the Catholic Church. The practices of fundamentalist Muslim women are being attacked by the Quebec government as uncivilized. And, more broadly, many traditional and long-standing congregations across the country must face the reality of their own worldly demise due to substantial declines in Sunday attendance.

Despite all this bad news, however, there remains much to celebrate about religion and its relationship with society at large. Not the least of which is that those who attend religious services are the most charitable in their donations and the most eager to volunteer. Without organized religion, the world would be a much poorer and less comfortable place for those less fortunate.

Last summer, Statistics Canada released a survey on Canadians and their charitable habits. While less than one in five attend church regularly, those who do are far more likely to give to charities, and are substantially more liberal in the size of their gifts to both religious and non-religious organizations. The average annual donation from a churchgoer is $1,038. For the rest of the population, $295.

With respect to volunteer effort, two-thirds of churchgoers give their time to non-profit causes while only 43 per cent of non-attendees do likewise. And churchgoers put in twice as many hours volunteering.

All this munificence is in stark contrast to complaints from anti-religion authors such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Philip Pullman, all of whom have found themselves getting substantially more ink in the wake of the Catholic Church’s sex scandals. “I’m an atheist,” Hitchens once said. “I’m not just neutral about religion, I’m hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one.” Pullman has claimed religion is “the most wonderful excuse for behaving extremely badly.” Their argument: the world would be a better place without churches.

Richard Dawkins doesn’t understand morality

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In this clip Richard Dawkins dodges the question of how atheists can lay claim to morality while undermining the basis for its objectivity:

Dawkins regales the audience with examples of what he views as stupid religiously inspired morality.

He then goes on to list what he believes are “good”, “acceptable” or “reasonable” examples of morality, implying a he has reference by which he is judging them. If his reference is little more than a personal preference seasoned with a pinch of contemporary middle-class pseudo-reasoned tendentiousness, why would he think he has the right to impose his version morality on the rest of us; if it is an absolute reference, he has denied his own premise.