Richard Dawkins is the Best Argument for Religion (article)

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Atheist Pope Richard Dawkins has bared his barren soul yet again, this time on Twitter.
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Earlier today, someone mused how they would handle a pregnancy if the fetus was found to have Down syndrome, calling it a serious ethical dilemma. Pish posh! Matters of life and death are dead simple to Professor Dawkins.
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@InYourFaceNYer Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.
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— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 20, 2014
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ricochet.com/richard-dawkins-best-argument-religion/
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more…
Outrage erupted on the social media service, which provoked even more vitriol from Dawkins who ridiculed human emotion and, out of dumb reflex, the Catholic Church.
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The Oxford professor claimed that he is no fan of eugenics, but those with Down syndrome simply have nothing positive to contribute. This is “elementary moral philosophy,” he sniffed, and if you’re too dim to get that, you really should buy his books.
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Dawkins burst into pop consciousness with his 2006 harangue The God Delusion, where he channeled the New Atheists’ id. Non-belief wasn’t enough for this breed, which instead required invective against anyone who dared disagree with their fundamentalist godlessness.
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But where Dawkins was once praised, he’s now criticized for a string of controversial statements thought to have damaged the atheist brand.
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Dawkins makes the mistake so many very intelligent people make of valuing measured intelligence as everything. I suspect that he values none of us with handicaps and regards us as biological mistakes.
 
I agree that people like him do us a favour when they show what atheism is about when you logically follows its fundamental assumptions about being. It is about believing to be the master of life and death and clinging to utilitarian principles in the absence of objective and universal morality. Funny how atheism always ends up being about death and destruction of those who are undesirable. It’s chilling.
 
Poor Dawkins! He’s been spurned by the atheists for being too conservative, but he’s still too liberal to find peace anywhere else.
 
Potter said:
Poor Dawkins! He’s been spurned by the atheists for being too conservative, but he’s still too liberal to find peace anywhere else.
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Nothing is impossible to God. 😃

Maybe good old Dick will experience a profound moment and find peace at some point. We must always pray for such people who hate religion. I find them extremely annoying and difficult to pray for, but precisely for that I should do it. I’ll pray the Divine Mercy chaplet for him today.
 
The guy sounds outright unhinged to me. Or is he just stealing Ann Coulter’s schtick to make a buzz and a buck? After all, these days all it takes to be famous is… to be famous.
 
manualman said:
The guy sounds outright unhinged to me. Or is he just stealing Ann Coulter’s schtick to make a buzz and a buck? After all, these days all it takes to be famous is… to be famous.
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Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist. From what I have read, he regards religion as unprovable. He also regards religions as sources of conflict and hindrances of progress, peace, and scientific research. Dawkins is English and popular among English atheists. He refuses to debate disbelievers in evolution on grounds that he won’t give them the publicity. It would be consistent for Dawkins to regard those of us with congenital handicaps as biological mistakes.
 
I’ve noticed the Richard Dawkins is getting crazier and crazier - like he’s overwhelmed with power or something. At one time he wanted to arrest the Pope because of the clergy sex abuse cases in the Church, and then later on he said at one point in his life when he was twelve he liked the feeling of being molested. Now he’s essentially promoting eugenics while being a strict Darwinist by discipline. Irreligious people admire and lionize such a crazy man yet call religious people crazy and insane. :hypno:

By the way, Darwin never said the words “survival of the fittest”. Those were added later by social Darwinists - those who use a form of pseudoscience involving the application of evolution to racism - as an excuse to promote eugenics. If Dawkins truly is a Darwinian evolutionary biologist he would dismiss social Darwinisim as a pseudo-science. But it seems he’s being hypocritical towards his own doctrines.
 
Seeker2013 said:
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist. From what I have read, he regards religion as unprovable. He also regards religions as sources of conflict and hindrances of progress, peace, and scientific research. Dawkins is English and popular among English atheists. He refuses to debate disbelievers in evolution on grounds that he won’t give them the publicity. It would be consistent for Dawkins to regard those of us with congenital handicaps as biological mistakes.
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Yes but I think there is another aspect to his refusal to believe. I heard him say once in an interview that he felt a sense of relief when he stopped believing in God, as if he didn’t have to worry about judgment or hell anymore. Also there was a thread recently about one of my favorite actresses, Patricia Heaton, hardly an atheist, but she had been a Catholic and said she became a protestant because she didn’t like always worrying about having to go to confession to safeguard her salvation. It all reminds me even of Martin Luther, that sense of never being “good enough”, and therefore concluding that it was futile to try, and deciding instead on a “faith alone” approach that seems more attainable.

I think this might be a kind of psychological pitfall we can all fall into. A sort of defeatism that can lead us to lose faith. A sort of “oh it’s too hard to be a Christian, or to overcome this or that sin, so I won’t try”. And then once we say that to ourselves, we humans go to work rationalizing our decision to quit on some aspect of religion by trying to make it seem that either the commands of God are not real or that God Himself isn’t, in order to make our decision seem logical.
 
I don’t see how people with down syndrome have nothing to contribute.

A human life whether they are healthy or not is special.
 
adawgj said:
I don’t see how people with down syndrome have nothing to contribute.

A human life whether they are healthy or not is special.
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The Down syndrome thing popped out to me as well. This is one of the most disgusting attitudes that faithlessness leads to. They have no concept of the intrinsic value of human life. it is the same reason they want to “put down” the elderly like dogs in a pound because they are not “productive” whatever that means when life has no higher purpose to them.
 
What about RD buddy Stephen Hawking? Should he have been aborted, as RD thinks other disabled persons should?

Heck, why not abort everyone including himself, since we are all going to die and are diseased with death anyway?
 
Saying Richard Dawkins is the best argument for religion is as short sighted and prejudicial as saying the Wesboro Baptist Church or the Sex Abuse Scandal are the best arguments against Christianity.
 
Seeker2013 said:
  1. Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist. From what I have read, he regards religion as unprovable.
  2. He also regards religions as sources of conflict and hindrances of progress, peace, and scientific research.
  3. Dawkins is English and popular among English atheists. He refuses to debate disbelievers in evolution on grounds that he won’t give them the publicity.
  4. It would be consistent for Dawkins to regard those of us with congenital handicaps as biological mistakes.
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Great post that deserves some unpacking and further reflection on each point (the numbering is my modification):
  1. He’s right on this point. What he misses is that it’s unprovable by design. Love and coercion are mutually exclusive. If an omnipotent God visibly loomed over us at all times, we would not be free to love him. We’d be coerced. God doesn’t coerce, so He built a universe in which He veils himself from us to give us the freedom to choose Him, which by necessity means giving us the freedom to reject Him as well.
  2. He’s a fool on this front. How one can be well read in history and not recognize that conflict arises from man’s own innate sinfulness rather than externally defined doctrines and beliefs simply amazes me. It’s also a little inconvenient for him that 20th century atheist / secularist leadres killed more people than in all the previous religious wars of history combined. Minor quibble.
  3. Believers are often their own worst enemies on this front. Dawkins doesn’t realize it, but he’s making the equal and opposite error as the 7 day creationists he so despises. They fail to recognize the jurisdiction and purpose of Scripture and attempt to force it to do teach in areas God did not intend to give us revelation in. Dawkins does the same thing with science and ends up with the circular reasoning whereby science starts with the assumption that all things are the result of natural processes and proceeds to use the scientific method to try to disprove God. The folly of that is that his conclusions are based on the assumptions of the methods. In other words, his entire argument rests on an unprovable assumption.
  4. I do think that Dawkin’s dogmatic form of Darwinism will inevitably lead back to eugenics and more horror. It’s the logical outcome of that worldview and it won’t be resisted by mere sentiment for long. Bad philosophy always leads to harmful outcomes.
And to another poster’s point, this sort of worldview DOES eventually come to see man as a plague on the planet rather than the pinnacle of God’s creation. It took me a long time to realize that this link isn’t satire. They’re actually serious: Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT). Enjoy. vhemt.org/
 
It’s one man’s opinion. He is a brilliant man who is one of the world’s leading atheists but he cannot speak for everyone. His very good friend and world renown atheists, the late Christopher Hitchens, was avidly against abortion. If someone wishes to say that atheists are more likely than religious people to be pro-choice then I will not argue with them because I agree with their statement. There’s no such thing as a head of the atheist community or atheist pope as was mentioned and each person who defines themselves as secular forms their morals and principles from different areas. Richard Dawkins can have different principles and morals than atheists who find their moral values and principles from somewhere else.
 
rasbat said:
The Down syndrome thing popped out to me as well. This is one of the most disgusting attitudes that faithlessness leads to. They have no concept of the intrinsic value of human life. it is the same reason they want to “put down” the elderly like dogs in a pound because they are not “productive” whatever that means when life has no higher purpose to them.
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Who are “they”? Dawkins is speaking for himself. He is not an atheist “pope”
 
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