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Dr. Richard Dawkins On Why Disagreeing With Religion Isn't Insulting
In part 2 of this video interview (with transcript), Dr. Richard Dawkins explains the function of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, headlined by his website. They're holding it up as a blueprint for similar groups: "We're trying to encourage, with some success, other organizations to make use of our facility, so that they will use our website, or have their own websites which are based upon ours, and have the same look and feel and use the same infrastructure." One of the Foundation's other purposes is to oppose organizations like the Good News Club. "What it is, is a group of Fundamentalist Christian organizations, who go into public schools after the school bell has rung for the day. So that it's no longer violating the Constitutional separation of church and state. ... And it's actually the Good News Club people masquerading as teachers, and they're being extremely effective." Dr. Dawkins also talks about his own comments, and explains why they're perceived as offensive: "Ignorance is no crime. There are all sorts of things I'm ignorant of, such as baseball, but I don't regard it as insulting if somebody says I'm ignorant of baseball, it's a simple fact. I am ignorant of baseball. People who claim to be Creationists are almost always ignorant of evolution. That's just a statement of fact, not an insult. It's just a statement. But it sounds like an insult. And I think that accounts for part of what you've picked up about my apparent image of being aggressive and offensive. I'm just telling it clearly." Hit the link below to see the rest of the interview.
Yeah, it usually descends into that after about ten minutes, right after you show them a few rules they're breaking that mean they're not going to heaven - own an iPhione, eat Bacon, etc. (really? Christians aren't supposed to eat pork? The Bible is the same book as the Koran??)
At that point of the debate they'll happily tell you The Bible isn't really what Christianity is all about. Nope, it's about loving everybody and being a good person. So long as they do that they can choose to ignore their own scriptures/rules (uhuh...)
At that point I usually show the verses that make the Bible a horrible moral code. The misogynistic ones, the ones that support slavery, beating of children ("spare not the rod"), etc. I point out there's a much better moral code than that, it's called "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and it was written by Atheists.
At this point the "debate" usually ends.
When you've done it a few times it's like following a script. I'd love a well-informed riposte that made me go away and research something but Christians are depressingly unimaginative. They never really vary in their answers or the order in which they give them.
You won't convert them on the spot, but you can easily get them to deny The Bible and show that religion doesn't make moral people (murder and divorce correlate quite well with number of churches per square mile in American states).
Maybe you can plant a few seeds of doubt...and that's really the best you can hope for.
It helps if they get angry too, that means they're listening...
No sig today...
Western nations say they have the "freedom of speech" to insult any religion as they please. Then why is it that scientists want to outlaw any questioning of scientific theories? By definition, a theory is not absolute truth.
When I got my PhD in statistics, one of the first things I was taught in grad school was to never extrapolate inferences beyond the range of observed data. Yet, that is exactly what evolution, geology, and cosmology does. There are no 5-billion-year-long experiments to verify that everything follows a neat linear (or log-linear) pattern as the theories claim. We have some experiments that lasted at most about 30 years, and say that since they followed a log-linear pattern for the first 30 years, it must also follow the same pattern for the remaining 4,999,999,970 years.
From what we know from the world of biology, patterns that appear to hold in the short term will often deviate greatly in the long term. But somehow, we are required to believe that such deviations could never happen elsewhere.
I was an atheist before going to graduate school, but I learned the huge number of assumptions upon which science is built. Upon close examination, many or all of the assumptions are wrong; but scientists merely ostracize those who question the assumptions, saying it is "irrelevant" or to avoid "paralysis by analysis".
I'm stunned by the number of pro-religious people here. I suppose it's an inevitable side effect of this being a US-centric site, but it's still baffling. It's like reading some Iranian forum.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it