One of the meatheads (use of this term will become clear later in this post) of Eschaton sent me this with a taunting message just now.
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Atheism 'must be criminalised and categorised as contempt of religion because atheists have no doctrine... It is necessary to enact laws that deter people from violating the natural instincts of man and punish those who have been seduced into atheism' says Egyptian lawmaker
Of course, I wouldn't approve of such a thing, however, I was a regular, wasting my time at Eschaton in December 2006 when the then hero of many an Eschatot, Richard Dawkins,* was one of many atheists who signed a petition, the text of which was given by the popular atheist blogger Ed Brayton as:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16.
In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians.
Taking heat, the, then, high pope of English language atheism (before his sexism and racism gave him the cooties) retracted his signature, though by then it was a matter of public knowledge. I don't have a list and wonder how many atheists didn't retract their signing on to something not much different from the thing in the "Humanists" tweet. I don't know the relationship of the "Humanists" with such things but having recently mentioned the "Freedom From Religion Foundation" it wouldn't surprise me if not a few "Humanists" would sign onto something like that.
And, in fact, in the 20th century, there were millions and millions of religious people murdered by atheists in the anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet Union, Communist China, etc, Many an atheist in the West, including Britain and the United States held up the leaders of those regimes as heroes for the west to emulate, none more so than the trust-fund atheist godfather, last of the Stalinists, Corliss Lamont, who bought the "Humanists" lock stock and barrel. And those murders by atheist regimes are ongoing.
Oh, and as for the "meathead" reference, notice this part of what Richard Dawkins signed onto (before he chickened out when he got too much heat for it).
In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching
As I mentioned in that piece about the "Freedom From Religion Foundation" a week or so back, Richard Dawkins as a materialist and a biological determinist, of course, doesn't believe there is any such thing as free thought, he is a determinist, having peddled a particularly infamous statement of that atheist faith, as science in The Selfish Gene:
They [genes] did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.
They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.
And you can find the same and similar claims debunking free thought all through atheist literature, only those who choose to not deal with the ultimate logical consequences of being a materialist don't make those claims because free thought is impossible under materialism where everything, every aspect of reality has to be determined by the consequences of material causation. Which, as I pointed out, means that all of it is meaningless or, at least, has no more meaning than any banal physical motion or chemical reaction. Dawkins doesn't seem to think these things out very carefully, but, then, neither do most atheists. I used to have a higher opinion of atheists before I read their thinking unedited and as babbled by large numbers of them.
* I remember one boring day when a number of the Eschaton gals swooned over how sexy Richard Dawkins was and the boys slobbered over Lalla, his then wife. I figure people get to have the taste they choose (though atheists wouldn't logically be able to say it was a choice) but I always found Dawkins to be smarmy - nothing turns me off like a Brit Received accent. Lalla Ward, I prefered the tough, smart Romana, Mary Tamm, sort of like I liked the original, tough cooky, Lois Lane.
Update: Reading Dawkins' credo about "lumbering robots" again, I wonder when he believes genes "gave up that caviler freedom" of "floating loose in the sea". That idea strikes me as so incredibly stupid that I can't believe I've never read of him being called on saying it before. The fact is, there is no evidence genes ever existed outside of cells as independent entities. They don't function outside of cellular chemistry in living cells. What an amazingly stupid thing for him to have said and even stupider that no one called him out on having said it as science.
He said it in a book of popular science, which isn't really science but is "sciency." Which is good enough for people who know as much about science as Dawkins does.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with you except for the number of people who hold professional positions in science who have called it one of the most important "science books" of recent decades. Granted, a lot of them do that for their own professional, ideological reasons but they are scientists.
DeleteI've decided through my research into eugenics and the post-war plaster St. Darwin that if a group of mainstream scientists employed as scientists are going to call even the most obviously wrong ideas "science" then I'm not going to go with the quotes around the word. Eugenics was science and whatever people are going to denominate science to comprise has to answer for it in the same way religion (in general) is held to be responsible for any depravity called "religion". And in that I'm being a lot more lenient to science because in almost every case, when it's religion, there were religious people who opposed religious depravity. Science is a matter of widespread consensus among professional scientists, religion isn't.