A young Christian reads Richard Dawkins' "God Delusion", and then commits suicide in anguish. What more can be said? Atheism is not a pleasant place to go. By removing the purpose for living with false logic and phony "science", Dawkins has created a cult of his own, one of darkness, self-deceit and self-focus. Unfortunately the secular-educated are totally unequipped to think their way through the morass of fallacies that Atheists like Dawkins rationalize. And being rationally unequipped leads to devastation, when the victim doesn't wish to join the Atheist cult in their pursuit of self, yet believes that his universe has been deconstructed and demolished.
No doubt Dawkins will reject any and all responsibility for the suicide of his new young protege. Perhaps he will claim mental illness on the part of the young suicide victim. But the mental illness wasn't present before the young man read the book. So the content of the book must have induced the mental illness.
Dawkins has consistently failed to take responsibility for the errors in his own logic, the erroneous basis for his computer simulations, and for his rabid intolerance of non-Materialist worldviews. His campaign against the "others" is one of pure hatred. So in a sense, the "God Delusion" is itself a hate crime. There is no reason to believe that Dawkins will feel any need to even acknowledge that this incident even occurred. Let's watch and see.
3 comments:
I'd be quite interested in what Dawkins has to say -- he's the type of atheists that more moderate atheists, let alone agnostics and others who don't believe in a Judaeo-Christian personal God, find to be unnecessarily brash, provocative and disrespectful (apparently in a recent secular conference in NYC he was doing some soul-searching about his antagonistic strategy, so perhaps there's hope he might moderate his speech, if not his beliefs).
I'd also be interested to hear from the poor student's pastor, though. Most religious people in mainstream denominations probably would not react that strongly to losing their faith, so it's interesting to see how this kid ended up with a very brittle faith that, once shattered, leaves only nihilistic atheism behind.
Comte-Sponville's book on atheistic spirituality, and the practice of moral living by billions of followers of non-theistic religions (from Buddhists to Unitarian-Universalists) show that one can be a non-theist and yet have a non-nihilistic, purpose-driven outlook on life. Shocking someone out of a religious belief (or into one) is rather morally reprehensible, though.
Then again, people with Christianist creationistic outlook might find *any* Biology class rather challenging. It is possible to reconcile religion with evolutionary science, but Intelligence Design is not the answer (theistic evolution is a better fit). I can quite imagine an atheistic biology professor getting exasperated by a creationist student and then assigning such reading, though that ought to be outside the scope of a biology class.
I agree fully that Intelligent Design is not a potential candidate for scientific (empirical) inquiry. Also, Creationism as a literal interpretation of Genesis in the King James Vesion is not a rational theory. Much of the bible is allegorical; much of Jesus' teaching was allegorical. There is no reason to think that the biblical creation story was anything other than allegorical, to model the origin of imperfect man, in terms understandable to the men of that age.
In fact, scientific models also tend to be allegories in the sense that they use a separate mechanism to understand a phenomenon. Computer simulations serve as allegories for hurricanes, train wrecks, circuit performance, bridge collapse, and so on. Mathematics has long been used to model the behaviors of many phenomena.
In studying the Grand Canyon, two observations are difficult to ignore. First, there are pre-existing layers extending downward for incredible distances. There is nothing in our experience that would account for this to have occurred in such a short time as 6,000 years. Second, the canyon does not show signs of a single, massive release of water. Such a release did occur in the Pacific Northwest, and the resulting signs are completely different from the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon appears much much more likely to have been a gradual erosion.
Young Earth Creationism has some interesting issues that science - to my knowledge - has trouble with, including the rate of recession of the moon from the earth, and so on. But the overall age of the earth, as observed from many traces, is very old, not very young.
This in no way detracts from the logical likelihood that the universe had a cause, that the cause was rational and extremely powerful, that cause exists outside and beyond space-time, and so on. Trying to prove that the KJV is literal truth is not only futile, it is a process for losing rational believers who can see otherwise. So theories such as Young Earth Creationism serve as a weapon in the arsenal of the Atheists.
As for biology, the famed "tree of life" is about to undergo a refutation in favor of a "bush of life" or even an intertwined "mat of life", or "web of life" as will be revealed by biolgists in publications coming in the next year. Evolution is not a fixed law, as of yet, because much new evidence is coming to the fore that is counter to previous theory. None of this endangers evolution as a pillar of Atheism, at least not yet. But being in such a state of flux, and with vast amounts of unanswered questions, the process of evolution as a certainty... is uncertain.
So since evolution is mostly an unknown process with the basics still being defined, it should not be allowed to be an effective weapon of Atheism... unless it is against dogmatic Young Earth Creationism.
I need to address the idea of moral living outside the auspices of religion.
Atheism rejects absolute morality.
Atheists are free to make up their own ethic.
Atheists who are living "moral" lives are moral by what standard?
If the moral standard that a "moral atheist" is living up to is in fact Judeo-Christian, then the Atheist is not living an Atheist life, he is co-opting standards in which he does not believe: it is a fraudulent existence, and a fraudulent claim.
If the moral standard is purely Atheist in its origin, then it would closely resemble the lack of absolute morality that is described by Hegel, Feuerbach, Comte, Nietzsche, and so on. But this is not the way the "moral Atheist" lives. Again, the claim is fraudulent.
If the Atheist claims that he has derived a morality on his own that corresponds to Judeo-Christian morality, then check his logic, his workings through the "evolution of ethics" and show him that evolution does not produce cooperation, it produces chaotic in-fighting and skirmishes as witnessed by the feudal enclaves in Europe and the tribal wars that existed in the pre-Columbian Americas, and still exist in many parts of the third world.
There is no way to rationalize the evolution of a parallel ethic that maps onto Judeo-Christianity. Such a claim is fraudulent.
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