Dawkins: Religion equals 'child abuse'

WorldNetDaily ^ | 1/8/06

[LibWhacker]

Scientist compares Moses to Hitler, calls New Testament 'sado-masochistic doctrine'

Controversial scientist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins, dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler," calls religion a "virus" and faith-based education "child abuse" in a two-part series he wrote and appears in that begins airing on the UK's Channel 4, beginning tomorrow evening.

Entitled "Root of All Evil?," the series features the atheist Dawkins visiting Lourdes, France, Colorado Springs, Colo., the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and a British religious school, using each of the venues to argue religion subverts reason.

In "The God Delusion," the first film in the series, Dawkins targets Catholicism at the pilgrimage site in Lourdes. "If you want to experience the medieval rituals of faith, the candle light, the incense, music, important-sounding dead languages, nobody does it better than the Catholics," he says.

Dawkins, using his visit to Colorado Springs' New Life Church, criticizes conservative U.S. evangelicals and warns his audience of the influence of "Christian fascism" and "an American Taliban."

The backdrop of the al-Aqsa mosque and an American-born Jew turned fundamentalist Muslim who tells Dawkins to prepare for the Islamic world empire – and who clashes with him after saying he hates atheists – rounds out the first program's case for the delusions of the faithful.

In part two, "The Virus of Faith," Dawkins attacks the teaching of religion to children, calling it child abuse.

"Innocent children are being saddled with demonstrable falsehoods," he says. "It's time to question the abuse of childhood innocence with superstitious ideas of hellfire and damnation. Isn't it weird the way we automatically label a tiny child with its parents' religion?"

"Sectarian religious schools," Dawkins asserts, have been "deeply damaging" to generations of children.

Dawkins, who makes no effort to disguise his atheism and contempt for religion, focuses on the Bible, too.

"The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist," he says. Dawkins then criticizes Abraham, compares Moses to Hitler and Saddam Hussein, and calls the New Testament "St Paul's nasty, sado-masochistic doctrine of atonement for original sin."

John Deighan, a spokesman for the Catholic Church, took issue with Dawkin's denunciation of religion, telling the Glasgow Sunday Herald, "Dawkins is well known for his vitriolic attacks on faith, and I think faith has withstood his attacks. He really is going beyond his abilities as a scientist when he starts to venture into the field of philosophy and theology. He is the guy with demonstrable problems."

Madeline Bunting, a columnist for the Guardian, who reviewed the series, wrote: "There's an aggrieved frustration that [atheist humanists] have been short-changed by history – we were supposed to be all atheist rationalists by now. Secularization was supposed to be an inextricable part of progress. Even more grating, what secularization there has been is accompanied by the growth of weird irrationalities from crystals to ley lines. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, the problem when people don't believe in God is not that they believe nothing, it is that they believe anything."

Dawkins, perhaps best know for his much-cited comment that evolution "made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist," appeals to John Lennon in a commentary he authored for the Belfast Telegraph on the eve of his program's premiere: "Religion may not be the root of all evil, but it is a serious contender. Even so it could be justified, if only its claims were true. But they are undermined by science and reason. Imagine a world where nobody is intimidated against following reason, wherever it leads. "You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one."

[ovrtaxt]

I have to say that: Imagine a world where nobody is intimidated against following reason, wherever it leads is worth repeating.

Besides the radical Muslims, where do you see this intellectual intimidation? The days of Galileo are long gone. Get over it already!

[M Kehoe]

Good morning.

Dawkins: God is dead. God: See ya soon.

5.56mm

[Logophile]

John Deighan, a spokesman for the Catholic Church, took issue with Dawkin's denunciation of religion, telling the Glasgow Sunday Herald, "Dawkins is well known for his vitriolic attacks on faith, and I think faith has withstood his attacks. He really is going beyond his abilities as a scientist when he starts to venture into the field of philosophy and theology. He is the guy with demonstrable problems."

An excellent response by the spokesman for the Catholic Church. Dawkins is using the prestige of science to bolster his attacks the religion. But Dawkins is not talking as a scientist when he takes on religious questions.

[Appalled but Not Surprised]

bringing their 3rd world religions>>

Like the Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, jack?

[thejokker]

rational debate on this issue is difficult when "wacko radicals" grab the headlines...

[Cheburashka]

Robert A. Heinlein said ( and I don't know where he got it from) "Children live in the present, adults live in the future, old people live in the past." Today many physically mature people are still children (i.e. present oriented, not future oriented). Perhaps it has always been so. It is a mistake that people often make to believe that "things are worse now than they have ever been." But I wonder if at some point the massive number of children who never grow up will lead to catastrophe.

[Cheburashka]

Ironically enough, Catholics have no problem with the theory of evolution as a theory. But at some point in the past, even if we cannot identify where that point was, our previously animal ancestors became something more than mere animals, something "made in the image of God".

[LK44-40]

I wonder if at some point the massive number of children who never grow up will lead to catastrophe.

Children, happily, will always be with us. But the conditions of modern life -- prosperity, mass communication, modern transportation -- have uprooted children from their family moorings. Children have the jingle in their pocket and little restraint from the wisdom of adults. There is a merchandising juggernaut (Hollywood, TV, the music industry, the clothing industry, HOWARD STERN) constantly offering them unhealthy, even poisonous, treats. Sadly, (the successes of home schooling notwithstanding) this set of historical circumstances is very hard for parents to resist.

[JCEccles]

The atheist High Priest of Darwinism, emboldened by the Dover decision, issues to the world his homily on child-rearing.

We should all feel so blessed amd enlightened now, especially those of us who are actually doing the hard work of rearing children in a society dominated by cultural atheism.

[Alouette]

What about all the mass murders committed by atheists? The French Revolution, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Holocaust.

There is not even evidence, other than the bible, that the ancient Israelites committed any massacres of Canaanites or Midianites or Moabites. If the bible is just a bunch of made up myths, it never even happened.

[JCEccles]

Children, happily, will always be with us.

Only in a technical sense if you live in Dawkin's Europe. There the native born population is dying off half again as fast as it is being replaced.

Here in the US we are barely maintaining replacement numbers.

[LK44-40]

Only in a technical sense [will children always be with us].

You make a dismally true point that calls me up short for my careless rhetoric.

(As it happens, I am sitting with Mark Steyn's longish essay, It's Demography Stupid, in my lap, having printing it out from another thread for a luxurious wallow.)

[governsleastgovernsbest]

an interview with Yousef al-Khattab, an American-born Jew turned fundamentalist Muslim, who clashes with Dawkins after saying he hates atheists.

In the UK, a country brimming with Muslims from Arab and Asian countries, the only Muslim the producers could come up with was a fruitcake American converted Jew?

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"What about all the mass murders committed by atheists? The French Revolution, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Holocaust."

Hitler was many things; atheist was not one of them. Not by a long shot. He believed that the Aryan race was the perfect special creation of God; he was in essence a creationist.

[JCEccles]

Hitler despised Christianity. He subscribed to notions of racial superiority through survival of the fittest that trace directly to your hero, Charles Darwin.

Hitler was Darwin's spiritual soulmate.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"Hitler despised Christianity."

He hated the churches; he did believe in a warped version of Jesus.

"He subscribed to notions of racial superiority through survival of the fittest that trace directly to your hero, Charles Darwin."

He never mentioned Darwin. He DID mention God repeatedly, and the need to protect his most perfect Creation (the Aryan Race), and how keeping it pure was doing God's work. No mention of evolution. Sorry, go back and do your homework.

"Hitler was Darwin's spiritual soulmate."

Only in your creationist fantasies. :) Hitler was no atheist.

[JCEccles]

"As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element." -- Ernst Haeckel, Disciple of Charles Darwin and Father of German Ecology

Source: Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (New York: Harper, 1900), pp. 14-15.

"Man is not above nature, but in nature." -- Ernst Haeckel, Disciple of Charles Darwin and Father of German Ecology

Source: Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man. 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1903), vol. II, p. 456.

"Man must not fall into the error of thinking that he was ever meant to become lord and master of Nature. A lopsided education has helped to encourage that illusion. Man must realize that a fundamental law of necessity reigns throughout the whole realm of Nature and that his existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife. He will then feel that there cannot be a separate law for mankind in a world in which planets and suns follow their orbits, where moons and planets trace their destined paths, where the strong are always the masters of the weak and where those subject to such laws must obey them or be destroyed. Man must also submit to the eternal principles of this supreme wisdom. He may try to understand them but he can never free himself from their sway." -- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

[Alouette]

Hitler had some made-up religion based on the occult and Norse paganism.

[NYer]

Dawkins targets Catholicism at the pilgrimage site in Lourdes. "If you want to experience the medieval rituals of faith, the candle light, the incense, music, important-sounding dead languages, nobody does it better than the Catholics," he says.

Catholic Ping
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[VOA]

Grist for the mill:

http://www.nationalreview.com/shiflett/shiflett012102.shtml

I'm no expert, but the general picture I get is that Hitler and
his Nazi buddies ranged from atheist to hard-core believers in
"Positive Christianity" (a sort of 'the Jews are to be eliminated and
replaced by Christians' philosophy).
But it's sure true that Hitler knew how to exploit and hijack Christian
imagery, meld it with Germanic snootiness and get millions killed in the
process.
Too bad more Christians didn't at least have the courage of Bonhoeffer.