Posted on 02/25/2015 5:36:23 AM PST by Heartlander
Children need to be “protected” from religious indoctrination in schools, biologist and atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins has said, backing a campaign by Atheist Ireland to overhaul our education system.
Speaking to The Irish Times in advance of a public talk at Trinity College Dublin on Tuesday evening, Prof Dawkins said: “There is a balancing act and you have to balance the rights of parents and the rights of children and I think the balance has swung too far towards parents…
“Children do need to be protected so that they can have a proper education and not be indoctrinated in whatever religion their parents happen to have been brought up in.”
Prof Dawkins was in Dublin on the second-leg of a pair of talks organised by Arizona State University’s Origins Project, which is aimed at promoting public understanding of science.
While his address focused primarily on genetics, Darwinism and “misconceptions about science”, he also answered questions from the floor about religion and those forces in society “against rationality”.
After Stephen Fry’s much-publicised comments on God, Prof Dawkins is perhaps only the world’s second most famous atheist right now. But he still pulls a crowd and several hundred people coughed up £35 (€50) a head for his lecture in Edmund Burke theatre with cosmologist and Origins Project founder Lawrence Krauss.
Prof Dawkins, who spent Monday in Belfast, praised the work of Atheist Ireland in campaigning to separate church and state in education.
Warning against the “power of childhood indoctrination”, he said it was futile debating with people who put the Bible ahead of scientific evidence. “You have to write off those people” but you can try to convince younger people to avoid superstition, Prof Dawkins said.
His plea for reform was backed by Prof Krauss who said: “Parents, of course, have concerns and ‘say’ but they don’t have the right to shield their children from knowledge. That is not a right, any more than they have the right to shield their children from healthcare or medicine.”
In his address, Prof Dawkins spoke of “the replication bomb” that gave rise to human life as we know it. He said the laws of chemistry showed that before DNA there was another “self-replicating entity”, probably RNA.
But could this process have occurred elsewhere? He said people were “perfectly entitled to believe” that earth was unique in containing life but this was highly improbable.
He said life in the universe could be as rare as “one in a billion stars” but if it existed “the one thing I will put my shirt on is that it will be Darwinian life”, namely it would depend on some information-bearing, self-replicating entity.
Recommending that people “put flying saucers out of your mind,” however, he said “it’s far more likely that we would discover it by radio than we would be visited.”
He also pushes the narrative that a person of science should believe all religion to be a myth.
The same is true of many of the major doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. The Virgin Birth, the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Resurrection of Jesus, the survival of our own souls after death: these are all claims of a clearly scientific nature. Either Jesus had a corporeal father or he didn't. This is not a question of "values" or "morals"; it is a question of sober fact. We may not have the evidence to answer it, but it is a scientific question, nevertheless. You may be sure that, if any evidence supporting the claim were discovered, the Vatican would not be reticent in promoting it.Either Mary's body decayed when she died, or it was physically removed from this planet to Heaven. The official Roman Catholic doctrine of Assumption, promulgated as recently as 1950, implies that Heaven has a physical location and exists in the domain of physical reality - how else could the physical body of a woman go there? I am not, here, saying that the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin is necessarily false (although of course I think it is). I am simply rebutting the claim that it is outside the domain of science. On the contrary, the Assumption of the Virgin is transparently a scientific theory. So is the theory that our souls survive bodily death, and so are all stories of angelic visitations, Marian manifestations, and miracles of all types.
- Richard Dawkins
The original host of Family Feud? I thought he had died.
>>The whole idea should be to expose the child to both sides.
>>Then when mature he or She can make their own minds up.
Yep.
“I am the way, the Truth, and the life”
If that is the truth then it will be self-evident to anyone whose free mind is allowed to seek it.
1. 169,202,000 Murdered: Summary and Conclusions [20th Century Democide]
2. The New Concept of Democide [Definition of Democide]
3. Over 133,147,000 Murdered: Pre-Twentieth Century Democide
4. 61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
5. 35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist Chinese Ant Hill
6. 20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
7. 10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime
8. 5,964,000 Murdered: Japan's Savage Military
9. 2,035,000 Murdered: The Khmer Rouge Hell State
10. 1,883,000 Murdered: Turkey's Genocidal Purges
11. 1,670,000 Murdered: The Vietnamese War State
12. 1,585,000 Murdered: Poland's Ethnic Cleansing
13. 1,503,000 Murdered: The Pakistani Cutthroat State
14. 1,072,000 Murdered: Tito's Slaughterhouse
15. 1,663,000 Murdered? Orwellian North Korea
16. 1,417,000 Murdered? Barbarous Mexico
17. 1,066,000 Murdered? Feudal RussiaReferences Index
“Children need to be protected from Richard Dawkins...”
...and Islam, public schools, the federal government, unions, the MSM and the DNC.
question
how is that statement a “rational” concept ?
The statement is saying there is no “reason” for our existence
That ultimately the universe is irrational in conception fundamentals saying there is no reason for our existence
he's reason to come to an end conclusion that there is no reason....it all starts with a serendipitous illogical event that just occurs for no reason....
you can't have it both ways
Atheism is the child of Marx, and the tool of the enemies of America.
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