Richard
Dawkins seems to think that religious people who take their belief seriously
(who he labels as ‘fundamentalists’) can never admit they are wrong. Considering his last chapter (where he
debated Scripture) one can only smile at the thick irony. For if
you even so much as skim the text of Scripture you will find that admitting you
are wrong is central to the Christian faith.
Almost
every time the Biblical record speaks at length of a person it includes a story
of their error. Abraham, Joseph’s brothers (all 11 of them), Moses, Saul, David, Eliphaz,
Bildad, Zopar and Job, almost every king
of divided Israel and most of the kings of Judah – and not only Israel, but also
Pharaoh of Egypt, Nebuchadnezzar and Darius – and that is just a few. And if you think that their error does not
include their fundamentalist beliefs, consider what Jesus said to the Pharisees
(a direct confrontation by the Son of God), or Peter’s dogmatic belief that the Gospel was only for the Jews
(God confronted him Himself on that in a vision). The whole point of the Bible is that mankind
apart from God is wrong, steeped in error to the degree of which we cannot
escape unless God reveals Himself (for only He is the right way). Repentance (turning from our wrong – including our wrongly ingrained beliefs) is key to
salvation, and there is no salvation without repentance. So to say that a fundamentalist will never
admit they are wrong is perhaps the greatest wrong statement! The reason most fundamentalists will not
yield to the evolutionist atheist argument is that they can see its error
plainly.
This
point cannot be easily dismissed, because this is the hinge point on which all
of Dawkin’s book stands. If you choose to believe only what you can
see and figure out in your own mind, you will choose Dawkins, Darwin and the
evolutionist lot. If you choose to
believe God (whom you cannot see) as the higher authority & greater
knowledge, you will choose His Word. It
is this choice that must be clearly seen and thoughtfully considered, not one
argument or another. There is no end to
the number of arguments that can be made for
one side or the other, but there is only one choice to be had.
Unfortunately
Richard Dawkins seems to think that if he could succeed in reasoning people out
of their religious beliefs the world would be a better place. I think not – it would simply be much
harder to identify evil, because the Zeitgeist would keep changing the
definition of evil. The fact that many,
many people claim religious motives for committing evil just makes it all the
more necessary to have a single fixed definition for it, and the Bible gives us
that. I think the crime Richard should
be speaking against is the fact that people don’t read or study their Bibles,
refuse to spend time praying about what they read and hear and want instead for
someone who claims to have done so to tell them what it says and what it means. But listening to what someone says about the
Bible without doing your own study on it is like listening to what
someone says about evolution without doing your own study on it. A great risk for folly.
Richard
writes against religion as being the reason people’s lives are ruined – for crimes that do not entail
anything more than thought. To prove his
point he raises the issue of execution for the crime of homosexuality in
Afghanistan, actions by people like Fred Phelps (whose organization is
considered a hate group by some) and the words of others that he calls ‘the American Taliban’. Out of this execrable drip he determines that
the greater wrong is owned by those who cause suffering as he can measure
suffering. He then concludes that murder
of a living doctor is wrong, but abortion is well and good.
The error
of such an approach is manifold. Firstly and most importantly because once
again the real issues can only be seen once one can discern between good and
evil. Richard allows for no such
distinction – claiming that “the religious” approve of the odious evil of
murdering doctors while good, right-minded people like him approve of abortion. Evil is evil – and that includes the murder of life that God gave decades ago (a living adult
– be it doctor or otherwise) and the murder of life that God gave days ago (a fetus – be it a day old or 8 months). Secondly, how can Richard claim that his
definition of evil (what the Zeitgeist labels such today) is the right
definition, when it is well possible that the Zeitgeist will label it good just
a few decades from now? Indeed, if we
must bow to the voice of the current majority, then whatever the people’s republic of China determines as good must be the truth
for the whole world.
To shore up
his viewpoint, Dawkins pokes holes in the anti-abortionist argument he calls
the Great Beethoven fallacy (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Great_Beethoven_fallacy). The problem with this argument, and also Dawkin’s rebuttal of it, is that it imputes the value of human
life as a factor of accomplishment. That
is, it subtly suggests (maybe not so subtly) that Beethoven is a worthwhile
individual and an unknown and unremembered person is not. So if you aborted Beethoven you’ve obviously erred, but if you aborted a kid who otherwise
would have died of tuberculosis at age 6 you haven’t erred. Richard
Dawkins seems to think a human life is worth less just because he/she doesn’t meet his definition of value! I can only hope that readers of his book will
recognize the incredible conceit such a viewpoint reveals.
Lest you
think that the abovementioned fails to fully reveal his faulty logic, he goes
on to equate abortion with abstinence (saying that to NOT have a kid is just
like having an abortion)! Unfortunately,
Richard seems to slide ever deeper off the end of rational thought as the
chapter wears on. He approvingly quotes
Sam Harris, “The fact that
nearly half of the American population apparently believes [the book of
Revelation] purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a
moral and intellectual emergency.” Really?
An emergency that people believe Scripture?
He says
of the 2005 London suicide bombers, “Only
religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in
otherwise sane and decent people.” And he quotes Muriel Gray (on the same
topic), “The cause of all
this misery, mayhem, violence, terror and ignorance is of course religion
itself…” Richard concludes, “Faith is
an evil.”
Wow. I would hope that not everyone who holds to
the atheist viewpoint is so deprived of discernment that they cannot see the line of demarcation between evil and faith.
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