IP: RE: Richard Dawkins: Religion's Misguided Missiles

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: "Hiawatha Bray" <watha () monitortan com>
> To: <farber () cis upenn edu>
>
> Dawkins isn't a kook; he's a twit.  Certainly not much of a scientific
> thinker, at least not in matters like this one.
>
> Because the underlying hypothesis of his argument is quite amenable to a
> scientific test, one which for some reason, Dawkins never undertakes.
> So let's do the poor lad's homework for him.
>
> If we grant that the horror of the World Trade Center might have been
> averted by somehow preventing the indoctrination of the young in some
> supernatural religion, it would be reasonable to suppose that such
> behavior would be nonexistent among those who do not believe in any sort
> of God.  So all we have to do is find a society of atheists and see how
> they behave themselves.
>
> Now this would have been a problem back in the 18th or 19th centuries,
> when modern philosophical atheism was getting its sea legs.  But guess
> what happened in the 20th century?  You got it--for the first time in
> human history, we found ourselves faced with a powerful global movement
> which had as one of its founding beliefs a total rejection of belief in
> any sort of God, supernaturalism, or afterlife.
>
> So how'd this movement behave itself?  Well, okay--I can't think of any
> suicide bombers wiping out skyscrapers.  But I do recall 20-30 million
> dead in Stalin's gulags, similar numbers slaughtered by Mao Zedong, Pol
> Pot's mass murders in Cambodia--he was educated in good old rationalist
> France, as I recall.
>
> What is wrong with this picture?  It appears that our clearheaded
> atheists, in less than a century, murdered about as many people as all
> the wars of religion of the previous millennium.  Granted, the atheist
> fanatics had better technology to work with, so let's just say they
> stood on the shoulders of giants.
>
> Still, there's not a whole lot of Dawkins' argument left once one tests
> it against real world experience.  I thought scientists were supposed to
> do that.  But then, scientists are only human, and all of us, caught up
> in the grip of an intense conviction, are tempted to switch off our
> brains from time to time.  Think of it as a mild case of fanaticism.
>
> Hiawatha Bray
> Tech Reporter (and Baptist)
> Boston Globe



For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/