Dawkins and Religion
James Crossley has a nice review of the U.K. Channel 4 program by Richard Dawkins, the leading scientist who loves telling us things we don't want to hear and need to hear. His recent dangerous idea for The Edge was beautiful, and unsettling to people. I agree with James, however, that he tends to go off the deep end with his anti-religious rhetoric.
James acknowledges "perfectly sensible points" made by Dawkins in his attack on religion, while noting that religion can hardly absorb all the blame Dawkins wants to dump on it. He writes:
"I don't think by itself [religion] is inherently good or evil (in some ways like science you could say). As I've said before, in most cases it requires some kind of specific socio-economic context to trigger off deadly responses."
Not only this, but we should be under no delusion that the evils of the world would have been diminished had religion never appeared on the scene. Stalin and Pol Pot weren't motivated by religion. The simple fact is that homo sapiens are, biologically, a violent, discriminatory, and unhappy lot, and we're always going to try to justify our hurting others and discriminating against them, whether by religion or not. A scientist like Dawkins should realize this. It should also be noted that religion has been part of the critique against injustice and ignorance, just as it has been a perpetuator of them.
posted by Loren Rosson III @ 1/10/2006
2 Comments:
Even though I'm an atheist/agnostic, Dawkins still turns me off with his rabid anti-religious rhetoric. He's doing more harm than good by hardening the feelings of antipathy towards science among religious folks. As you pointed out, people will always harbor comfortable delusions and will always find excuses for justifying the unjustifiable, with or without religion.
Much of the evil perpetrated by organized religion, and politics, is not due to belief in God, the supernatural, or the illogical. It's the establishment of an ideological authority, be it a priesthood, dictatorship, or the GOP, which claims to have all the answers, demands unquestioning loyalty, manipulates people's fears and inherent "us versus them" mentality to cement that loyalty (and distract from its own shortcomings), and considers any questioning of its dogma as a threat to its power.
It is interesting that the secular equivalents given like Stalin or whatever have similarities to Dawkins' view (NB Dawkins' view) in that that it requires belief in all sorts of things grounded in a great figurehead who knows all etc.
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