I had seen on Richard Dawkins’ blog that he was going to be on the O’Reilly Factor, which he in fact was. He and Bill skirmished, as could have been predicted, and I only want to say one thing about it. O’Reilly brought up Stalin and Hitler, good job, and Dawkins pointed out that both …
Slavery and Atheism
In Letter From A Christian Citizen, I argue two basic points concerning slavery. The first is that atheism does not provide us with any solid ground for condemning slavery. This does not keep atheists from condemning slavery. It just keeps them from having a good reason for doing so. “From an atheistic perspective, how can …
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Virginia Tech
Let’s tie two timely issues together. This is sometimes dangerous, because when issues are timely, they are also frequently raw, and this means that it is easy to be misunderstood. But I will try to state this basic argument against atheism as briefly and as clearly as I can. The first timely issue is the …
Lots of Things We Could Do
Letter from a Christian Citizen has drawn the attention of Richard Dawkins, and there was quite a discussion over at his blog. If you want to take a look, you can see it all here. I am not asking you to go over there to pile into the discussion — in fact I would recommend …
A Bowl of Sawdust Paste
In this last Dawkins installment, I want to do two things. The first is to briefly summarize his last chapter and respond to it. The second task is to develop something I mentioned in an earlier post — viz. that Dawkins is more than half ashamed of what he is doing — and for good …
In the Zone
The ninth chapter of Dawkins’ book is entitled “Childhood, Abuse, and the Escape from Religion.” The chapter is almost impudent in its intellectual dishonesty, and more than impudent in its proposal. Dawkins begins by telling a heart-wrenching story from 19th century Italy, in which a young Jewish boy (Edgardo Mortata) had been secretly baptized by …
Rabbitless Rocks
In the next chapter, Dawkins seeks to answer the question, “Why are you so hostile?” So believers in God are delusional. So what? Why get that datum wound tight around your axle? He also has to explain why, given his adversarial stance toward Christianity and creationism, he never takes “part in debates with creationists.” With …
Pina Coladas, and Walking in the Rain
The next chapter in Dawkins is called “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist,” and it is one of the strangest bits of business I have encountered in some time. The first part of the chapter is dedicated to proving how the Bible exhibits “sheer strangeness” and is “just plain weird” (p. 237). To …
Scratching the Itch of Morality
In the next chapter, Richard Dawkins undertakes the question of morality, seeking to ground that morality on the unshakeable foundation of evolution. What kind of foundation might that be? Well, let’s go down into the basement and have ourselves a little check. But before getting to this important issue, Dawkins gives us some samples of …
Who? Me?
Richard Dawkins knows that he cannot just say that religion is silly, and that people are silly for believing it. Given his evolutionary premises, he has to give a Darwinian account of why people are so overwhelmingly religious. This is the goal of his next chapter in The God Delusion. “Religion is so wasteful, so …