Religion Equals Child Abuse?

(From WorldNet Daily.)
Controversial scientist and evolutionist Richard Dawkins, dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler," calls religion a "virus" and faith-based education "child abuse" in a two-part series he wrote and appears in that begins airing on the UK's Channel 4, beginning tomorrow evening.

Entitled "Root of All Evil?," the series features the atheist Dawkins visiting Lourdes, France, Colorado Springs, Colo., the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and a British religious school, using each of the venues to argue religion subverts reason.

In "The God Delusion," the first film in the series, Dawkins targets Catholicism at the pilgrimage site in Lourdes. "If you want to experience the medieval rituals of faith, the candle light, the incense, music, important-sounding dead languages, nobody does it better than the Catholics," he says.

Dawkins, using his visit to Colorado Springs' New Life Church, criticizes conservative U.S. evangelicals and warns his audience of the influence of "Christian fascism" and "an American Taliban."

"Christian fascism" and "an American Taliban?" Once again, we have a supposed intellectual who can’t tell the difference between a crazed dynamiter on a Jewish school bus and the Wheaton College English Department. I may have a few theological quibbles with most of the Evangelicals I hang out with, but somehow I can’t quite equate them with konzentrationslagern or public beheadings for doing the naughty out of wedlock. Really now, get a grip, Dick!

The backdrop of the al-Aqsa mosque and an American-born Jew turned fundamentalist Muslim who tells Dawkins to prepare for the Islamic world empire – and who clashes with him after saying he hates atheists – rounds out the first program's case for the delusions of the faithful.

If they can’t stand Richard Dawkins, I may have to reevaluate my distaste for Islam.

In part two, "The Virus of Faith," Dawkins attacks the teaching of religion to children, calling it child abuse.

"Innocent children are being saddled with demonstrable falsehoods," he says. "It's time to question the abuse of childhood innocence with superstitious ideas of hellfire and damnation. Isn't it weird the way we automatically label a tiny child with its parents' religion?"

"Sectarian religious schools," Dawkins asserts, have been "deeply damaging" to generations of children.

“Jesus loves me, this I know…” Man, the nightmares that must inflict on children.

Dawkins, who makes no effort to disguise his atheism and contempt for religion, focuses on the Bible, too.

"The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist," he says. Dawkins then criticizes Abraham, compares Moses to Hitler and Saddam Hussein, and calls the New Testament "St. Paul's nasty, sado-masochistic doctrine of atonement for original sin."

Paul didn’t have a doctrine of original sin; he just believed we all fell short of perfection. The doctrine of original sin, which was codified later, basically just says that we are all fatally flawed; I always liked Chesterton’s claim that it is the only major Christian doctrine that can be proven simple by reading the morning paper.

I had hoped that its alternative, the notion that humans can be perfected by social engineering – the driving delusion of the Century of Megadeath – had disappeared with the collapse of Marxism. Unfortunately, it is alive and well in the academy.

John Deighan, a spokesman for the Catholic Church, took issue with Dawkin's denunciation of religion, telling the Glasgow Sunday Herald, "Dawkins is well known for his vitriolic attacks on faith, and I think faith has withstood his attacks. He really is going beyond his abilities as a scientist when he starts to venture into the field of philosophy and theology. He is the guy with demonstrable problems."

Zing.

Madeline Bunting, a columnist for the Guardian, who reviewed the series, wrote: "There's an aggrieved frustration that [atheist humanists] have been short-changed by history – we were supposed to be all atheist rationalists by now. Secularization was supposed to be an inextricable part of progress. Even more grating, what secularization there has been is accompanied by the growth of weird irrationalities from crystals to ley lines. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, the problem when people don't believe in God is not that they believe nothing, it is that they believe anything."

Zing again.

Dawkins, perhaps best know for his much-cited comment that evolution "made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist," appeals to John Lennon in a commentary he authored for the Belfast Telegraph on the eve of his program's premiere: "Religion may not be the root of all evil, but it is a serious contender. Even so it could be justified, if only its claims were true. But they are undermined by science and reason. Imagine a world where nobody is intimidated against following reason, wherever it leads. "You may say I'm a dreamer. But I'm not the only one."

Evolution didn’t make me an intellectually satisfied atheist, since it fails to answer any basic questions, like “Why is there anything?” or “Why should the universe be explainable in terms of mathematics?” Physics doesn’t help much either; these days, at the cutting edges, it seems to be devolving into appeals to aesthetics and to faith in physics itself rather than into any set of experimentally verifiable claims.

It is odd that Dawkins describes himself as a “dreamer.” I thought that’s what he was accusing us of. After all, it’s usually the dreamers who start the wars, not the realists.