Yay Dawkins, Boo Fundies - including Athiest Fundies!

“The Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals.” - Richard Dawkins

That’s from an excellent speech Dr. Dawkins gave earlier this year, and which is available via Google Video here. I haven’t read his new book, but this speech, which involves excerpts and arguments from it, really makes me want to. I encourage everyone to watch the video — you may not have the stomach to digest a whole book of something you may disagree with (though my commenter-pal Sabbath does, and we could all learn a lesson from that) — but at least listen to the man’s own words before writing him off because the media tends to equate him with those stupid “fundamentalist atheists” who’ve been vying for attention lately. (Dawkins and the stupid fundie-atheists are both big names in religious debate lately, but that doesn’t put them in the same camp.) It’s also incredibly worthwhile to stick around for the end of the speech; he gets hit with some truly brutal questions and provides some really insightful answers. Four stars, yo.

I’m still aggravated from an NPR piece on fundie-atheists last week, which was significantly more poorly done than most NPR pieces, painted conflicts and players in strokes way too broad and did nothing to clarify what is in my mind the main point: That the freedom to practice religion includes the freedom to practice no religion and not be discriminated against for it.

I don’t identify myself as an atheist — really, Dawkins’ description of “Einsteinian” theism is probably the perfect category for me — but I end up defending atheists constantly, because, if you haven’t noticed, even when people of one religion manage to be “open-minded” enough to “allow” people to “worship in other ways”, they have a much harder time (and feel much less social pressure towards) allowing people to not “worship” at all. That would be a problem even if “straight atheism” was the only choice at stake here, but it isn’t — there are plenty of religious choices that might not involve worship, or that might disagree with the concept of a personal God. All of these are guaranteed protection by the First Amendment too, people.

And of course, the atheist fundamentalists are just as wrong as any other fundamentalist, by virtue of the nature of fundamentalism: To declare your beliefs fundamental to reality, to insist that because you thus believe, so must everyone else or be “wrong”…that’s just plain fucking stupid, and it burns me that we even tolerate it from anyone in this century. It also drives me utterly Malkavian batshit when religious apologists claim that scientists are being “fundamentalists” in claiming that people who don’t “believe in” things like Evolution and gravity are “wrong”. A scientific fact is so by virtue of its being true and verifiable across the boundary that separates people, okay? Scientists are, in my experience, the first people to admit that their ability to discover facts is not perfect. But facts are not open to choice and denial like beliefs are — they required evidence and argument to get to, and they require evidence and argument to disprove. It scares me that the minds of Americans are such jello nowadays that they feel that their right and ability to “decide” how to conceptualize God translates into a right and ability to “decide” that things like Evolution and archaeological discoveries are simply false if they disagree. I suppose, if I wanted to stoop to disproving this “idea” philosophically, I could literally do it in one sentence: If it’s true that facts are susceptible to our desire for them to be different, then why the fuck should I bother listening to what you say? (This is a version of the classic logical refutation of relativism in general, for those interested.)

Of course it’s just as unconstitutional to try to “ban worship” as it is to disenfranchise or disallow non-worship; but to be fair, there are MANY more people attempting the latter than the former. Both are illegal and societally wrong, I remind America, because Fundamentalism is STUPID and the people who helped put our government together knew it. (Deism was very influential during this time, which helped.) The fact that atheists can be stupid just as well as Christians, Muslims, Nazis ad nauseam isn’t surprising. The fact that people–educated people no less–continue to fall for any form of fundamentalism is more shocking and revolting to me than anything I’ve ever accidentally seen on the Internet. Donkey porn included. Yech.

-PD