Atheist Neo-Paganism...In Other Words

Ruth Gledhill wrote an article which presents an interview with Richard Dawkins. It is entitled "God . . . in other words" and is subtitled "Richard Dawkins may be Britain's foremost atheist, but he is willing to be inspired and uplifted. Is he a believer after all?" (The Times, May 10, 2007).

Ruth Gledhill notes:

Richard Dawkins believes that children should grow up reading the Bible and has a "soft spot" for the Church of England. He also believes some of the historic atrocities of human behaviour were not inspired by religion, but were a result of our "ruthless Darwinian past".
And he believes in the possibility of a transcendent "intelligence" existing beyond the range of present human experience. It is just that he refuses to call it God.
These are just some of the more surprising confessions to come from the man variously described as Britain's angriest atheist and the self-appointed Devil's chaplain…
"You'd be rightly written off as uncultivated if you knew nothing of the Bible. You need the Bible to understand literary allusions,"….

With regards to the Devil's Chaplain I will direct the interested reader to my essay Darwin's Chaplain.
As for being Bible literate; I do often wonder about the atheists who ask questions to the affect of "Who cares what the Bible says?" When the answer is certainly, "The majority of the world's population." Indeed, in The God Delusion Richard Dawkins provides a large list of commonly employed literary and vernacular Bible phrases and allusions-that book's only high point, to be sure.

Ruth Gledhill asks Richard Dawkins,

how he is getting on with his friend Lord Winston, the fertility pioneer, who last last month condemned Dawkins for his "patronising" and "insulting" attitude to religion, which he said was in danger of damaging the public's trust in science.
"He's a dear friend and I have enormous regard for him. He either is religious, as he claims, or he believes in beliefs. He claims to be an observant Jew and I'm sure he does go to synagogue. I sometimes wonder whether he really believes it. He is offended by strong criticism of religion. I believe that what appears to be strong criticism of religion is not as strong as people think. Criticism that in any other field - theatre, book or restaurants - would be comparatively mild. It sounds outspoken and strident because we are not used to religion being criticised."

Understand that, in Richard Dawkins mind, since Lord Winston is a scientist he cannot possibly take all of that God stuff seriously, can he? I would disagree that criticism of religion merely appears to be strong because we are not used to religion being criticized. Religious criticism has existed since the time that there were more than one religion or more than one practitioner of the same religion. In fact, the Bible has been criticizing religion for millennia.
I would argue that when people set out to criticize theatre, book or restaurants they generally do not compare the play's director, the author and the chef to Adolf Hitler, as Richard Dawkins has done to just about every Christian, Moses and even a Rabbi (see Hitler's Rabbi). Or his correlations between religion and viruses as he does later in the interview,

"short of vaccination, a weakened strain of the virus should protect against the virulent strain." For a moment, I had forgotten I was talking to a biologist.

Actually, Ruth Gledhill forgot that she is talking to a militant activist atheist who, within the interview, claims that "I would criticise the brutality of Stalin and Hitler" and yet is flummoxed as to Nazism's ethical standing but not about raising children according to one's faith:

What's to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn't right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.1

It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child. I think labelling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue.2

Hitler: who knows?
Merely describing children as Muslim or Christian: evil!

Sam Harris prefers rape to religion and stated,

If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion…I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.3

Would he criticize a theatre, book or restaurant by stating,

If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or Spamalot…I would not hesitate to get rid of Spamalot.

Or,

If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or The Da Vinci Code…I would not hesitate to get rid of The Da Vinci Code.

Or,

If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or Carl Jr's…I would not hesitate to get rid of Carl Jr's

Further, examples from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and other atheists are legion.

Now we come to what I covered in essays such as History of Atheism and Dan Barker’s Neo-Pagan Atheism see here and here; as Richard Dawkins states:

…"under the banner of religion you can write about what I call Einsteinian religion, which I subscribe to and so do many scientists as a sort of reverence for the Universe and life, which has nothing to do with anything supernatural"…
"If that's what you call religion then I'm religious." But when I suggest that, in this case, he is in touch with the transcendent, he accuses me of "playing with words".
He says: "If by transcendent you mean what Einstein believed then yes, but what I think, to come back on your statement that more intelligent and sophisticated religious people believe something close to what Einstein and I believe, that may be true, but they are a tiny minority of religious people in the world. It's the majority of religious people in the world that we have to worry about."

FYI: the majority of religious people in the world have never engaged in malice against those with whom they disagree.

As was pointed out in the post From Zeitgeist to Poltergeist, Part 4 of 13 while Albert Einstein was no strict theist he most certainly stated:

"I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how.
It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."4

Next, Richard Dawkins, predictably, reduces love to a "manifestation of brain stuff"-can you imagine that Valentine's Day card?

Ruth Gledhill notes that Richard Dawkins, "denies that he is setting up an alternative religion, an atheistic lack-of-belief system." Yet, as part of the Alluminati he is certainly been in the forefront of considering an atheistic co-option of science as neo Pagan nature worship-by whatever name. Mover, the other Alluminati, the other influential celebrity atheists, are most certainly attempting to establish a one world atheist religion: a Novus Ordo Saecularis.

We have previously argued that many atheists look forward to a mythological future time when humanity will posses omniscience (see Omni-Science)-the fallacy of validation by projection: imagining validation of absolute materialism by projecting to a time when it will be validated. Only then, it is claimed, will we be able to either affirm or deny the existence of the supernatural. Some atheists consider this a fallacious statement about atheist beliefs yet consider Richard Dawkins' claim,

I am a scientist. It is my business to understand and help others to understand the nature of life in my case, or generally, as a scientist, the nature of the Universe. At the beginning of the 21st century, humanity is approaching a staggeringly impressively near-to-complete understanding. It's hugely exciting to be a member of this elite species at this time when our understanding of physics, biology and cosmology are so exciting and near complete.[emphasis added]

He concludes by, of course, appealing to his bread and butter: besmirching "religion",

It's tragic that people are deprived of this not by misfortunes or lack of education, but by deliberate distortion, by organised of misinformation.

Indeed, if only those meddlesome religionists would abscond we would all know that we know just about everything about everything.

As part of the Darwinismdidit catechism Richard Dawkins states,

"A lot of what is good about human history has been an emancipation, a weaning, of humanity away from our ruthless Darwinian past," he says. "As a Darwinian, I see that."

Whatever the case, the claim, the observation, the speculation may be: Darwinismdidit.

No wonder that Philip S. Skell wrote the following ("the father of carbene chemistry," member of the National Academy of Sciences and Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University):

Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive - except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable.
Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed - except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers.
When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.5

Benjamin Wiker seconds that observation by noting the following in his consideration of "Game Theory",

By using games with fewer rules than Candy Land, the Darwinian game theorists are claiming "to uncover the fundamental principles governing our decision-making mechanisms." We'd better take a closer look, starting with their presuppositions…
The answer seems to be that whatever has survived must be the most fit; therefore whatever exists must have been the result of natural selection. Fairness exists; therefore, it must be the result of natural selection. Q.E.D.
It is always convenient to have a theory that cannot possibly be proved wrong.6

Note what Birch and Ehrlich wrote in the journal Nature,

Our theory of evolution has become…one which cannot be refuted by any possible observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it.7

In the interview Richard Dawkins also makes a well-within-the-atheist-group-think-box statements about how the Golden Rule did not come from Christianity but that "Christianity is one belief system that has adopted it." I have considered this in the section entitled "1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you" of the post Ecce Homo's Commandments in which we consider the "New Ten commandments" of which there are fifteen.

As for further hopes for the future: Richard Dawkins seems very certain that his chosen worldview will be validated:

Well, I'm convinced that future physicists will discover something at least as wonderful as any god you could ever imagine…I think that all theological conceptions will be seen as parochial and petty by comparison…

Moreover, in Atheism Spirituality we noted that Richard Dawkins offers goose-bumpy-feel-good descriptions of atheism. He add to these in the interview in describing how such future finds will augment his atheism,

…awe-inspiring. Also, aesthetically appealing, uplifting…Maybe transcendent would be a good word to adopt.

Well, just because something is awe-inspiring, aesthetically appealing, uplifting and transcendent does not mean that it is true.

Lastly, Ruth Gledhill states that Richard Dawkins' website sent out emails advertizing his DVD series "Growing up in the Universe" and that "It looked superb and I will buy a set for my young son." Big mistake.
"Growing up in the Universe" does target children as it is an indoctrination session which reviewed as Richard Dawkins - Children in the Atheist's Den.

1. 1. Stated during an interview with Larry Taunton, "Richard Dawkins: The Atheist Evangelist," byFaith Magazine, Issue Number 18, December 2007 (copyright; 2007-2008)
2. 2. Martin Beckford and Urmee Khan, "Harry Potter fails to cast spell over Professor Richard Dawkins," UK Telegraph, October 25, 2008
3. 3. Jorg Blech, THE NEW ATHEISTS - Researchers Crusade against American Fundamentalists, October 26, 2006
4. 4. "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck," The Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 26, 1929
5. 5. Philip S. Skell, "Why Do We Invoke Darwin? - Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology," The Scientist, August 29, 2005
6. 6. Benjamin Wiker, "Playing Games with Good & Evil - The Failure of Darwinism to Explain Morality," Crisis, May 1, 2002. Candy Land is a "Hasbro" board game for children ages 3 and up. "Q.E.D." the Latin term "quod erat demonstrandum" which means "that which was to be demonstrated," in other words; tautology or circular logic.
7. 7. L.C. Birch and P. Ehrlich, Nature, April 22, 1967