I don’t like Richard Dawkins – not because I think he has nothing to say, but because he seems unable to say it civilly. If he is the example of the ethic his belief system produces, no thank you.
That being said, I loved this paragraph. I have thought the same thing many times myself.
The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.
via Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact.
FYI: The best faith response to Pop-atheism I have seen is Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution.
wow. true. it is a bit stunning from that perspective.
What does an atheist look like in Sweden, Japan, or Norway, the countries that have the best social and economic equality in the world? They look like the population. In those countries that are the best functioning, most moral in the world, atheists are ~90% of the population, while in the USA it is about the reverse(and we have the worst inequality, social and crime problems of any developed country).
(citation: http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdf and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality )
In polls in the US by comparison, atheists are consistently the most hated minority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination_against_atheists#United_States
Richard Dawkins only makes sense if you see him in light of these facts. In a society that says you can’t talk about religion politely, he takes up the mantle of a discriminated part of the religious landscape. You might see him as a “Malcom X” figure. We see him as the “freedom riders”. He’s not harming anyone, but neither is he going out of his way to be respectful to bigotry and poor epistemology.
Atheists see Dawkins very differently. See this video for example: If I was talking to someone about my field of study and they was how they responded, I doubt I could be as kind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFjoEgYOgRo
If you want to hear from Dawkins what he is about, here’s his TED talk on the topic. http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html
(note, I’ve never read one of Dawkins books, but I have seen a lot of his videos.)
Still, I have no wish to be Dawkins, though I think Christians have a skewed view of him. I would love to be more like Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrass Tyson, or Norman Borlaug(who is credited with saving over a billion lives) or Bill Gates, or Sam Harris or any one of millions of faceless secular humanists in Norway.
Atheism has nothing to say on morality. It is simply a statement on what we think of the evidence for an intelligent supreme being. To put it another way, it is the “no easy answers” club, from which point we start inquiry in to how to best conquer problems of human suffering.
Perhaps Sam Harris says it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMSwQJr-mhc
Correction: non-theist beliefs in Sweden and Norway are closer to 80% and 70% respectively, not 90% as implied. Japan is closer to 95%.