The Root Of All Evil?

Redwire · January 8, 2006

yes, should be interesting. The thing about Dawkins is, though he is clearly a vey intelligent bloke, he seems evey bit as evengelical and rabid about (a) his own beliefs and (b) condeming the religious evangelicals that he clearly detests so much.

I always find it interesting that there is a basic and unsettling irony there that he nevers seems to acknowledge.

Maybe he thinks he has something very important to say.

I disagree with much that Nick Cohen says but I thought his bit in the Observer today is interesting.

The most uncompromisingly atheist series British television has dared to screen begins tomorrow at 8pm. Channel 4 is allowing Richard Dawkins to explain how religion is a 'virus' that spreads murder and ignorance.

In The Root of all Evil?, Oxford's professor of the public understanding of science uses the very Darwinism fundamentalists reject to explain why they are so keen to 'abuse childhood innocence' in religious schools. Children can't follow the scientific method and test everything their parents say. If they decide to find out whether it is truly dangerous to walk off a cliff, they will be in no position to pass on their genes when they grow up. Evolution has preprogrammed them to believe what adults tell them.

With a shockingly irresponsible Labour government preparing to use sectarian schools to divide our country by religion and race, Dawkins is giving us a warning as well as an argument. Channel 4 dramatises it by sending him to confront fundamentalists of all faiths. He treats them with donnish puzzlement rather than aggression.

You can't say the same of his interviewees. A Muslim in Jerusalem tells him to prepare for the Islamic world empire. A Protestant pastor in Colorado has the charm of the boy next door, until Dawkins asks him about biology. He chases Dawkins out of his church, screaming that he has called his children 'animals'.

A north London rabbi comes back with what I think will be the dominant criticism. Not believing in God because of the evidence for evolution is itself a form of religion, he says. This dunderheaded trope is everywhere. As Ophelia Benson of the Philosophers' Magazine put it: 'Not playing poker does not make me a gambler. Not playing football does not make me an athlete. And not being a theist does not make me a believer. Not believing is not simply a kind of believing - it's not believing.'

Mind you, after Sikh fanatics closed a play in Birmingham and Christian fanatics hounded the families of BBC executives, Channel 4 will probably be grateful if the worst thing to hit it is a philosophical howler.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/sto...1681663,00.html

Ostrich Man · January 9, 2006

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