In Defence of Dawkins

Following on from yesterday's post there was a letter from a local religious nut attacking Dawkins, and Evolution in our local evening paper a couple of years ago at around the time of the furore over the Danish Cartoons. That is an illustration of the point I was making about the fact that opening the door to religious intolerance for one group, means that all the other religious zealots will attempt to barge their way through too. The following is a copy of a letter I sent in reply at the time.

Dear Sir,

Your correspondent Brian Ball criticises Professor Richard Dawkins’ recent TV programme “Religion – The Root of All Evil.”

Mr. Ball accuses Dawkins of quoting selectively he says,

“As you rightly say, in Genesis 22, God tested Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to see how much he loved Him. You may think this is sick for God to do this, yet don' t we test each other, our families and our own friends to see how much they love us? “

Well yes, I do think it is sick, and no I have never tested my family to see how much they loved me. I would think you would need to be a rather strange and insecure person to do so. Is Mr. Ball telling us that God is insecure, that maybe he has done things which might cause His “children” not to love him? Moreover, I would ask your readers whether even were they to test the love of their families would they do so by asking them to kill their children??? I would suggest that anyone capable of making such a request is no fit parent, and needs treatment for their evil and sadistic tendencies. What does this tell us about both this God, and the man he chose as the Father of the Chosen Few. First of all what does it tell us about Abraham? That he was a man prepared to butcher children based on voices he heard in his head. Didn’t Ian Brady and Myra Hyndley do something similar, are they the kind of people Mr. Ball wants to put up to us as examples of how to live a good life? Secondly, what does it tell us about this God. That the kind of people he wanted as his followers were people capable of butchering children!!! Surely, this cannot be the same God of Jesus Christ. And perhaps it is not, for Mr. Ball admits that there is more than one God, he just wants to support one of them rather than any of the others. Given the kind of sadistic tendencies this God demonstrates I think Mr. Ball has chosen badly. Mr. Ball’s statement that God wouldn’t have let Abraham do it is no defence, as the request in itself is an act of evil and perversion. Mr. Ball has a further problem here. He tells us that God did this to test whether Abraham loved him. Why would an omnipotent God need to do that? Being omnipotent he would know whether Abraham loved him or not, and would know whether or not he would do what was asked of him. If he did not know these things then he could not be omnipotent, and if he was not omnipotent then he was not God at all but a fraud.

The same kind of problem arises with Dawkins example of the Pauline doctrine of original sin. According to St.Paul, Jesus dies in order that God could forgive mankind. But an omnipotent God could have forgiven mankind without putting himself/his son through all this torture and pain. He could have simply said, “I forgive you.” As Dawkins points out, for someone to put themselves/their son through such unnecessary pain and suffering is a sign of sadomasochistic tendencies. Does Mr. Ball want us to believe in a God that is a sadomasochist? But, in fact, the doctrine, along with the story of the resurrection, is a construct of St. Paul written several hundred years after the crucifixion. Certainly, in the teachings of the original Disciples there is no mention of the miraculous resurrection, something you would have thought they might have commented upon. The closest Disciple to Jesus was Mary Magdalen, who was probably his wife. The teachings of Mary Magdalen are in stark contrast to those of Paul. But, there again, we know that, in the power struggle, after Jesus’ death, (or more likely his escape along the Silk road to Shrinegar in Kashmir where he is probably buried) the other Disciples and Peter, in particular, tried to push Mary out. They and their followers went so far as to deliberately confuse her with Mary the prostitute in order to blacken her name. Only recently has the Catholic Church admitted to that, and apologised for it.

Mr. Ball continues.

“Richard then goes on to mention the story in Judges 19 - again not telling the whole story. Yes, the Jews did have a custom where they treated their visitors with a lot of respect, and were required to protect them as much as they could. Yet giving his own daughter and his visitors' mistress to the men, who wanted to have sex with the male guest, would not have been condoned by God”

But here it is Mr. Ball who quotes selectively. Last year, I was a bit bored, when on holiday, and began reading the Bible again from the beginning. I noticed, shall we say, a few anomalies and began making some notes. By the time I had got to the end of Exodus I gave up because I had pages and pages of contradictions, of clearly ridiculous statements, let alone examples of the kind of atrocious attitudes given by Dawkins above. In most cases, these actions were carried out by the very people that the Old Testament sets up as supposed examples of how to lead a good life. We have, for example, a number of cases where Abraham (chosen by God for his willingness to slaughter children) palms off his wife to other men as being his sister, in much the same way as the example given by Dawkins above. In fact, these are illustrative, because the writers of the story obviously forgot they had told it once, and then used it again in another setting. In other words, Abraham of whom in Genesis 28:14 God says “….and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be Blessed”, basically acts as a pimp for his wife. Later on, again obviously forgetting what they had written earlier, they describe Sarah as actually being Abraham’s sister, which means that he was living in an incestuous relationship with her. In Genesis 20:1 to 20:8 where Abraham palms off Sarah to the King of Gerar as being his sister, in order to save his own neck, what is God’s response? Does God punish Abraham for this act of wickedness? No he punishes the poor duped king!! A look at the genealogy given of Abraham’s father Terah also gives further evidence of the confusion the writers got themselves into as far as Sarah’s relationship to Abraham.

Or take the laws supposed to have been handed down by God to Moses. Does God see all of his children as equal in these laws? We read in Exodus 21:12,

“He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death.”

However, things were not the same if you happened to be a slave or servant. We read in 21:20

“And if a man beats his male or female servant with a rod, so that he dies under his hand he shall surely be punished (i.e. not put to death).”

Even then,

“Notwithstanding, if he remains alive a day or two he shall not be punished, for he is his property.”

And although we find in 21:32 that a person, whose ox killed someone, could be killed this did not apply if the person killed was a slave. Then the ox owner merely had to compensate the slave owner for loss of property. Why would a fair and compassionate God write such laws that treated slaves and freemen differently? Because these laws like everything else in the Bible were not written by God, they were written by human beings, written hundreds, and in the case of the Old Testament thousands, of years after the events they are supposed to describe. The words it contains are no more the Word of God than the words on the back of a Corn Flakes packet. The Ten Commandments were basically laws to protect the property of the rich.

Why any Christian would want to uphold the barbarous philosophy of the Old Testament is beyond me. Jesus Christ didn’t spend much time doing so, and his philosophy of tolerance and compassion stands in stark contrast to the hatred and intolerance spewed out on virtually every page of the Old Testament. But then as recent studies have shown Christ was almost certainly educated in the teaching of the Buddha during his youth in India, and Christ’s teaching in many parts are almost word for word copies of the teachings of Buddhism, which predates Christianity by 500 years, and a far cry from the barbarism of the Old Testament philosophy.

Finally, Mr. Ball says,

“I felt I needed to send this letter in for one reason - because there are a lot of people out there who don' t know The Bible, and have been totally mislead and misinformed by Richard Dawkins. A backlash, I feel, due to his Evolution Theory being blown out of the water.”

I think that it is because many people have not read the Bible critically that people like Mr. Ball can make the statements they do, quoting from it selectively and avoiding the contradictions and ridiculous statements made on virtually every page of the Old Testament. As for Mr. Ball’s last statement that the Theory of Evolution has been blown out of the water, that can only be described for what it is, an outright lie. The Theory of Evolution is backed by probably the greatest amount of documented evidence of any scientific theory in any sphere. The Creation myth is supported by none, and everything we know about the history of the Earth and the development of life on it shows it to be a ridiculous story, and nothing more. Even the Catholic Church accepts Evolution as the explanation of the development of life on Earth, and to be compatible with Catholic belief. The only people who believe in Creationism are a few ignorant bigots. Even the advocates of Intelligent Design do not try to defend the notion that the Earth was created in 6 days, or that Man was created out of the dust. The only thing Creationists can point to is words in a book written over a very long period of time, by many different people each with their own axe to grind, and interests to further. But of course, there are other people of a similar bent who believe that the words contained in their Holy Books are the words of their one true God, and can hold this belief with equal validity, or lack thereof. Muslims with the Quran, for example. In fact the Moonies could just as legitimately claim that the words of the Reverend Moon are the words of God transmitted to him. It is because each of these different groups of religious fanatics can equally claim that they and only they have the monopoly of truth that Dawkins can rightly point to the evil nature of religion in promoting conflict.

Even the more refined version of Creationism – Intelligent Design – has been shown to be hokum, its proponents little better than snake oil salesmen. In a recent Court case in the US the proponents of ID put forward their arguments, and supposed evidence. On every count evolutionary scientists completely dismantled their arguments and their evidence. The court decided, in crushing terms for the supporters of ID, that it was not scientific, that its propositions did not hold water, and that it was religion not science.

Without the theory of evolution we would have no chance of fighting such things as the threat of Bird Flu, a virus which, like all forms of life, evolves and changes to best suit its environment, as the theory of Evolution predicts. Or does Mr. Ball want to tell us that the Bird Flu virus, which might kill hundreds of thousands of innocent children, is a new creature created by God that he is sending to cause yet more death and destruction to sinners and innocents alike? Like all scientific theories Evolution is open to question and development. That is the difference between science and religion. Science is inherently democratic, it encourages dissent, questioning and thereby development and greater knowledge. Religion is totalitarian. It tells people what to think, what to believe, and allows no questioning, no development, no possibility of greater knowledge. In a world where greater knowledge and understanding is vital for human survival, where the ability to question ideas needs to be welcomed, rather than insistence on a given truth, which leads to conflicts with others beliefs, then Dawkins is right religion is the root of evil.