Atheists Make Lousy Atheists

Dawkins's Atheist Hat Blows Off

Now here is a real hoot. Richard Dawkins has produced a splenetic outburst in the Washington Post against the invitation by the Roman Catholic Church to high church Anglicans to rejoin with the Roman denomination.

It seems that Richie Rich is offended by the alleged authoritarianism of the Roman Catholic denomination. (Now recall that this is coming from a gentleman who has called for removing children forcibly from the homes of religious parents!) His indictment of the Roman Catholic Church contains the following accusations delivered in high dudgeon:

What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world? In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders. The Anglican church has at least a few shreds of decency, traces of kindness and humanity with which Jesus himself might have connected, however tenuously: a generosity of spirit, of respect for women, and of Christ-like compassion for the less fortunate. The Anglican church does not cleave to the dotty idea that a priest, by blessing bread and wine, can transform it literally into a cannibal feast; nor to the nastier idea that possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite. It does not send its missionaries out to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans, about the alleged ineffectiveness of condoms in protecting against HIV. Whether one agrees with him or not, there is a saintly quality in the Archbishop of Canterbury, a benignity of countenance, a well-meaning sincerity. How does Pope Ratzinger measure up? The comparison is almost embarrassing.

What is amusing in this little tirade is the revelation of the Dawkins moral compass. It seems that true morality and high ethics roughly corresponds to effete, learned, upper-class , respectable English morality. Gentlemanly behaviour (as exhibited by the Anglican leader, Archbishop Rowan is laudable, he tells us. Pro-homosexuality and feminism advocated by Rowan represent "decency" and "kindness" and the kind of thing that Jesus of Nazareth might have supported.

What an complete hypocrite! The only deserving response to Dawkins's outrage is to call it for what it is: humbug, and pretentious humbug at that. Like all the militant materialistic evolutionist atheists, Dawkins dons his atheism garb when it pleases him, and dumps it when it does not. Until he proves that he is a real, consistent, and serious atheist, he has no street cred at all.

OK, so let's put on Dawkins's atheist tweed hat for a moment. Whatever a man believes, whatever values he espouses, whatever religion or ideology he professes must be the product of a cluster of molecules upon which brute chance has acted. Under Dawkins's hat, there is nothing else. Therefore, every view and belief is equally valid, which is to say that none are valid in the sense of being truthful or meaningful or rational, or sensible, or just, or right. Views just are, in the same way that the sun and the moon just are. Anti-homosexuality is equally valid as pro-homosexuality, under Dawkins' atheist hat. Both alike are equally and totally the product of stochasticity acting upon matter. To adopt one particular ethical, social, or moral stance, and criticise the opposite if it were not equally valid or just as authentic or equally authoritative is empty and vainglorious cant. Worse, it is hypocritical and deceitful and disingenuous.

But when it comes to the cluster of beliefs which Dawkins regards as part of advanced evolved civilisation (which strangely seems to co-incide with what is currently fashionable in elite British academia) suddenly Richie Rich wants to take off his hat and propound, declaim, and protest at the non-conformers as if there were moral and ethical meta-absolutes in the world.

At the height of the British Empire a cynic remarked that within the realms of that Empire, whatever else God might be, it was generally agreed that He looked and acted and thought remarkably like an Englishman. Which was to allege, of course, that Victorian Christianity was deeply and profoundly synthesised with humanistic idolatry.

The same saw holds for our esteemed professor of biology. Wherever the works of true atheism are found in the world, they seem to look remarkably like a left-wing, liberal, modernist, upper-class Englishman. Which is to say, of course, that the atheism of Richard Dawkins is a disingenuous crock. He either must either eschew the meta-validity of his liberal socio-political lexicon and stop criticising contrary beliefs, or his atheism is a self-deception. We vote for the latter.

Your move, old chap.

HatTip: Lucia Maria