Sparrow Excrescence

Fish Or Cut Bait

Poor Alan Duff.  He's pretty angry about religion--any religion.  Readers not from New Zealand may not know that Alan Duff is the author of the celebrated book (later a movie) Once Were Warriors.  It exposes the degradation of gang violence in New Zealand.  Alan doesn't like gang violence.  He does not like crime.  He also does not like child illiteracy.  He has spent a good deal of effort trying to encourage children to read.

It turns out that he does not like Jesus Christ, either.  Having announced that he is a devotee of Big Bang evolutionism, aka atheism, and a devoted disciple of Richard Dawkins, he derides the Christ.  He says of a visit to a cathedral in Bayonne:

I can't wait to get out of there as I feel such a hypocrite with thoughts of wondering how on earth Jesus Christ not only got away with his preposterous ideas but that they went on to become one of the great religions of the world.

If someone like Jesus turned up now, declaring himself the son of God, he'd be declared mentally unwell and given help. Except in America where they'd be hostile and the guy would be homeless. In a Muslim country he wouldn't last two minutes.  [NZ Herald]

He also cannot stand alleged hypocrites.

How did white Christian church-goers in America attend church every Sunday and the same - or any other - day dish out corporal punishment to their Negro slaves?  Why is the death penalty in the USA carried out by the most religiously minded states? Why did the Church of England approve capital punishment for children as late as Victorian times?

Alan is a man bristling with morality, condemnation, outrage.  Not that he does not have his heroes and his prophets.
 He tells us that he finds the cool, calm rationality of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens is as balm to his very soul.  He even manages a bit of evangelism on their behalf.

YouTube has ample videos of the non-believer and atheist arguments. Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, both British, are two of the best.  To see either of these guys up against a Muslim or a Christian is a lesson in logic, rationality and calmness versus its complete opposite.You should give it go.

But before he enters the lists to argue for his particular moral system, he owes us a justification or two.  How does he move from a universe which exists exclusively of matter to a world where moral truths, rights and wrongs, have meaning or credible authority?  By what rational foundation or precept does he bridge that gap?  Instead of allowing Alan to presuppose morality and ethics, he needs to explain to us why they have any meaning at all in his blind, impersonal, random, meaningless universe.

So Alan is in a quandary of his own making.  He must choose.  He must either continue to genuflect before the avatars of materialistic atheism as his prophets, priests, and kings and thereby give up on any possibility of ethics, morality, reason, and truth, or he must cling to his moralisms, such as they are, and reject his atheism.

At the moment he is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  His passion is compelling, but only in the way brute, angry force can titillate the inchoate.  Come on, Alan.  You are an educated man. You can't make a grand presumption about the existence of morality and ethics, when your atheistic, materialistic cosmology destroys the very possibility of right and wrong in the first place.

As the Americans say, you must fish or cut bait.  All that frothing about hypocrites and Islamic terrorism and kids that can't read is a nonsense.  They are just what is--the product of blind, impersonal, sub-atomic particles, the random coagulation of quarks and old Higgs's bosuns.  Kids that can't read are neither significant nor insignificant.  They just are.  And their being is random.

According to your atheistic world, they have no more importance or significance or meaning than the excrescent of a sparrow perched a power line, or a jihadi cutting off the head of some random meaningless coagulation of sub-atomic particles.  It's what you believe, isn't it?