Richard Dawkins: Good Scientist, Bad Philosopher

Foxholes are unnecessary. There are no atheists in the dentist’s chair. That’s my theory at least.

After getting four teeth drilled on the other day in Charlotte, I had the only slightly greater pleasure of driving my Novocain-paralyzed face down to Columbia, South Carolina to see the infamous Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist. Dawkins, a British biologist, is part of the controversial neo-atheist movement. Neo-atheism itself is a highly vocal, if not outright shrill, atheist philosophy that seeks to argue, insult, and humiliate believers of all stripes into abandoning their faith—or at least ostracizing and ejecting them out of having any cultural influence. Dawkins’ last book and a key intellectual bulwark of this view, was politely named The God Delusion in honor of anyone moronic enough to have any belief of the divine.

I waited among thousands of students in Columbia with baited breath, for the neo-atheist circus ringleader to shock the crowd with resounding statements of intellectual superiority from his new science-oriented book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I anticipated enough fire and brimstone to replace a Bunsen burner. I was instead stunned to hear a soft-spoken English gentleman request that ministers, priests, and pastors live up to their responsibility as community leaders by educating their flocks about the reality of evolutionary truth.

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A Stimulus Plan for Sunday School

Religious education is in the same shape as Detroit automakers.

Gone are the days when it was a cultural norm that every child would go to confirmation and every adult would dutifully attend Sunday School before church. According to the Barna Group, a pollster of American religious trends, Church attendance has remained fairly steady in the last decade, but Sunday School participation is slowly going the way of the buffalo. Churches have tried all sorts of gimmicks to reverse this trend—bagels, coffee, dancing bears—without much success. Meanwhile, the Barna Group also says only nineteen percent of self-identifying Christians profess belief in historical Christian doctrines, which is at an all-time low.

Forget about atheists. We’re quite capable of sabotaging our own faith, thank you.

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