Ours is the civilization that built the modern world. 

We built it, and, if we do not maintain it, and defend it, then, as Donald Trump says, it will never come again.

So Mark Steyn writes.

President Trump’s speech in Warsaw was a remarkable statement from a western leader in the 21st century – which is why the enforcers of our public discourse have gone bananas over it and denounced it as “blood and soil” “nativism” (The New Republic), “racial and religious paranoia” (The Atlantic), and “tinpot dictator sh*t” (some comedian having a meltdown on Twitter). … This was the offending passage:

There is nothing like our community of nations. The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.

We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.

And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

I’m not certain we do put “faith and family” ahead of “government and bureaucracy”, …

And we atheists, of course, do not think that “faith” is a positive good …

… not in Germany or even Ireland, but we did once upon a time. Nor am I sure we still “write symphonies”, or at any rate good ones. But Trump’s right: “The world has never known anything like our community of nations” – and great symphonies are a part of that. I’m not sure what’s “nativist” or “racial” about such a statement of the obvious, but I note it’s confirmed by the traffic, which is all one way: There are plenty of Somalis who’ve moved to Minnesota, but you can count on one hand Minnesotans who’ve moved to Somalia.

As an old-school imperialist …

For which we praise Mr. Steyn  …

…  I make exceptions for sundry places from Barbados to Singapore, which I regard as part of the community of the greater west, and for India, which is somewhat more ambiguously so, but let’s face it, 90 per cent of everything in the country that works derives from England.

But otherwise Trump’s statement that “the world has never known anything like our community of nations” ought to be unexceptional. It’s certainly more robust than Theresa May’s and David Cameron’s vague appeals to “our values” or “our way of life”, which can never quite be spelled out – shopping, telly, pop songs, a bit of Shakespeare if you have to mention a dead bloke, whatever… For his part, The Atlantic‘s Peter Beinart preferred the way Trump’s predecessor expressed it:

To grasp how different that rhetoric was from Trump’s, look at how the last Republican President, George W. Bush, spoke when he visited Poland. In his first presidential visit, in 2001, Bush never referred to “the West”.  He did tell Poles that “We share a civilization”.  But in the next sentence he insisted that “Its values are universal”. 

I wish that were true. It would be easier if it were. But it’s not. These values are not “universal”: They arise from a relatively narrow political and cultural tradition, and insofar as they took root elsewhere across the globe it was as part of (stand well back, Peter Beinart!) the west’s – gulp – “civilizing mission”.

Alas, left to fend for themselves, those supposedly universal values have minimal purchase on millions upon millions of people around the planet – including those who live in the heart of the west.

Yes. Millions of the children of the capitalist West, endowed with liberty, prosperity, tolerance, security, opportunity, good health, education, entertainment, luxury, hate the civilization that nurtures them, rebel against it, and call for its destruction. In Europe and America they are gathering in their tens and even hundreds of thousands to riot. They are smashing, burning, maiming, killing.  

They call the countries that allow them to do this in the name of freedom and tolerance, “fascist” and “oppressive”.

Equipped with their iPhones, which only Western freedom, capitalism and prosperity could have given them, they try to pull the house they live in down upon their heads.

And behind them, safe in their castles, mysteriously untouched by the law, are deeply evil people who pay the thugs who lead them:

Mark Steyn continues:

Bush’s bromide is easier to swallow because it’s a delusion – as we should surely know by now, after a decade and a half of encouraging Pushtun warlords to adopt Take Your Child Bride To Work Day. In contrast to Bush’s happy talk, Trump concluded his laundry list of western achievement on a sobering note:

What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. So we cannot fail.

That, I think, is also true. Were a catastrophe to befall our world – an EMP strike or a widespread nuclear exchange, a sudden devastating virus or a zombie apocalypse – we could not rebuild the modern world in anything like the time-frame in which we originally constructed it. The technological reason is obvious: The industrial revolution was powered by comparatively easily extractable coal and oil. We extracted it and used it to develop the skills to get at the less easily extractable stuff. A global calamity would put us back to Square One, but with resources we could only reach at Square Twelve. That goes for more basic human resources, too: We have lost a lot of the skills of our ancestors, because we assumed they were no longer required. And in a less quantifiable way it applies to artistic achievement, too. So, in a fairly routine stop on a foreign tour, Trump has introduced a rather profound warning:

What we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again.

It will never come again. Is there a “racial and religious paranoia” to this? Even the Globalist Kingpin himself, Klaus Schwab, founder of Davos, sees it as basic demographic arithmetic:

“Look how many countries in Africa, for example, depend on the income from oil exports,” Schwab said in an interview ahead of the WEF’s 46th annual meeting, in the Swiss resort of Davos. “Now imagine one billion inhabitants, imagine they all move north.”

As I commented at the time:

A billion man march, eh? The population of the developed world – North America, the European Union, Japan, Oz, NZ – is about a billion. Of the remaining six billion people around the planet, is it really so absurd to think that one-sixth of them would “move north” if they could? Or if they chanced to see a YouTube video of “refugees” in Sweden and Germany demonstrating how easy it is?

The population of Africa is projected to grow from one to four billion in the course of this century – to about two-fifths of the planet’s people. Is it remotely likely that 40 per cent of humanity will choose to stay in the most dysfunctional continent on earth when it can’t support a population a quarter that size?

And if a billion people move to the west what chance those “universal values”? Even the crappy Cameronian ones like lousy pop concerts, which in Sweden are already being canceled and boycotted because of the, um, lively interaction between vibrantly diverse non-universal values. As Trump continued:

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will. Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.

Indeed. In Sweden, the most “enlightened” and “progressive” social democracy on earth, under a self-proclaimed “feminist government”, cannot muster the will to defend the right of its women to enjoy an evening of music in the park unmolested. It’s a small pleasure, but illustrative, as Trump grasped, of an existential question:

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it? …

Our own fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield — it begins with our minds, our wills, and our souls. Today, the ties that unite our civilization are no less vital, and demand no less defense, than that bare shred of land on which the hope of Poland once totally rested. Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture, and memory. …

I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail. Our people will thrive. And our civilization will triumph

As I said, a remarkable speech. …

I am nowhere near as confident of that answer. But he raised the question at a time when no other western leader will. It is a measure of our decay and decadence that the question is necessary, but in an age of cultural relativism a statement of the obvious is daring and courageous: Ours is the civilization that built the modern world – as even the west’s cultural relativists implicitly accept, if only because they have no desire to emigrate and try to make a living as a cultural relativist in Yemen or Niger. We built it, and, if we do not maintain it, and defend it, then, as Donald Trump says, it will never come again.

It will never come again.

Today we posted this on our Facebook page:

A message to Republicans:

We know there are thousands, and we plausibly guess there are tens of thousands, and we conjecture not unreasonably that there may be millions of atheists and secularists who would vote Republican if Christian conservatism did not exert the degree of influence on Republican policy that it does now. Many atheists have voted Democratic not because they like Obama and Pelosi and Reid and Holder and their horrible Leftist, redistributionist, and unpatriotic policies, but because they are repelled by the voices of the religious sounding so loud and often on the Right. By paying less attention to those voices, and keeping religion out of policy-making, you would not lose the votes of many Christians. They’re not likely to go over en masse to the Left. But you would gain a considerable number of new voters. Please take this message, which we advance very seriously, into consideration.

Please help us get our message to Republicans.

It just may make some difference.

Or not?

Would the Republicans ever risk losing the votes of the religious Right? Do they think of it as their base? Would they ever consider ignoring it, let alone abandoning it?

What do our readers think?

Here’s one of the most important reasons why The Atheist Conservative needs to exist. Why what we have to say is important. Why we must make ourselves heard.

From Fox News comes this story of an atheist of the left. In everything except his atheism, he couldn’t be more wrong.

If you sign up for Denver college professor Charles Angeletti’s American Civilization class, be forewarned that you’re going to have to recite his invective-filled “New Pledge” – and according to some of his students, also be ready to swallow a big helping of his politics.

Angeletti, who teaches at Metropolitan State University of Denver, has students learn an anti-American spoof of the Pledge of Allegiance that denounces the U.S. as a Republican-controlled bastion of injustice, all while spewing his own far-left brand of politics, according to current and former students.

The professor hands out this “pledge” on a flier to his students and demands that they repeat it.

I pledge allegiance to and wrap myself in the flag of the United States Against Anything Un-American. And to the Republicans for which it stands, two nations, under Jesus, rich against poor, with curtailed liberty and justice for all except blacks, homosexuals, women who want abortions, Communists, welfare queens, treehuggers, feminazis, illegal immigrants, children of illegal immigrants, and you, if you don’t watch your step.

The anti-U.S. recitation, first reported by higher education blog Campus Reform, was a satirical pledge aimed at getting students to question their nation’s leadership, Angeletti said. The self-proclaimed atheist and socialist told the site that he has been distributing the pledge in his classes for nearly 20 years as part of his lesson plan.

“We’re very racist, we’re very repressive, we’re very Christian oriented, we don’t tolerate other kinds of thinking in this country,” Angeletti told Campus Reform. “I could go on and on – and do, in my classes, for hours about things that we need to do to make this a better country.”

Could anything be further from the truth?

Consider that a majority of voters twice elected a black man (though he was completely unqualified for high office) to the presidency, many of them just to prove they were not racist. But see how America has again become over race-conscious as a result. President Obama and his attorney-general Eric Holder  are race-hustlers, working with others of their kidney; most prominently Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Malik Zulu Shabazz (head of the New Black Panther Party). Racism is now mostly expressed by black politicians, black trade union bosses,  black politicians  and “community organizers”.

The  voices calling loudly for repression in the US are those of politically-correct lefties.

We too dislike Christianity, and we exist to prove that one can be conservative, a defender of the Constitution, a free marketeer, an advocate for states’ rights, and a patriot without believing in the supernatural, or bible literalism, or creationism, or that “Jesus” is a god or a part of a god, or in that rump of a godthing they call “intelligent design”. Our existence alone disproves his caricature of conservative thought.

And equally that one can be an atheist without being – yes – “Communists, welfare queens, treehuggers, feminazis”;  or politically-correct progressives, Alinskyite community organizers, whitewashers of Islam, collectivists, redistributionists and America-hating racists.  

As for “not tolerating other kinds of thinking”, the US is the one country in the world which really does protect freedom of speech. The Left of course would change that if it could.

Academia is dominated by lefties like this professor, and – what is more and worse – his comrades are at present occupying the commanding heights of power.

 A student from Angeletti’s class told Campus Reform that the flier was handed out to the entire class and all students were required to recite it.

“This was an attempt to propagandize an entire classroom of young adults,” Steven Farr, a freshman majoring in meteorology, told the blog site.

Officials at Metropolitan State University of Denver did not immediately return requests for comment. The 24,000-student school has the second-highest undergraduate enrollment in the state and has several notable Division II sports programs. It also bills itself as a top choice for active-duty military and veterans to pursue higher education, and has several notable Division II sports programs.

We wonder what the active-duty soldiers and the vets think of Professor Charles Angeletti’s ravings.

Ah! – Fox tells us:

“This is typical elite, progressive, post-modernist garbage,” said Pete Hegseth, a Fox News contributor and CEO of Concerned Veterans for America. “I hope and believe that vets in his class will challenge this professor. We have seen this time and time again. Lessons like this stack the deck against veterans and basically tell them, you fought for nothing,” Hegseth added. “You fought for a lie.”

(Hat-tip to our Facebook reader and commenter, Joe Compton. He rightly believes that to counter the lies of ill-informed, malicious, anti-America atheists like this, is why The Atheist Conservative exists.)

… but they fear to confess their atheism.

This is from the State Journal-Register:

Many lawmakers feel a sense of pride when asked to give the invocation to open a House session, but state Rep. Juan Mendez of Arizona was gripped by a different emotion.

“I came in with a little bit of fear — not wanting to let myself be known,” said Mendez, a freshman Democrat from Tempe.

“Known,” that is, as an atheist.

Even as Americans become less religious and their tolerance for atheism is growing, there are still very few politicians who are openly nonreligious. They have to walk the thin line between their personal feelings and public image.

“There is such a stigma attached to being a nonbeliever,” said Lauren Youngblood, spokeswoman for the Secular Coalition for America.

This despite the fact that the fastest-growing religious group in the U.S. from 2007 to 2012 was religiously unaffiliated — or “nones” — according to a 2012 Pew Research report. It said the percentage of religiously unaffiliated U.S. adults grew from 15.3 to 19.6 percent in that time.

Nonreligious includes everything from atheists and agnostics to people who simply do not affiliate with any particular religion. But Pew said atheists and agnostics made up 5.7 percent of the adult population in 2012, accounting for about 13 million people.

But there is only one member of Congress who has gone on record as nonreligious: Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., was the only one to answer “none” when a 2013 Pew Research poll asked members of Congress about their religion. …

“When she first got elected, everybody in our movement was very enthusiastic,” said Bishop McNeill, coordinator for a new secular political action committee. “But unfortunately … she has gotten some advice to stray away from that label.”

Bishop is Mr McNeill’s first name, not his title. Unsuitable for a secularist, of course, but we rather relish the irony.

Experts say such reticence is understandable given the often-negative perception of atheists in this country and the long history of religion and politics….

Ever since George Washington talked in his first inaugural address about “fervent supplication to that almighty being,” …  presidents and other politicians have felt inclined to talk about religious faith.

Even though the Constitution bans a religious test for elected office, … a de facto test is whether or not a candidate openly speaks to his or her beliefs.

It’s only fair that candidates share their religious beliefs [opined Brent Walker, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty], so voters can know where politicians stand morally. …

– Which is just the sort of statement that gives believers away as  non-thinkers. Why would knowing someone’s religion tell you what their morals are? A religious person is far more likely to be intolerant than a secularist, just to start with.

In 2007, then-Rep. Fortney “Pete” Stark, D-Calif., became the first member of Congress to declare his atheism. …

Stark won two more elections as an atheist, but was beat in a 2012 primary race … 

Youngblood claims that 32 members of the current Congress have told her or others in the Secular Coalition for America that they are atheist but cannot admit it for fear of political backlash. …[She] said the coalition is encouraging atheists [in politics] to “come out” — much as gays and lesbians did in the past. …

Chances for non-believing politicians are better [than they were] — but still not good.

A 2012 Gallup poll found that 54 percent of voters would vote for an atheist in a presidential election, well above the 18 percent who said in 1958 that they would vote for an atheist.

But the same 2012 Gallup poll said 95 percent would vote for a woman, 94 percent for a Catholic, 80 percent for a Mormon and 68 would vote for [a] homosexual. Atheist was the least-popular option.

[Rep. Juan] Mendez said he does not shy away from the word atheist — but he did not want to be labeled the atheist lawmaker, either.

When [Mendez] was called to offer the prayer in May, he first tried to get a secular lobbying group to give the invocation in his place, but that fell through. So he gave an invocation that started by asking all present at the Arizona House of Representatives not to bow their heads, but to look around at the others in the room.

“Let us cherish and celebrate our shared humanness,” Mendez said, “our shared ability for reason and compassion, our shared love for the people of our state, for our constitution and for our democracy.” 

The next day, Arizona state Rep. Steve Smith, a Republican, asked House members to join him in prayer for “repentance of yesterday”.

A Republican did that. A Republican believer. There hisses intolerance!

But Mendez said that was the only thing “that made it feel like I was doing something that I wasn’t supposed to be doing”. Otherwise, he said, he got positive emails and phone calls, and was stopped on the street by people thanking him for his prayer and message.

No prayer. Message only.

But we need atheist conservatives in Congress. And that may not happen for a long time yet, we reckon.

(Hat-tip our Facebook commenter, Pat Sisson-Kelley)

One of our readers, Nietrick, has raised a very important question: who are acceptable political fellow travelers ? The US has a two party system, so if power to make law is desired, we are left with a choice between the GOP and the Democratic Party.   I would guess that many atheists are Democrat, because they associate Republicans, or conservatives generally,  with the religious.  And statistically they would be right. But they must also have an ideological leaning towards collectivism, and an anti-free-market, authoritarian government. (Perhaps the bias is inspired by the wish to squash religion.)  For an atheist to consider himself a Republican, the free-market, individual freedom and  small (federal) government principles must be of paramount importance. If the religious vote Republican because they want government either to legislate religious values, or because it is more likely to support values that are traditionally in line with religious beliefs (heterosexual marriage, pro-life, creationism), does the GOP become a hostile place for a rational, free-market atheist?  No.  Leaving out the extreme religious agenda (establishing a state upon a constitution based on fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible),  political policies attached to marriage and abortion should be decided at the State level. The GOP has been a strong supporter of States’ rights precisely because it allows local majorities to decide social issues – and therefore allows for the most self-determination, and diversity. Should Kansas decide to demand creationism be taught in schools, foolish as it is, it has only local effect, and individuals are still free to work around it. Meanwhile, other states will ban creationism from science class to another forum, or altogether. Given the need for qualified scientists, I believe that the creationist jurisdictions will fade away.  Indeed,  I believe that the free market permits the free market of ideas, and backward leaning ideas will be crowded out as they always eventually have been, by innovation and progress, which occur only under free-market and individual liberty systems. For these reasons, I believe that for atheists who want rationality to flourish and individuals to arrange their lives as they will (within the law),  the GOP is the right choice, although there are more atheists on the other side. I would also add that the left desires a uniformity of opinion, which we are seeing propagandized nationwide in schools, whereas the right likes  genuine diversity of ideas.

C. Gee  September 2009

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Houghton Mifflin,  Boston and New York, 2006, 406 pages

Richard Dawkins is an inspired and inspiring exponent of Darwinism. His books on evolution are rigorous and entertaining, and the frequent leftist political jabs that crop up in them, though irritating, can be overlooked as they are irrelevant to his subject and will soon become outdated in any case. Sadly, in The God Delusion, Dawkins’ leftism is more than an irritant, it trivializes the debate. He states that the purpose of the book is to ‘raise consciousness” – the arrogant phrase of the feminists. With its unworthy aim and silly model the book amounts to little more than a replacement of God and religion by the politically correct desiderata of the leftist professoriate.

This is far from Dawkins at his best. Not surprisingly, the most interesting points he makes are concerned with evolution. He contributes a Darwinian idea to the discussion of why religious belief is ubiquitous. Mankind’s impulse to religion may be explained, he suggests, in Darwinian terms as a by-product of a trait naturally selected for survival. Simply stated, faith (gullibility) is a by-product of the child’s unquestioning obedience to parental authority. “Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal leaders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival.” The by-product idea is also used by evolutionary psychologists to explain why mankind has a natural tendency to impute agency to natural phenomena (decision-making short cuts). Similarly, religious mania is a by-product of the “genetically useful tendency” to “fall in love”. Finally, he floats an interesting conjecture that consoling gods evolve from childish imaginary friends by a sort of psychological “paedomorphosis” (a retention into adulthood of childhood characteristics ). On this theory, “religions could have evolved originally by gradual postponement, over generations, of the moment in life when children gave up their [imaginary friends] – just as we slowed down, during evolution, the flattening of our foreheads and the protrusion of our jaws.’

Yet it is precisely his scientific habit of mind that leads Dawkins most widely astray. He posits the existence of a creator God as a scientific hypothesis that, as such, needs to be tested. Then by using probability he brings us to the conclusion that almost for sure there is no such thing. I do not think that treating belief in God as a scientific hypothesis actually makes the arguments against it more persuasive.

In the first place, and while accepting the impossibility in logic of proving a negative, it is possible for one to arrive at the conclusion by reason alone (what else?) that the God idea is a bad one, an irrational fantasy, an error, and that God exists nowhere outside the minds of the deluded. Secondly, it panders to the feeble argument that scientists should keep ‘an open mind’ to the supernatural. Finally, if one agrees with Popper that a theory is scientific if it is falsifiable, the God hypothesis can only be treated as a scientific idea if it is capable of being falsified. Proving probability almost to certainty does not do it. However narrow the probability of God, even a teeny tiny ‘short of zero’ space provides enough real estate for God and his angels to dance on.

Dawkins sets up a spectrum of belief in the probabilities for God’s existence, ranging believers from‘1. Strong theist. 100% probability of God, through 4.Exactly 50%. Completely impartial agnostic, to 6. Very low probability, but short of zero, de facto atheists to 7. Strong atheist. “I know there is no God…’’ Dawkins puts himself at number 6, a de facto atheist, tending to 7. Why not squarely in 7? Because, he iterates, “reason alone could not propel one to total conviction that anything definitely does not exist”. As a convinced level 7 atheist, I am as annoyed by this prevarication as Dawkins is by believers.

The refutation by probability is Dawkins’s own. (He proudly quotes Dan Dennett’s description of it as “unrebuttable”.) It is the same idea he used in his impressive book Climbing Mount Improbable: that natural selection, for which he uses the metaphor of a “crane”, can accomplish complexity more probably than can a creator God, for which he uses the metaphor of a “skyhook”. The complexity of a creator God would itself, he points out, demand explanation. Elegantly described as it is, I fail to see how this is the magic formulation to confound believers. Why should a believer concede either God’s complexity, or that, even if it’s granted, it must have come about by a ‘crane’ – a Darwinian process in another, pre-existing universe? If push comes to shove, the believer can set up infinite regressions of God – God’s god, God’s god’s god – and call them all God. “Turtles all the way.” God can be the cause of the Big Bang, the Big Crunch, this universe, the “multiverse”. Wherever the frontier of knowledge is, there can he locate God.

Having reduced God’s existence almost to nothing, Dawkins turns to the question of where we get morals from if not from God. I agree that we do not get them from God. But I find little merit in his arguments.

He argues that Scripture is certainly not a source of morality, and that, as a matter of fact, we do not get our morality from it. Like others among recently published atheists (Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris), Dawkins has a grand old time showing, in the words of Randolph Churchill which he quotes, that “the God of the Old Testament is a shit”. The trouble is, as his bibliography reveals, he has found out almost nothing about the history of religions. The Abraham myth, for example, is not about an evil father prepared to murder his own son, but about God’s forbidding the sacrifice. It is the founding myth of the Hebrew faith. Its rejection of human sacrifice was a giant moral leap forward for mankind.

Not only does Dawkins display his ignorance of religious and cultural history, he relies on highly dubious sources for his argument against the morality of the Old Testament. The chief authority he cites is one John Hartung, a fellow Leftist and follower of Noam Chomsky, and one of the numerous anti-Zionists who believe that the Jewish state is ‘racist’. His schtick is to show that Judaism itself, and the immorality of the blood-thirsty ancient Israelites as demonstrated in the Old Testament, prefigure the blood-thirsty modern Israelites and their treatment of Arabs in their ‘apartheid’ theocracy. A perfect give-away of Hartung’s view appears in the original essay (which Dawkins regards as ‘entertaining’) where he refers to ancient Israelites at war in ‘Canaan-cum-Palestine’! Hartung also believes, against all the evidence, that Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty. For Hartung, Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish people are not to be credited with anything good. Even the ‘golden rule’ expressed as ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’‘ (Leviticus 19.18) is not so moral according to Hartung, because it applies only to Jewish neighbours. Hartung here relies on a line of interpretation favoured by Maimonides, but as a matter of exegetical fact, other lines of interpretation by Jewish commentators have maintained that by ‘neighbor’ is meant a non-Jew. In any case, a later verse of Leviticus (19.33) repeats the command to love a ‘stranger’ (specifically a non-Jew) as thyself. Furthermore, a commandment by the Jewish God to the Jews to ‘love’ – that is, to act righteously towards – their fellows-in-covenant is not by implication an immoral commandment simply because it excludes – if it does – those not bound by the same rules and responsibilities. Patriotism is, after all, ‘in-group’ favoritism everywhere. It is only to the politically correct of this strange era in which established norms are inverted by the politically correct such as Dawkins and Hartung, that patriotism is now a sin. They and their like-thinkers form an in-group of their own. They manifestly extend little love, or righteous dealing, to those who are outside it.

Most irritatingly, Dawkins also drags in Hartung’s reference to an experiment conducted by an Israeli professor, George Tamarin, on Israeli school children between the ages of eight and fourteen. Presented with an account of Joshua at Jericho, they were asked whether Joshua ‘acted rightly or not’ to destroy Jericho and kill all the people and animals therein. The choice of answer was A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results showed that 66 per cent chose A, 26 per cent chose C and 8 per cent chose B. Writes Dawkins: ‘the justification for the genocidal massacre by Joshua is religious in every case. Presumably, the savage views they expressed were those of their parents, or the cultural group in which they were brought up. It is not unlikely [!] that Palestinian children, brought up in the same war-torn country, would offer equivalent opinions in the opposite direction.’ These experiments prove nothing more than that Israeli children are capable of an historical reading of what they all recognize as a story from the Old Testament. They were asked whether Joshua behaved rightly. Behaving ‘rightly’ within the context of a bible story means obedience to God’s command. Historically, extermination was the way of war, assimilation was wrong, other religions were impure. It says nothing about the Israeli children’s moral views, only their religious knowledge. Once taken out of the sphere of religous knowledge, the same text set in China with a Chinese general in place of Joshua, produces the right moral answer from Israeli schoolchildren – disapproval. And while Professor Tamarin is busy proving how ‘savage’ Israeli children know their bible stories, those Palestinian children are very likely, in fact certainly, every day on Hamas children’s TV, being taught moral lessons to strive for the genocide of the Jews by becoming suicide ‘martyrs’. Biblical literalism is not the basis of Israel’s legal system. On the other hand, Koranic literalism is the basis for Sharia. This obsessive need to indict Israel on every possible count, with half-truths and lies, and by applying to it standards never applied to any other nation, is part of the sickness and derangement of the Left.

Hartung states that the Bible is “a blueprint”’ of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. Yet, he says, the real evil of the Bible is that it’s “sold as a foundation for morality … as a guide to how people should live their lives”. So it’s the false advertising that really bothers him? Perhaps a health warning should be printed on its cover saying something along these lines: “Some of the cultural practices herein are not suitable for modern life and may, if carried out, subject the perpetrator to criminal or civil liability. With respect to genocide and enslavement, it may be advisable to attempt these in Sudan. Jehovah is not a suitable role model for American citizens. Circumcision, while proven to be beneficial in the prevention of the spread of AIDS and cervical cancer, is now widely regarded as child abuse”.

Literalist readings of the Bible, caricatures of Jehovah, and fundamentalist trumpetings, while providing good laughs (indulged in by Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and all atheists everywhere) do not establish the immorality of Scripture. Leaving aside the tedious exegeses by contemporary believers who tease out the most progressive ethics from its pages, if the Bible is read as a set of historical documents, and as an “in-group” ’ survival “blueprint”, it cannot be said to be immoral.

Dawkins extends his criticism of religion-based morality by suggesting that the fundamentalists of all faiths perform their immoral acts with a strong belief in their righteousness; and that being the case, it is not the religious who are immoral, but the religion, or religion itself. Religion as such sets up the exclusivity of the ‘in-group’, which Dawkins regards as an evil idea. That to him is what is really immoral about religion. And what is moral, therefore, in his view, is the break-down of in-groups by humanism, universalism, and a creed of universal ‘human rights’. Further, and taking the piety to ridiculous lengths, humans should not form an ‘in-group’ that excludes animals. This fashionable vapidity is Dawkins’s morality without God. And what is the source of this morality of his? Astonishingly, and disappointingly, he conjures up a djinn – the “Zeitgeist”.

This djinn, which we are told is a fact, is the gradual moral progress of “civilized” people away from “genocidal racism, xenophobia, oppression of women and minorities, homophobia, and cruelty to animals”. So, it’s a pink djinn!

Where is the Zeitgeist headed? To a “post speciesist condition in which humane treatment is meted out to all species that have the brain-power to appreciate it, a natural extension of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women”. How will the Zeitgeist spread from the civilized world to the barbaric world (so much larger )? Through conversation, editorials, radio chat shows, the Internet. (Not by a foreign policy of spreading Western values). “Most of us in the twenty-first century are bunched together and way ahead of our counterparts in the Middle Ages or in the time of Abraham”. Who is “us”? Dawkins and his friends in the ultimate in-group, leftist academia, the echo chamber of the great and the good.

He does concede that the progress of the Zeitgeist will not be smooth. “There will be local and temporary setbacks such as the United States is suffering from its government in the early 2000s.” Local and temporary setbacks, such as George W. Bush? Not Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, none of the Arabian despots, not the ayatollahs, not Ahmadinejad, none of the African tyrants, not communism, national socialism, or Islamofascism, but Dubya? “But over the longer timescale, the progressive trend is unmistakable and will continue.” Ah, this is fine cocktail-party sentiment, ever so sweetly optimistic.

However, whether he recognizes it or not – and it seems he does not – the Western “progressive” class to which Dawkins belongs is under severe threat, both from within and without. Democracy is dying with the populations that created them. Demographically and ideologically, Europe is giving way to Islam. What will happen to the Universal Court of Rights for Humans and Smart Animals when the Caliphate is reestablished?

What gives rise to the Zeitgeist? The onus, says Dawkins (echoing God-believers when asked how God came into existence) is not on him to answer. He does, however, believe that mankind has an innate morality not derived from religion. How is this innate morality shown? Dawkins cites certain scientific experiments to show that most people, even remote tribal cultures, will agree on moral outcomes when given hypothetical moral dilemmas. For example most people will choose the death of one person in certain circumstances to save five. But whatever one may think of these experiments – and whether they are about morality at all and not an assumed utilitarianism (or ‘consequentialism’), they no more establish innate goodness than other experiments show innate badness. For example, the famous Milgram experiment, replicated in various forms in many places where the Zeitgeist blows, demonstrated that most people will inflict pain and even death on another person when obeying (non-divine) authority. A certainty of innate morality is a very difficult concept to extract from any aspect of culture, including religion, since cultures are made of ‘in-group’ rules. Interestingly, the ‘civilized’ people of the Zeitgeist correlate closely with Judeo-Christian nations and cultures, the ones which have separated church and state, the former colonialists, the technological and scientific innovators, the citizens of democracies – the ones which are now losing faith the fastest. An intellectual history of tolerance and its manifestation in cultural institutions, including religious institutions, would provide a better explanation for the moral progress that Dawkins ascribes to the ‘Zeitgeist’.

With or without the djinn, why does Dawkins elevate compassion, a private decency, to the supreme progressive moral principle? Why not, say, justice (which is, by the way, the supreme moral principle of Judaism)? I suspect because he is so deep in the multiculturalist fog of the Left; the fog that blurs distinctions, moral or otherwise. The fog that invariably equates American Christian fundamentalists with the Taliban; that distorts the push and pull of First Amendment jurisprudence played out in the courts of a secular nation into a threat of an impending theocracy; that believes terrorists are “today’s equivalent of Salem’s witches and McCarthy’s Commies”. It even clouds Dawkins’ scientific judgment: he brings in Sam Harris’s nonsensical city crime statistics as proof of the American religious right’s immorality. Having correlated Republicans with religious conservatives, he looks at the crime rates of cities and finds that of ‘the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of crime, 62 per cent are in “blue” [Democrat] states, and 38 per cent are in “red” [Republican] states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities in the US, 76 per cent are in red states and 24 per cent are in blue states.’ Perhaps Dawkins is not aware of the fact that cities themselves are political jurisdictions, so one would have to count up the number of Republican and Democratic elected representatives at the city, county, state, federal and Presidential levels to establish whether the city is (majority) Republican or Democrat. If one were to do so, the picture may well emerge that most inner-cities, where most of the crime within a state is committed, are Democrat, irrespective of where the state stands politically (but again, what determines a state’s color? Presidential elections? State Governor elections?) The only way of knowing whether most felons are Christian Republicans is to ask prisoners their religion and how they vote. I would confidently wager that most are not Republicans, considering that the Democratic party is keen to enfranchise felons.

Dawkins is a good exponent of evolutionary theory, though a poor and apparently ill-informed political thinker. As a scientist he has earned his scorn for religious dogma. Scientific knowledge has displaced God as an explanation for natural phenomena and dilutes the hold of formal religion. But we might ask of this Darwinist: if belief in the supernatural is natural, if our brains have evolved to favor irrational belief, as you say they have, can the “impulse to religion” be eradicated? Will not our evolved gullibility always find other irrationalities to latch onto? Evolutionary theory seems to be telling us that as a species we are inclined to blind faith and will make religions, cults, gods, prophets, messiahs and other infallible authorities out of whatever material is to hand – global warming, for instance. Or will further evolution wholly correct the religifying predisposition? And are there not also natural selection pressures that favor an “impulse to skepticism” – for after all many of us have it? Is it rational of us to look forward to an age in which irrational belief no longer bears significantly on human action? Is evolution going the way we atheists would wish it to?

I fear not. The most atheist of the world’s populations (Europe, Japan, Russia) are not reproducing themselves. Rather than raising atheists’ consciousness, Dawkins should be telling us to “go forth and multiply”.

C. Gee   July18, 2009

Here is a long video (nearly 2 hours) which is thoroughly worth watching.  Scientist Ken Miller’s lecture on evolution versus intelligent design is absorbingly interesting and often very amusing.

Continue listening into question time. One of the questioners suggests that evolutionists – and so by implication atheists – must be on the political left.

The fact that many atheists think this way, and are probably driven leftward by their non-belief in the existence of God, shows how important it is for those who think as we do to demonstrate that conservative politics fit easily with atheism.

The lecture itself carries this message in the fascinating story of a Republican judge who came down firmly on the side of those who argued for evolution.