This article has been floating around the internet for the past few days, and Larry sent it to me today. It's disturbing on so many levels. But let's just look at it a minute...
Atheist Fundamentalists
From Investor's Business Daily, Posted 11/13/2006
Intolerance: Rock star Elton John's wish to "ban religion completely" may be dismissed as the hyperbole of a famous eccentric. But militant atheism has become more fashionable than ever. And it's targeting your children. The flashy singer of "Crocodile Rock" and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," who recently "married" his longtime male partner, told Britain's Observer Music Monthly that "religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays."
"Organized religion doesn't seem to work," he said. "It turns people into really hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate." John concluded: "From my point of view, I would ban religion completely."
Uh, hold up. Sir Elton has had public cat fights with Princess Diana, Madonna, and recently with his own record label. Let's look ...
"Nobody would know my new album has been out since. My record label isn't doing anything to help. Fuck Universal. Please drop me. I'm 58 and I don't care anymore."I don't think the increasingly enraged Elton should judge others for being hateful.
On accusing Madonna of lip-synching: "I'm not afraid to speak my mind. I'm not going to mellow with age. I get more enraged about things as I get older."
Further, religion turns people into hateful lemmings? Mother Theresa, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama and Ghandi don't strike me as hateful lemmings. Or did Theresa go to the Calcutta slums because "everyone else was doing it."
If you check the money flowing to the starving and orphaned children in Africa, it's the religious nonprofits lead the way.
Elton has a point, because gays have suffered a lot from religious people. (read Blogger Chris Campbell. But Hitler also exterminated gays. And Hitler wasn't a Christian. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, exterminated at Ravensbruck, who opposed Hitler and led the Confessing Church during Nazi Germany. He also partook in a failed plot to kill Hitler. That hateful lemming Dietrich! Anyway, back to the Investors business daily article...
Amazon's second-best-selling book at the time of this writing is an Oxford zoologist's venomous 400-page diatribe against "the vice of religion." In it, he insists that "even mild and moderate religion helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes." And he wants parents forbidden from raising children by their beliefs.If Sir Elton has anyone to fear, it's this psycho who advocates killing handicapped babies. Because they're substandard? That was Hitler's excuse for exterminating gays and Jews! Forget Hitler, evolutionary theory on animal homosexuality is that it's "nature's way of eliminating the weaker of the species." How terrifying is THAT?
"Our society," writes Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, "has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them — 'Catholic child,' 'Protestant child,' 'Jewish child,' 'Muslim child,' etc." Those "labels" are "always a form of child abuse," said Dawkins, who concludes: "Maybe some children need to be protected from indoctrination by their own parents."
... Dawkins has called on the United Nations to extend human rights to gorillas and orangutans. He extols Princeton's notorious "professor of bio-ethics" and animal-lib poster boy Peter Singer, who advocates the killing of handicapped newborn babies, as "the most eloquent advocate of the view that we should move to a 'post-species-ist' condition."
Irony of Ironies: Dawkins is MORE fundamentalist and intolerant than the religions he condemns as being intolerant. His drive to exterminate religion is right there in his manifesto. The Bible doesn't teach hatred or suppression of speech. Jesus was the guy who said "turn the other cheek," and "my kingdom is not of this world." And there's that whole "blessed are the meek..."
But back to IBD's article...
No. 11 on Amazon is another atheist screed — "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris. Harris' 2005 attack on religion, "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason," got a prestigious award from the PEN literary association and still ranks No. 33 on Amazon. Harris is as eager as Dawkins to kidnap your kids and bring on the day when "the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is."YIKES! But before Christians get their panties in a bunch, these accusations come with foundations. There has been a lot of violence committed in the name of religion. But also in the name of Atheism (see Pol Pot, Stalin, Ghengis Kahn). A lot of the poeple who are hateful toward gays are just hateful people. Like Neo-Nazis. There are probably atheists who hate gays, but they don't stand with signs saying, "gays are going to hell." My friend Alicia's uncle was an abortion doctor. WAS. He was murdered, not by an atheist, but by a fundamentalist Christian psycho.
Religious Americans shouldn't be alone in fearing the popularity of these modern Mein Kampfs. Imagine the government forcibly preventing you from inculcating your children with your values and convictions, and substituting its own instead. Even when it's Darwin — instead of Hitler or Mohammed — being worshiped by the state, fascism is fascism.
Harris and Dawkins say that science is the ONLY way to prove anything. Which means ONLY left-brained analysis. Say goodbye to women's intuition. Harris and Dawkins are eliminating a fundamental way that WOMEN apprehend truth. Maybe they're misogynists as well.
The ONLY information they want to recognize is that which the current scientists can prove (and sign off on) at any given point in history.
To quote that scientist, Albert Einstein:
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.And to quote that dangerous subversive, Alexsandr Solzhenistyn:
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.
3 comments:
My first response to Sir Elton was that his comments were awfully bigoted, spiteful and intollerant. No serious voice is calling for the elimination of gays. Banning gay marriage, yes -- banning gays, no.
And atheism is responsible for the deaths of far more people than religion. Marxism killed some 100 million in the 20th century between Stalin, Mao the killing fields of SE Asia, and so on.
Then again, there are far too many vocal and visible Christians picketing with "God hates fags" signs, and worse. Think of those crazys protesting at the funerals of American servicemen and women killed in Iraq proclaiming their deaths as God's judgement for homosexuality, etc.
I can't really argue with someone who finds those members of the church spiteful and intollerant -- I do myself.
Boy Susan, you hit the nail on the head. The Dawkins, Elton Johns and Sam Harris's of the world respond to intolerance with... intolerance. It's what the documentary "Jesus Camp" was trying to say, "let's ban those Christians and prevent them from raising their kids as such nuts!" They don't even see how scary their position is and how intolerant and what any kind of fascism always leads to.
Isn't it interesting that those who confess tolerance are often just as "intolerant?" Go figure: seems like eveybody's got an opinion these days, even the billion of religious lemmings. But isn't the goal of pluralism? Ya think? Good!
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