Richard Dawkins has been a hero of the left for his outspoken criticism of religious belief.
I have done some background research on him (30 seconds on Wikipedia) and have discovered that he has no formal training in theology, nor is he involved with any church.
By the well defined standards of the left, this clearly disqualifies him from talking about religious matters – which can only be properly discussed by people who have formal training and a steeply vested interest in their own dogma.
He is an amazing communicator but his own theoretical work in evolutionary theory is pretty crap too.
The only thing about qualification and/or experience is the likelihood of whether someone will make a statement that is true about said subject. (Note: that’s the general case; it doesn’t account for people like Hansen or Mann)
If you examine something someone has said, no amount of qualification, experience, or money (or where it came from) is going to change its veracity. This is why dismissing someone’s statements based purely on someone’s lack of qualification (or whether it has been
palpeer reviewed) etc without even examining the veracity of the statement is a purely ad hominem attack.Sadly, many alarmists do it all the time.
I submitted a comment using my real name and it magically disappeared. I have reasonable grounds to believe that you will find it in your SPAM folder.
For the fun of it, I always put up a video of Lloyd Pye just for the fun of it to watch liberals freak out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DZQ_qIql0g&feature=related
The headline of this post truly is an excellent analogy.
In a similar vein, I occasionally comment that asking the IPCC about the existence of AGW is akin to asking the College of Cardinals whether God exists, and for the same reason – they only let true believers in.
I went to the same Primary School in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) as Dawkins, but a few years later. We did have religious instruction, though he left there after a couple of years. Those few years must, like any good climate astrologist, represent experience enough to comment surely. (sarc)
Dawkins is an intellectual mouse. Whenever the subject of morality comes up, he always reverts to “we don’t get our morality from religion”. Not from RELIGION, maybe, but GOD? The new atheists don’t have any reasonable basis for their “morality”. The old atheists understood that without a supreme being, “evil” and “good” were arbitrary concepts, devoid of any ultimate purpose of meaning. Camus and Sartre understood this very well. Dawkins and his ilk do not. They are like actors on a stage, who will one day end up a pile of dust like every other person on this planet.
yes, like unto all of us, the 2nd law of thermodynamics will make sure that we end up as dust; although those in Christ will be raised from that dust, as was adam in the beginning
in Christ
gabriel