Richard Dawkins - Biographical resource about the author / scientist and his research and books

Richard Dawkins does a wonderful job of explaining biology and science.  He is less convincing in has role promoting atheism as a religion. Both views deserve careful study however.  This website is as good as any to begin that study.

 

Richarddawkins.org is another site that presents opposing positions.

 

"In The God Delusion,  Richard Dawkins, the celebrated evolutionary biologist, Oxford Professor, and author (The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, A Devil's Chaplain, The Ancestor's Tale), gives us a carefully-reasoned yet entertaining treatise on atheism that is equally eloquent and provocative. His basic argument is that the collective irrational belief in "The God Hypothesis" is not only wrong ("intellectual high treason"), but pernicious in its resulting intolerance, oppression, bigotry, arrogance, child abuse, homophobia, abortion-clinic bombings, cruelties to women, war, suicide bombers, and educational systems that teach ignorance when it comes to math and science. Sure to provoke his adversaries, Dawkins not only portrays the "psychotic" God of the Old Testament as "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" (p. 31), but also challenges, quite convincingly, every major argument for God's existence, and shows that the Founding Fathers considered religion to be a threat to democracy. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, claimed "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man" (p. 43). Benjamin Franklin said "Lighthouses are more useful than churches" (p. 43). A 1796 treaty signed by John Adams declares, "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion" (p. 40). Adams also said, "this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it" (p. 43). Even conservative icon, Barry Goldwater, threatened to fight fundamentalists "every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans" (p. 39)."

Richard Dawkins - Biographical resource about the author / scientist and his research and books

 

Technorati Tags: Richard Dawkins,the selfish gene,atheism,chiristianity

Christopher Hitchens Debates Alister McGrath - FORA.tv

 

Christopher Hitchens Debates Alister McGrath - FORA.tv

 

Technorati Tags: Christopher Hitchens,Alister McGraf

Bishop John Shelby Spong #3148.1

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a founding member of the Women's Movement in the United States. For all of her adult life, she fought for justice for Blacks and for women and , of course, indirectly for men. Below we hear her views on the role of the Church in that struggle.

 

"It does not occur to them that men learned in the languages have revised the book many times, but made no change in woman's position. Though familiar with "the designs of God," trained in Biblical research and higher criticism, interpreters of signs and symbols and Egyptian hieroglyphics, learned astronomers and astrologers, yet they cannot twist out of the Old or New Testaments a message of justice, liberty or equality from God to the women of the nineteenth century!

"The real difficulty in woman's case is that the whole foundation of the Christian religion rests on her temptation and man's fall, hence the necessity of a Redeemer and a plan of salvation. As the chief cause of this dire calamity, woman's degradation and subordination were made a necessity. If, however, we accept the Darwinian theory, that the race has been a gradual growth from the lower to a higher form of life, and that the story of the fall is a myth, we can exonerate the snake, emancipate the woman, and reconstruct a more rational religion for the nineteenth century, and thus escape all the perplexities of the Jewish mythology as of no more importance than those of the Greek, Persian and Egyptian."

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (1898)

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Bishop John Shelby Spong #3148.1

Technorati Tags: Elizabeth Cady Stanton,Bible,Christianity

The Diary of Anne Frank

Today the story of Anne Frank has reached far. Anne was a young vibrant intellegent girl who died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Berkenau when she was only a few months from her 16th birthday. Through her travail she never swayed from her wisdom, courage and love of humanity. She died of typhus only a few days after her sister died in the camp from the same disease. Tragically, Anne died only a few weeks before the prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau were rescued and freed by the Allied army in 1945.

from womennewsnetwork.vod

Pat Buchanan - FORA.tv

 

Pat Buchanan - FORA.tv

The African View of Morality and Social Justice - FORA.tv

This is a wonderful interview on the situation of the Anglican Church in Africa by a very able man.

The African View of Morality and Social Justice - FORA.tv

View The African View of Morality and Social Justice on FORA.tv

Kenya violence brings a bloody end to uneasy coexistence among ethnic groups - International Herald Tribune

 

Tribal tensions have been simmering in Kenya for decades.

After independence in 1963, then-President Jomo Kenyatta flooded this western Kenyan region, native to the Kalenjin and Luo tribes, with his Kikuyu people. Many of the Kikuyu had been displaced by the British from the fertile central highlands that are their ancestral home.

The Kikuyu settlers quickly prospered, growing into the most powerful of Kenya's 42 ethnic groups, running businesses and politics. But favoritism shown to Kikuyus fueled old resentments.

Kikuyus in the Rift Valley were targeted in ethnic clashes during elections in 1992 and 1997, when then-President Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin, sponsored gangs from his tribe to intimidate his opponents.

Politicians also helped stoke recent violence, with opposition politicians promising Kalenjins the return of lands they believe were wrongly wrested from them.

Kenya violence brings a bloody end to uneasy coexistence among ethnic groups - International Herald Tribune

 

Technorati Tags: Kenya,Kikuyu,election

This is an example of the complexity of world events today. We have the potential of conflict on every level from nuclear weapons to bows and arrows.