Questions for Dawkins

[tongodeon]

This evening I'm going to see Richard Dawkins speak at Berkeley City Arts & Lectures. He's doing a book tour for "The Greatest Show On Earth", and I like him. I've been trying to think of a good question to ask him during the Q&A

Comments

[mmcirvin]

Shortly after the September 11th attacks, Dawkins used them to argue that belief in an afterlife is inherently dangerous, since it allowed al Qaeda to turn people into suicide terrorists. This might make sense as far as it goes but it strikes me as unnecessarily reductive; after all, the vast majority of afterlife-believers don't do any such things, and there are lots of things that correlate more strongly with being a suicide terrorist, mostly having to do with geopolitical situations. I'm not sure we want to go there, anyway: It's a lot like blaming atheism for Stalin's body count, which is actually a favorite pastime on the other side of the fence.

In this regard Dawkins was far less obnoxious than Sam Harris, who once mused that certain radical Islamic beliefs might be so dangerous that we would be justified in killing people just for believing them. Indeed, I suspect that a significant subset of New Atheist advocacy is actually a cover for xenophobic anti-Muslim bigotry, especially in the UK (though Harris is American). But I wouldn't pin that on Dawkins, who doesn't show this tendency to any great degree.