Dawkins on O’Reilly
April 24, 2007
Radical Christian Bill O’Reilly “interviewed” Professor Richard Dawkins yesterday.
Dawkins got a total of a minute-and-a-half of a 4 minute interview to respond to O’Reilly’s nonsensical ramblings.
O’Reilly made a few arguments that wouldn’t have survived a Junior High debate team, but, since he dominated the entire interview, Dawkins couldn’t get a reasonable word in edgewise.
O’Reilly argues that Atheism can’t supply an answer for the origin of the sun, moon, tides, etc, so he’s going to stick with the Jesus Theory. He claimed that Atheists are taking a bigger leap of faith than he was.
Going back to my post on Logical Fallacies we see this is an Appeal to Ignorance - The debator claims that due to the lack of evidence to support the contrary opinion, his opinion must be true. I once met a guy, who wanted to sell me a genuine rolex watch. I asked how I could verify that it was genuine, and he told me I could trust him. Any reasonable person in this situation would have been skeptical of this man’s claims, yet when it comes to religion, this argument is perfectly valid. Like I told that guy, “Sorry, I’m not buying it”
As far as this “leap of faith” (A Straw Man Argument) - the complete opposite is true. In the absence of proof (which O’Reilly readily and repeatedly admits he cannot give for God’s Existence) the only reasonable course of action is to dismiss the claim as unproven. That doesn’t mean the claim is false, just that it has not been proven. Atheists don’t act on that unproven claim, nor, in light of that non-evidence, do they regard the claim as true.
O’Reilly shot himself in the foot. He states that he is not positive that Jesus was God, but he’s going to “throw in” with Jesus rather than Atheists who cannot tell him how it all got there. O’Reilly implies that the Jesus Theory DOES tell him how it all got there, but he also admits that he can’t be positive that it is true. He states “It’s true for me”
[Sidebar] THIS is the attitude that Atheists are facing today. Many people readily admit that they cannot be completely certain that their opinions and beliefs are true, but they go ahead and act on them,{ok} and belittle, harass, and even assault people with contrary opinions {NOT ok}, even when those contrary opinions are supported by fact. What do you do with a person who sticks their fingers in their ears and yells “LA LA LA, I CAN’T HEAR YOU” every time you try to teach them something? O’Reilly mentioned that humility is a Christian attribute - is THIS humility? [/Sidebar]
Dawkins slammed him on the “True for Me” point, asking if there is a difference between truth for O’Reilly and truth for eveyone else. O’Reilly quickly changed the subject, going to the old stand-by, “Atheist Atrocities”. Without letting Dawkins respond to this, he quickly moved on to the US Founding Fathers creating a “Christian” nation.
O’Reilly mentions Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as Atheists who committed atrocities. I would disagree that they are Atheists as we know them. Hitler was raised as a Roman Catholic (Although O’Reilly claims Hitler was only raised in a household of Roman Catholics… Obviously, he wasn’t a very good Catholic, but he never renounced the faith) The remaining three were Communist. They rounded up and killed intellectuals and anyone who could have had an influence over the people. They created personality cults, destructive cults that had no intention of letting people think for themselves. In this way, they were VERY much like the ancient church, and completely against the FreeThought and Personal Liberty principles adopted by the vast majority of Atheists.
Obviously, these people were a bane on humanity, but to say that Atheism was the root of their atrocities would be akin to saying that Christianity was the reason behind 9/11.
[I'll have to write an article about FreeThought one of these days... Basically, though, when utilizing the principles of FreeThought, a person ignores dogmatic ideas - such as popularity, superstition, authority, and tradition - and focuses on scientific and logical principles. The idea being to come to the right answer for the right reasons]
Back to the Founding Father’s argument. O’Reilly (correctly) mentioned that most of the founding fathers acknowledged a deity - he neglects to mention that this was in no way shape or form the Christian Deity. Look at their personal writings on the subject, and you’ll realize that their concept of God was not a personal one, and required no worship. God’s role was in the creation of life, a mystery back in the mid-18th century. Despite all the references to a diety, Jesus was NEVER mentioned. (Had Darwin’s theories been available back then, it’s fairly safe to say that most of those Deists would probably have considered themselves Atheists.)
Considering the O’Reilly’s penchant for drowning out opposing arguments, shouting down dissidents, and switching off microphones, I would say that Dawkins did exceptionally well in the debate. Once you peel away the slimy coating of O’Reilly’s aguments, you realize they are complete crap.
In my current favorite O’Reilly clip, Bill uses Christians as an example of people who WANT to believe. (i.e. believe something despite the absence of proof) Of these people, he goes on to say:
“[They] are irrational, neurotic, self-destructive people who will hurt you. Irrational thought is self destructive. If a person can’t think logically, they are going to hurt themselves and everybody else around them. They’re going to hurt their children, they’re going to hurt theur spouse,they’re going to hurt anyone they work with, it’s just a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’. And THAT is the most true thing I can ever tell you.”
Thanks for the warning, Bill.
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Actually, although O’Reilly barely let him slip it in, Dawkins responed well to the Hitler/Stalin atheist link. I didn’t catch it exactly, but it was close to: “Well, both of them had mustaches, too.” But I suspect that a more significant common denominator among all such megalomaniacs is that they all had two eyes