Home » Philosophy, Religion » Do Dawkins and Dennett Incite to Hatred?

Do Dawkins and Dennett Incite to Hatred?

December 11, 2007 Posted by Barry Arrington under Philosophy, Religion
125 Comments

I live in Arvada, Colorado, and for many years I attended the church associated with the YWAM shooting on Sunday.  Earlier this year I befriended two of the young men going through the training program there, one from New Zealand and the other from England.  I am numb with sorrow, and my prayers go up for the families of the victims.

 The media is reporting that Matthew Murray posted the following on the web:  ”I’m coming for EVERYONE soon and I WILL be armed to the @#%$ teeth and I WILL shoot to kill. …God, I can’t wait till I can kill you people. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame, I don’t care if I live or die in the shoot-out. All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you … as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.”

Look at the last part of that quote closely.  One wonders if Murray has been reading Dawkins or Dennett.  By blaming the world’s ills on religious people do Dawkins and Dennett incite to hatred and make it more likely that tragedies of this sort can occur?  I don’t know, but it is an interesting question.

 Addition:

Surprisingly, several commenters have suggested that unless I can prove a direct causal relationship I should be quiet.  Stuart Harris as much as says that unless I can show that Murray read an atheist book last Saturday and started killing people on Sunday then I should “shut the hell up.”  Mr. Harris, let me clue you in.  Human motivation is rarely simple, linear and direct.   The standard you set is patently unreasonable.  A multitude of variables contribute to human actions, and one of those variables is what I would call the “intellectual climate” of the culture.  Are Dawkins and his ilk guilty of contributing to a climate of hatred (or at least animosity) against religious people generally and Christians in particular?  Hitchens calls religion a “poison.”  Isn’t it axiomatic that poison is bad and should be eradicated? 

 Mr. Harris, the killer said that Christians are to blame for most of the problems in the world.  One wonders where he got that notion.  I think it is a fair question to ask whether Darkins, Dennett and Hitchens have gone too far with their inflammatory rhetoric.  You can stick your head in the sand if you want to, but thinking people ask questions.  Are Dawkins, Dennett or Hitchens directly responsible for Sunday’s murders?  Obviously not.  At the end of the day, my inquiry is not so much about “responsibility” as “irresponsibility.”  Have the vituperative atheists been irresponsible in contributing to an intellectual climate that condones animosity toward religious people?  It’s a fair question.

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125 Responses to Do Dawkins and Dennett Incite to Hatred?

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  1. 121
    DonaldMDecember 14, 2007 at 4:23 pm

    That ideas have consequences should not be a surprise to anyone. When I read the statement that the shooter made, my thoughts were similar to Barry’s. Had this guy been reading Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, et.al.? Maybe we’ll never know. But, what is clear is that something in his mind gave him justification for the actions he took that fateful night and morning. No doubt he felt he had been dealt with unfairly by some Christian(s) or others in his past. Was it enough to justify his “revenge” in his mind? Was it that coupled with a larger cultural context where ridiculing and showing animosity towards religion in general and Christians in particular is tolerated, and even encouraged by the makers of media? Did the shooter feel the culture had somehow given him “permission” to take out a few of the “bad guys”?

    We may never know what passed through his mind. What we do know is that his loathing towards Christians was real…and it was real enough to motivate him to take a gun and go on a killing spree. What was it that fed and nutured that loathing? If I were Dennett or Dawkins or Harris or Hitchens or any of the other of the so-called “new” atheists, I’d be asking myself some pretty tough questions about now. And the first question would be “how have I contributed to a cultural climate that has demonstrated such strong animosity towards Christians and people of faith that some are inspired to violence?” The irony here is obvious: these “new” atheists have ranted and railed against religion and Christianity claiming that it inspires all sorts of visciousness, hatred and violence. Have we now witnessed that fanatical atheism inspires the same?

  2. 122
    StephenBDecember 14, 2007 at 6:47 pm

    S. Wakefield Tolbert: Thanks!

    allanius:

    forthekids:
    tribune 7:

    All your points granted. Tragedies of this kind almost always require a multiplicity of causes in the short run. Take away any one factor and you may get a different result.

    If the young man hadn’t been troubled, or if his religious training had been less reactionary, or if such training had not been followed by influences from a radically nihilistic subculture, or if medical intervention had not backfired, or if the de-Christianized culture at large had not set the table, perhaps the inner conflict that prompted the act would have been less severe and less likely to result in a violent act.

    Further, I would venture that something very personal and very recent occurred prior to the event that, in itself, may seem to have been the decisive factor—a snub, a broken dream, a lost relationship, or any emotional crisis that the young man simply could not or would not deal with.

    HOWEVER:

    We are left with the following questions: How do we account for the widespread despair and resentment that attends all of these events? For every one of these youth who finally crosses the line, there are probably hundreds who are thinking about it.
    How do we account for the almost complete disregard for human life? It is one thing to do away with one’s enemy in an act of vengeance, but it is quite another thing to take down everyone else in the vicinity as a means of achieving immortality.

    I submit to you that it is precisely the de-Christianizing of the culture that has brought this about. Consider the life lessons our narcissistic secularist culture is offering our youngest generation:

    We tell them that they deserve the best of everything, even if they have achieved nothing; that they have a right not to be offended by any idea, even if it is something that they need to hear ; that they should be immune from the embarrassment of failure, even if their performance is lacking; that they cannot control their passions, even if premature sex will ruin their lives; that they should not have to struggle in order to grow, even if there is no other way to reach maturity; that they should feel free to abort a life in the womb, even if that life is innocent and helpless; that they are nothing but risen beasts, even if the angels inside of them are crying to get out.

    Is this any way to build a well-ordered society? Our Judeo/Christian heritage once provided a decidedly different perspective on freedom. It was less about following the cravings of our appetites and more about following the dictates of our conscience.

  3. 123
    ForthekidsDecember 14, 2007 at 11:06 pm

    StephenB:

    Very well said.

  4. 124
    kairosfocusDecember 15, 2007 at 2:13 am

    StephenB:

    Well said indeed.

    I add, that we need to look at the driving trend, the evolutionary materialism based, secular humanist [often statist-progressivist (i.e politicaly messianistic)] worldview and its agenda implications:

    . . . materialism, however, has deeper problems. It argues that the cosmos is the product of chance interactions of matter and energy, within the constraint of the laws of nature. Therefore, all phenomena in the universe, without residue, are determined by the working of purposeless laws acting on material objects, under the direct or indirect control of chance . . . .

    Therefore, if materialism is true, the “thoughts” we have and the “conclusions” we reach, without residue, are produced and controlled by forces that are irrelevant to purpose, truth, or validity . . . .

    As a further consequence, materialism can have no basis, other than arbitrary or whimsical choice and balances of power in the community, for determining what is to be accepted as True or False, Good or Evil. So, Morality, Truth, Meaning, and, at length, Man, are dead.

    As Francis Schaeffer and others have so ably pointed out, this inner contradiction explains modern man’s dilemma and confusion. For, his soul — created by God, our real Maker — tells such a man that he is significant, but what he thinks he knows tells him that he is nothing but a random bit of rubbish cast up by an ultimately chaotic and purposeless universe. He therefore knows not which to believe, and so lives under a cloud of hopeless despair, “a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”

    It is consequently no surprise to detect the consistent theme that all of reality is ultimately meaningless in modern and post-modern Literature, in contemporary Philosophy, and in the Arts generally . . . . In Law, Government, and Public Policy, the same bitter seed has shot up the idea that “Right” and “Wrong” are simply arbitrary social conventions. This has often led to the adoption of hypocritical, inconsistent, futile and self-destructive public policies.

    “Truth is dead,” so Education has become a power struggle; the victors have the right to propagandise the next generation as they please. Media power games simply extend this cynical manipulation from the school and the campus to the street, the office, the factory, the church and the home.

    Further, since family structures and rules of sexual morality are “simply accidents of history,” one is free to force society to redefine family values and principles of sexual morality to suit one’s preferences.

    Finally, life itself is meaningless and valueless, so the weak, sick, defenceless and undesirable — for whatever reason — can simply be slaughtered, whether in the womb, in the hospital, or in the death camp.

    In short, ideas sprout roots, shoot up into all aspects of life, and have consequences in the real world.

    So, should we not now very seriously reconsider the want of solid empirical evidence for, the logically self-refuting nature and destructive moral-cultural implications of the evolutionary materialism that in the name of “science” [but falsely so-called] has largely taken over the control of our classrooms, courtrooms, policy-making bodies and mass media all across our civilisaiton?

    GEM of TKI

  5. 125
    specsDecember 21, 2007 at 5:34 am

    It looks like we now have the answer to the interesting question. The results of the search warrant on Matthew Murray’s residence have been released. No Dawkins. No Dennett. No Hitchens. There was a prescription for alprazolam, a drug used to treat severe anxiety disorders, lots of gun and bomb making materials, and religious media including a Bible and a Book of Mormon.

    More interesting questions?

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