The Atheist Blogger

An Icon of Freedom of Speech

It’s no wonder so many websites attack atheism, and why an increasing number of newspapers seems to be doing the same thing; we’re probably one of the easiest targets out there. We’re a minority group in most countries in the world, but not only that, we are actively challenging the view of the majority group. In comparative terms, we’re like the British National Party (BNP) in the UK elections. The BNP are a fascist, right-wing, white supremacist political movement which has gathered together the last surviving members of Britain’s racists. They are a small minority, yet they are often one of the loudest; campaigning against every single other party, blaming them for the current state of the government. Unlike other targets that one could attack such as those of a certain race or sex, we don’t have any anti-discrimination laws to protect us, and for very good reasons, we have campaigned against such laws (the ones that would protect us) under the banner of freedom of speech. We don’t want our governments saying that people cannot write hateful things about us, because the whole point about the atheism debate is that there can be a debate.

Freedom of speech is often attacked by the religious, who claim that atheists use it to blaspheme and campaign against their beliefs, even though they are fine when they do the same to us. The point of freedom of speech is that anyone can say anything about politics, religion, art, etc and have their view protected so that others can hear it. The people who agree will state their approval, and the people who disagree or find it offensive in any way can have their say as well, and their response will likewise be protected.

It is this freedom of speech that I execute when I respond to the newspaper articles which lie and misrepresent us. I don’t want the articles to be censored, but I want my right to a fair response. The execution of this right was most recently seen when a Op-Ed piece, penned by Charlotte Allen was published in the LA Times (and then republished yesterday in the Guardian) and spread around the blogosphere. I doubt very many atheists would have wanted Allen’s piece obliterated from the newspaper (shame on you if you did), but the sheer amount of responses it generated from both sides of the debate show the level of disagreement. If you want to read a thorough, well-written objection to Allen’s article, then head over to Shane Croucher’s blog.

I’m sure Allen will put this response down to “whining” as she did in the article and won’t even realize the hypocrisy of her writing, which one could argue is a lot of whining about atheists. I’m sure she’ll continue to criticize us for using freedom of speech to attack religion or belief in god, whilst at the same time using the very same freedom of speech to attack our views. Hers is the one-sided argument; she wants nothing but her views to be made, and she will ignore all objections or file them under the title of “whining”. We’ve seen this kind of behaviour before in so many forms, and if one thing holds true in each of those cases, it is that in the long run, people like Charlotte Allen always lose out eventually.

Opinions will be heard, debate will be had. Long live freedom of speech.

Ray Comfort’s latest stroll into the land of irrational thought has produced yet another blog post that attempts to link the theory of evolution with Adolf Hitler. It’s common knowledge that Hitler was a creationist, at most believing in some form of “micro-evolution”. Hitler never mentioned Darwin in any of his books, and the mentions of “evolution” that Ray gives us are almost all references to social evolution. Hitler can be accurately described as a social Darwinist, a political theory that has no relation to Darwin or to the biological theory of evolution that is studied today ^[1][2]. With this in mind, after reading through the 5 or so quotes in the post, the rational thinker is left with the resounding question “Ok, so what?”.

Let’s leave the fact that Hitler was a creationist, that his politics were not based on science but on racism and white supremacy. Instead, I want to examine the “so what?” that often gets ignored, yet is actually very important in analyzing Comfort’s argument. We shall begin by assuming that Ray Comfort is completely correct; that Hitler was a believer in the theory of evolution. We shall also assume that Hitler was so devoted to the theory, he decided to use it through social Darwinism in order to justify genocide. What does this tell us about the theory of evolution? Nothing. A theory is not defined by how people use it, but by what it tells us. The theory of evolution says nothing of “higher species” or that organisms must systematically wipe out all those who are “inferior”. In fact, the theory of evolution gives us no help in pinpointing which species are “more evolved” than others, or even what that would entail.

For instance, human beings are considered to be more evolved because of our consciousness, yet some bacteria have genomes hundreds of times larger than our own. So how do we calculate inferiority when we have two opposing lines of measurement, one based on evolved attributes, the other based on number of mutations. I don’t think one could make a good argument for either, especially given the further problem of how to compare attributes (is consciousness a better attribute than metabolizing citrate for example?). This all points to the conclusion that most would agree on; that science tells us about the universe in which we live by describing and explaining it, but it does not tell us what to do with this knowledge.

Science told us how to make the nuclear bomb, but science did not tell us to drop these bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. If science was responsible for these actions, then you could easily justify Newton as responsible for the deaths of everyone killed by projectiles. The reason creationists like Comfort do not extend their argument to include men like Newton is that they accept the theory of gravity (and yes, it is just a theory Ray). By holding Darwin and his theory as responsible for the actions of men he never knew, yet not doing the same for other scientists like Newton, Nobel, Einstein, etc reveals Ray’s dishonesty and unwillingness to discuss evolution on an intellectual level. Instead, he prefers to launch a thinkly veiled ad-hominem attack in the hopes that people will focus on the supposed “link” and not the attack itself. This may have worked well for him in the past, but not today, and not on this blog.