No More Mr. Nice Guy!

D'inept D'loser

I was going to take Dinesh D'Souza to task for spouting a load of cant under the title What Atheists Kant Refute (also published as Why Atheists are Not Very Bright), but I procrastinated until PZ and Skeptico, among others, did a better job than I would have. Unfortunately, D'Souza has an inexhaustible amount of pompous BS to shovel before us.

D'Souza's latest opus to come marching out of the fever-swamps of his Jesus-addled brain is The Atheist Indoctrination Project. I seem to have missed the memo on that one, but when you strip away the windy verbiage, ad-hominem attacks and strawman arguments, what it boils down to is: if schools aren't indoctrinating Christianity in children, then they're indoctrinating atheism.

D'Souza liberally quotes Dawkins, Hitchens and other names likely to provoke the hate reflex in his far-right readers. Funnily enough, the points they make - that religious indoctrination of children, the teaching of absurd superstitions as facts that may not be questioned, is not a good thing - seems totally reasonable to me. But for D'Souza, it is simply outrageous to ask, for example (as Hitchens does), "How can we ever know how many children had their psychological and physical lives irreparably maimed by the compulsory inculcation of faith?" and therefore there is no need to respond in any way. (If you can stomach an extreme example of how religious indoctrination is most definitely child abuse, read this article I wrote last year.)

D'Souza quotes psychologist Nicholas Humphrey: "Parents have no god-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith." Daniel Dennett adds: "Parents don't literally own their children the way slaveowners once owned slaves, but are, rather, their stewards and guardians and ought to be held accountable by outsiders for their guardianship, which does imply that outsiders have a right to interfere." D'Souza makes no response to this. Does he or does he not think parents are slaveowners of their children?

According to D'Souza,

In his book Breaking the Spell, Dennett urges that schools teach religion as a purely natural phenomenon. By this he means that religion should be taught as if it were untrue.

Wrong! As Dennett makes clear in the next sentence, religion should be taught objectively as a human phenomenon. Teachers should say: "this is what Religion X believes, and here is the evidence it has for its beliefs." (That second bit would be the shortest part of the lesson.) Teachers should not say: "A, B and C are true because that is what Religion X teaches."

After coming to the end of his atheist quote dump, D'Souza whines:

This is how many secular teachers treat the traditional beliefs of students. The strategy is not to argue with religious views or to prove them wrong. Rather, it is to subject them to such scorn that they are pushed outside the bounds of acceptable debate.

First of all, the onus is not on anyone to "prove" religion wrong. Believers must at least offer some independent support for their views if they want them to be taken seriously. And it's worth noting that no such support exists. Every time religion makes a statement that can be checked by science, religion makes a fool of itself, whether it's a 6,010 year old earth, insects having four legs, rabbits chewing the cud, etc. Quite frankly, religion's track record is so abysmally pathetic that after giving it a more than fair hearing over the last several millennia, we are fully entitled to treat it with derision and ridicule.

But D'Souza cannot bring himself to admit that his superstitious myths simply cannot stand up to scientific inquiry, so he wails about professors brainwashing students "to think a certain way merely by making that point of view seem fashionable and enlightened." He just can't grasp the idea that a university is where you are supposed to learn to think for yourself, to weigh evidence, to consider the burden of proof, to accept hypotheses tentatively for the sake of argument instead of dividing all of human knowledge into dogma and heresy. How did D'Souza spend his time at Dartmouth, anyway? Oh, yeah - writing "humorous" attacks on African-American and gay students.

D'Souza concludes:

Isn't it brilliant that they [atheists] have persuaded Christian moms and dads to finance the destruction of their own beliefs and values? Who said atheists aren't clever?

Um... you did, dickwad. We're "not very bright", remember?

D'Souza's whole screed is just a more pompous and pretentious version of those annoying "jokes" your neanderthal fundy relative emails to you along with everyone else in your family. The kind that is premised on the belief that every professor in every college is an atheist who spends every minute of every class declaring that God does not exist. The joke usually ends with God sending a marine drill sergeant to punch the professor's lights out. Yeah, let's hear it for brute force triumphing over the intellect!

Having devoted way more time to D'Souza's rant than it deserves, I can only continue to shake my head in amazement that the theocrats are so panicked by a few books by a handful of atheist authors. Do they realize at some subconscious level that the emperor really is naked, and that if enough people can overcome the constant psychological bullying of the religious right's attack pundits, and start thinking for themselves and asking awkward questions, the whole creaking and decrepit edifice will come crashing down?