Dawkins, 9/11, Special Pleading & Conflation

So, A Huge And Hitherto Undiscovered Cretacious Beast, Part I turned into a total thread derailment. I'm really upset at Arthur and John Evo, and although I'm not going to ban them, I'm limiting the amount of comments they can make on TWIM. I don't usually punish atheists just for being atheists, but this has become intolerable…

Ha! Yeah right! April Fool's all the way on this one! I'm making an inside joke here, and just couldn't resist the chance to parody the genuine actions of one popular atheist website. Sure, I wanted an answer to the question I wrote Part I about, and didn't get it, but so what? And sure, we're all convinced the other person is illogical. And sure, the argument seems destined to not resolve. And sure, at times our tones rubbed each other the wrong way here and there. But are any of those valid reasons to close a comment thread or curtail people's ability to comment?

I say no. To think freely, we must value free speech. When speech is constrained to only those answers that some random blog owner considers pertinent, that speech is not free, and we are not thinking freely. But enough on that, let's get to today's point, which is really Friday's point still.

Here's the source of our misery from the thread in Part I:

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. (Richard Dawkins)

Okay. Growing up skateboarding was one of the best childhoods possible and it really taught me to think rationally. Science and logic are key aspects of skateboarding. It was through skateboarding I learned that an isolated instance is not representative of its respective category. In other words, skateboarding taught me to identify the fallacy of conflation. Early on in skateboarding, most skaters come to conclude that cops are dicks, but later realize the truth is really more along the lines of, when it comes to skateboarding, most cops can be dicks.

But guess what? No matter the actual percentage of cops that are dicks, we cannot rationally label the general category cops with the general connotation dicks, because dicks only applies to specific elements within the set. Many police officers are not dicks. Some police officers skate. Other police officers pull up to the session only to ask for an autograph of a pro they recognize, or stop by just to warn skaters that they're in a bad neighborhood. Just because a police car pulls up to the session doesn't mean negativity is going to be the outcome. I'm sure it's fairly easy to see where this is going, and this is why I have such a hard time taking Dawkins' comment or its defenders seriously. I see no justification for a rational, non-biased person to defend it.

My argument distills to the position that people commit crimes, not facts or belief systems. However, I do not deny the connection between facts, belief systems and behavior, nor do I say that an idea cannot be intrinsically criminal. So yes, certain ideas and belief systems are dangerous, but any lunatic can use any idea or belief system to justify horrific actions. That's why I brought up Pekka-Eric Auvinen, and the resistance to the analogy was interesting.

I do not think Arthur or John Evo successfully rebutted Pine and myself, and I'm willing to go another seventy-something comments on it. Arthur's strategy was to attack my analogy by claiming that natural selection is based on fact, religion on fluff (paraphrased). I replied that whether I agreed or disagreed on that point, I didn't see how he felt that challenged my analogy or my main argument. John Evo squared off a bit more directly, trying to justify Dawkins' claim via brute force enumeration of historical religious atrocities. But in doing so, John Evo also shot himself in the foot, because he also defended Dawkins' claim for having "woke scholars the fuck up," as to the dangers of religion. Evo's own evidence on religious atrocities contradicts his sub-point. As Evo himself pointed out, the past few thousand years have given scholars enough examples of religious atrocities to fill the solar system, so any scholar that wasn't awake by the time 9/11 went down is no scholar at all. Did Dawkins seriously need 9/11 to figure out that religion can be used to justify atrocity? Is his history as bad as his theology?

What I really want to know is this: Why aren't Dawkins and his defenders going into Tipper Gore-like frenzy over science? Particularly Dawkins' own scientific field of biology?

It is undoubtedly true Hitler endorsed Neitzche’s evolutionary platitudes to incubate delusions of grandeur about a super race in a demoralized and desperate populace. Mussolini, who also revered Neitzche and repeatedly quoted Darwin, held that war and killing were essential for the survival of the fittest. Brutal fascism was the result. Karl Marx asked Darwin to write the introduction to Das Kapital because he felt Darwin had established a scientific foundation for communism. Margaret Sanger publicized her faith in eugenics to assist in the emergence of what she described as "a race of thoroughbreds." Dr. Ernst Rüdin collaborated with Heinrich Himmler on Germany’s 1933 edict that called for the sterilization of all Jews and colored German children. The keen reader will note that John Scopes' state-approved textbook, A Civic Biology, introduces the science of genetics as that of, “…being well-born,” dividing the human race into five classes and commenting further that, “…the highest type of all, the Caucasians, were represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe in America.”

Does science in general, and the theory of biological evolution in particular, cause Nazism, racism, Eurocentrism, communism and fascism? Is evolution responsible for the Holocaust? In fact, doesn't Dawkins commit the exact same error as Ben Stein, an error that had atheists pooping in their pants all over the internet in outrage? 

And what of politics and imperialism? Why do these receive no mention from the Dawk? Here again, I think Dawkins' comment misses the mark and exposes the professor's strong anti-religious bias. While we certainly we cannot deny its presence in the backstory, it is not entirely accurate or honest to imply that religion alone motivated 9/11. The bulk of what I heard in the propaganda feeds consisted of Osama Bin Laden threatening the United States with retribution for specific American foreign policies:

We swore that America wouldn't live in security until we live it truly in Palestine. This showed the reality of America, which puts Israel's interest above its own people's interest. America won't get out of this crisis until it gets out of the Arabian Peninsula, and until it stops its support of Israel. -Osama bin Laden, October 2001

…the Mujahideen saw the black gang of thugs in the White House hiding the Truth, and their stupid and foolish leader, who is elected and supported by his people, denying reality and proclaiming that we (the Mujahideen) were striking them because we were jealous of them (the Americans), whereas the reality is that we are striking them because of their evil and injustice in the whole of the Islamic World, especially in Iraq and Palestine and their occupation of the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries. -Osama Bin Laden, February 14, 2003

A German friend of Mohammed Atta(the hijacker pilot who flew into WTC) is quoted as describing him as "most imbued actually about Israeli politics in the region and about US protection of these Israeli politics in the region. And he was to a degree personally suffering from that. -Osama bin Laden, October 2001

It's clear to see that a complex web of factors caused 9/11, perhaps many more than we'll ever know, and I think it's a fair argument that if the United States were not meddling in the affairs of Middle Eastern nations, 9/11 might not have happened. We don't see Al-qaeda wrecking skyscrapers in Canada, right? Are there no non-Muslims in Canada?

It's not like the motive behind 9/11 was to convert us to Allah, and to me it's very telling that politics and invasive foreign policy received zero criticism in Dawkins' 9/11 comment. Sure, Bin Laden and his buddies certainly think Allah is on their side, and they undoubtedly pray to Allah for guidance and protection, and I'm sure they're on record somewhere saying Allah supports their maniacal responses to equally maniacal foreign policies, but does that give a Ph.D scholar with an immeasurably wide audience the right to mislead and misinform by conflating religion with terrorism?

I stand by my analogies and my argument. Let's be honest. Dawkins' 9/11 statement was inaccurate, misleading and biased, at least. It was nothing more than the atheist equivalent of Ben Stein on the Holocaust, and unless John Evo and Arthur are willing to equally fault science for atrocities committed in its name, I cannot accept their arguments. If we say religion motivated 9/11, we must also say that science motivated Jokela, the Holocaust and all the other atrocities introduced above. Anyone who cannot do so catches a charge of special pleading in my book.