Dawkins's comments re: tsunami disaster

[CFLarsen]

"Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety."

So why didn't science produce an early warning system in that geographical location? They exist in other locations.

Science has produced early warning systems, but it is a political/financial decision where to put them. As much as you would like to, you cannot blame science for this disaster.

I'll predict that the contributions from religious groups ("churches, mosques and synagogues") will be more than the contributions from the atheist groups.

Please back it up with evidence. I would like to point out that the (largely non-religious) relief organizations here in (largely non-religious) Denmark have never received so much money in such a short time as they have with this disaster.

How do you explain that?

 

[CFLarsen]

Dawkins's argument is that religion is the reason why there is no system in place. Why not say that politics and government are the cause for that? Hm?

No, that's not what he says. You are wildly misrepresenting what his argument is.

You want to chip away at science, skepticism and critical thinking, but you are not doing a very good job. Try being less transparent, and you might fool a few people.

 

[CFLarsen]

Fact: if you lack belief in god(s) (note: no religion is out there that believes in invisible pink unicorns), you do have something in common with all atheists.

It doesn't matter if there are organized groups or not. You are merely trying to get out of an poorly considered snipe at skeptics.

 

[T'ai Chi]

To get back to Dawkins's quote:

"If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety."

Why not just say that more money needs to be spent on getting early warning systems in every geographical area? Why even bring religion into the picture?

Your final statement implies that the religious groups are more compasionate than those who are not.

A prediction is hardly a statement.

As an atheist yourself, you surprise me that you predict that the religious will be more generous than those that are not.

Based on my own personal experience, that is my experience. Rarely do I see atheist organizations 'out and about' in the community doing good. Maybe they do and I just don't see them, or they don't get media coverage...

 

[CFLarsen]

Any calculations here?

Do you have any calculations? You must have based your prediction on something. Or did you merely pull it out of your rectum?

You are always very quick to get others to do your legwork for you, and then complain when it doesn't happen. It's by far not the first time, and I suspect it won't be the last.

 

[Zep]

Dunno about where you are, jzs, but when it comes to donating for causes like this, they don't have anything on the form that says "Religionist/Atheist, circle one only".

You have simply pulled a quote totally out of context and are using it to fuel a stupid argument. Giant YAWN.

 

[epepke]

I'll predict that the contributions from religious groups ("churches, mosques and synagogues") will be more than the contributions from the atheist groups.

I'm sure this will be true. Secular groups like, oh, let's say the Red Cross and Red Crescent don't seem to feel the need to ram atheism down anybody's throat or tie it with giving.

 

[Pixel42]

As someone who has been following the debate in the Guardian letters page, to which Richard Dawkins' remarks were a contribution, I think it necessary to give the context to them.

The debate was prompted by this article by Martin Kettle. The article, entitled "How can religious people explain something like this", asked some very good questions:

A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life?

From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur. Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things?

This produced the expected feeble response from religious apologists on the following day's letters page.

Richard Dawkins' letter from which Randi quotes, was published the following day and was prompted by these lame responses. Here's what he said in full:

The Bishop of Lincoln (Letters, December 29) asks to be preserved from religious people who try to explain the tsunami disaster. As well he might. Religious explanations for such tragedies range from loopy (it's payback for original sin) through vicious (disasters are sent to try our faith) to violent (after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, heretics were hanged for provoking God's wrath). But I'd rather be preserved from religious people who give up on trying to explain, yet remain religious.

In the same batch of letters, Dan Rickman says "science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can". There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word "why", does plate tectonics not provide the answer?

Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety.

Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.
Richard Dawkins

This again produced the response you would expect. Here's a typical one:

Doing something about human suffering is precisely what churches have always done. Prayer is a preparation for doing. As a Christian, I know exactly why I should love and care for others. If I were an atheist, I can't imagine why I should bother to help anyone whose genes might compete with mine.

Today's Guardian has a further letter from Dawkins:

It is true that science cannot offer the consolations that your correspondents attribute to prayer, and I am sorry if I seemed a callous ayatollah or a doorstepping bogeyman (Letters, December 31). It is psychologically possible to derive comfort from sincere belief in a nonexistent illusion, but - silly me - I thought believers might be disillusioned with an omnipotent being who had just drowned 125,000 innocent people (or an omniscient one who failed to warn them). Of course, if you can derive comfort from such a monster, I would not wish to deprive you. My naive guess was that believers might be feeling more inclined to curse their god than pray to him, and maybe there's some dark comfort in that. But I was trying, however insensitively, to offer a gentler and more constructive alternative. You don't have to be a believer. Maybe there's nobody there to curse. Maybe we are on our own, in a world where plate tectonic and other natural forces occasionally cause appalling catastrophes. Science cannot (yet) prevent earthquakes, but science could have provided just enough warning of the Boxing Day tsunami to save most of the victims and spare the bereaved. Even worse lowland floodings of the future are threatened by global warming, which is preventable by human action, guided by science. And if the comforts afforded by outstretched human arms, warm human words and heartbroken human generosity seem puny against the agony, they at least have the advantage of existing in the real world.

I should make it clear to anyone who can't be bothered to follow the links that Dawkins is not a lone voice in the wilderness, there were other letters supporting his position. At the moment I'd say that the Dawkins' view was ahead on points.

 

[Patricio Elicer]

Why not just say that more money needs to be spent on getting early warning systems in every geographical area? Why even bring religion into the picture?

Because many many people around the globe still believe, despite the overwhelming evidence against, that their dieties are in better position than science to save us from natural disasters. They divert enormous amount of money to the church, in part out of the selfish motivation of winning heaven, but also out of ignorance on the fact that science can use resources in a far more productive way.

 

[T'ai Chi]

Because many many people around the globe still believe, despite the overwhelming evidence against, that their dieties are in better position than science to save us from natural disasters. They divert enormous amount of money to the church, in part out of the selfish motivation of winning heaven, but also out of ignorance on the fact that science can use resources in a far more productive way.

"Many many people", "their", "they", "amount"... got any more generalities?

Regrading this specific tsunami disaster, Patricio, what does religion have to do with the failure to construct an early warning system in that geographical area?

From a CNN news article:

"Some scientists had urged both the Clinton and Bush administrations to create a tsunami warning system in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, but they say nothing much happened."

So again, Patricio, what does religion have to do with it?

From the same article:
(bold mine)

"Fifteen minutes after Sunday's quake near Sumatra, NOAA fired off a bulletin from Hawaii to 26 Pacific nations that now make up the International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System, alerting them of the quake but saying they faced no threat of a tsunami.

Fifty minutes later, the U.S. agency upgraded the severity of the quake and again said there was no tsunami threat in the Pacific, but identified the possibility of a tsunami near the quake's epicenter in the Indian Ocean.

After nearly another half hour, NOAA contacted emergency officials in Australia as a backstop, knowing they would quickly contact their counterparts in Indonesia.

It wasn't until 21/2 hours after the quake that NOAA officials learned from Internet news reports that a destructive tsunami had hit Sri Lanka."

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2004/WEATHER/12/30/us.warning.ap/index.html

Again, what does religion have to do with it? Sounds like politics and bad science.

 

[CFLarsen]

Because many many people around the globe still believe, despite the overwhelming evidence against, that their dieties are in better position than science to save us from natural disasters. They divert enormous amount of money to the church, in part out of the selfish motivation of winning heaven, but also out of ignorance on the fact that science can use resources in a far more productive way.

Very true.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Patricio, I must agree with your estimate of "many, many people" who have such counterproductive beliefs which, due to scarcity of resources, divert money from valid scientific endeavor to superstitious activities of no known efficacy.
Like praying.

 

[Patricio Elicer]

"Many many people", "their", "they", "amount"... got any more generalities?

I can't quantify at this point, but I can tell you that every Sunday afternoon the church in my community is packed with faithful believers, that every 19th, for whatever religious festivity is celebrated on that day, the crowd is so big that the traffic must be detoured on that area. If we multiply this by all the churches in the world, of all religions, and if we consider that just 10 percent of those people are money donors, we'll begin to grasp the enormous amount of money that religion collects. How do they use that money?, do they use it in a really productive way?. If they use it to teach people to pray in order to prevent natural disasters or to win the favors of God, which seems to be the case, then they are wasting the money. Science can do much better, it's a proven fact.

Regrading this specific tsunami disaster, Patricio, what does religion have to do with the failure to construct an early warning system in that geographical area?

That area of the world was known to be tsunami-sensitive, there are historic records of tsunamis in that area. Why wasn't an early warning system already in place there?. For financial reasons, what else. If there were money available to construct such systems, through private donations, then how (and why) could any political authority prevent their implementation?

The tsunami disaster is just one example of the ravages of nature that cause so much human suffering. Religion is reponsible for wasting financial resources that could otherwise be used by Science to improve people's quality of life. That's the idea Richard Dawkings tried to convey in my opinion, with which I entirely agree.

 

[H3LL]

Many countries and cities are troubled with a long history of seismic disturbance of various kinds.

Some currently have strict building codes for tall buildings and have engineered some imaginative solutions such as base isolation.

Why should these engineers and architects bother wasting their time.

It surely would be cheaper to just post a monk or priest praying for protection at each building.

The people would probably be much happier seeing a direct channel to a deity working to protect their building rather than some invisible, incomprehesible lump of engineering lurking in the basement.

Science has helped no-one and praying is a tried-and-tested method that has been in use for thousands of years and is just as effective today as it's always been.

 

[valis]

Religion is reponsible for wasting financial resources that could otherwise be used by Science to improve people's quality of life. That's the idea Richard Dawkings tried to convey in my opinion, with which I entirely agree. [/B]

During the recent twin hurricanes in this area the only place to get a hot meal was the local church. This improved my quality of life quite a bit. MREs are an improvement over c rations but they still get old after a while.

The single mother across the street had her roof tarped by a church group from North Carolina whose members vouluntered their time to come to Florida and do good deeds. I would say that being able to sleep in a house with a watertight roof improved her quality of life.

I love science but religion has an important role in the daily life of many. When my wife was pregnant and I was traveling on buisness a local church pastor and his wife would stop by to check on her. We do not go to their church nor did we even know them. They heard about the situation and wanted to do something nice for a stranger.

When the baby was born it was at a hospital that is scientifically based. Both things have their role. I find Mr. Dawkins reasoning to be suprisingly poor. I suppose since he is British he was talking of taxing churches in England? To pay for a warning system where? I don't see the connection. I do see a knee jerk hatred of religion. Let's see tsunami in the far east, must somehow be the fault of those Jesus freaks down the street.

 

[T'ai Chi]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Dawkins's comments re: tsunami disaster

jj, you there?

Fact: atheists all lack belief in god(s). They all have that in common.

Even http://www.celebatheists.com/faq.html states that "atheists share no ideology other than their shared lack of belief'.

Question for jj, which he'll probably say is "illicit", or "suborned": does any atheist believe in god(s)?

 

[CFLarsen]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Dawkins's comments re: tsunami disaster

Even http://www.celebatheists.com/faq.html states that "atheists share no ideology other than their shared lack of belief'.

Oh, it's on a webpage. Must be true, then.

 

[T'ai Chi]

Not jj.

 

[CFLarsen]

Not jj.

So, I'm off your ignore list? Good.

 

[Rolfe]

I just think the whole thing was a tasteless and uncalled-for remark. Like the Zionist (from Cheshire) who decided that the best response to the tsunami was to write a letter to a newspaper in Glasgow praising Israel's humanitarian effort.

Get Real. Nobody sat down and said, a tsunami warning system would be nice, but we can't afford one because we have to give the money to religious causes. No religious organisation vetoed the proposal of a tsunami warning system in order to corner more money for itself. Indeed, I'd hazard a guess that if a local religious organisation had been seriously concerned about the threat of a tsunami they'd have tried to organise something.

Simply, everybody concerned, believers and unbelievers alike, just underestimated the risk. Probably because the fault-line had been apparently dormant for so long, when in reality it was storing up oodles of potential energy just ripe to create mayhem. It was a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, and using it to take cheap swipes at ones "enemies", be they anti-Zioinists or theists, is unworthy.

Rolfe.