Dawkins on South Park
Richard Dawkins was recently caricatured in the South Park episode Go God Go.
Warning: This clip is very funny and calculated to offend!
While treating anti-evolutionists as harshly as they deserve, overall the episode ends up warning against “irreligious intolerance” in much the same way Kristof argued in his NYT column, and implies that even if everyone became atheist, we would still have intolerance and wars. The fact is, if there is still dogmatism we will still have wars. To quote Sam Harris:
Were the regimes of Stalin and Hitler actually the products of too much intellectual honesty? Was an overweening demand for good evidence and coherent argument really what built the Soviet gulag and the Nazi crematoria? Are the Swedes — a majority of whom appear to be atheists (poll results range from 45-80%) — gearing up for the next great atrocity? It is amazing to see someone like [Scott] Atran defend religious dogmatism by pointing out that the consequences of political and racist dogmatism have also been terrible. One of the most conspicuous problems with communism and fascism is that they are so similar to religions. These political ideologies are systems of brittle, divisive, and dehumanizing dogmatism. And they regularly give rise to personality cults which evince all the perverse features of religious hero-worship. I invite Atran to produce a single example of a society that has suffered because its members became too reasonable — that is, too open to evidence and argument, too critical of dogma, etc.
