by P. David Gardner
The ultra-religious never fail to astound me. Sometimes it's their bald-face ignorance of the scientific facts that lay before them for all to see. Sometimes it's their use of shouting (the louder voice always wins) to make you listen to them.
And sometimes, it's their not-so-clever and convoluted logic (or rather, lack of it) that they use to hammer their preconceived points home to the gullible and anyone else who will listen to their pathetic bleats.
Today was the latter case for me. In one fell swoop of twisted reasoning, a creationist has declared Richard Dawkins, noted atheist, ethologist and evolutionary biologist, to NOT be an atheist as Dawkins believes himself to be.
In a recent article at The Gospel Herald web site, Creation Museum CEO Ken Ham claims that not only is Dawkins not an atheist, neither are me, or you, or any one of the countless atheists on this planet we call home.
"Some Americans call themselves atheists," Ham said in a Facebook post, "and many in other countries openly profess atheism, but as I explain in my article below, there are no atheists now, and there will be no atheists in eternity."
That's quite a bold claim. Just how did Ham come to figure out that wildly ignorant claim?
Well, Ham cited a 2013 appearance by Dawkins on The Daily Show, where when asked by host Jon Stewart what happens when people die, Dawkins replied, "I don't know what happens to us, but I know that our consciousness is wrapped up in our brains. I know that our brains rot."
From that simple statement, Ham extrapolates that Dawkins is indeed not sure about his atheism. That's quite a reach, in this writer's opinion.
"So Richard Dawkins, a man who is so certain there is no God, is not totally certain about what's going to happen to him when he dies," Ham chortled with apparent glee. "And yet he speaks with certainty as he tries to indoctrinate people to believe in his religion of atheism!"
What's that? "Religion of atheism?" I never knew that atheism was a religion. I always assumed it was a distinct lack of religion myself, but maybe I'm wrong.
But further, Ham claims that Dawkins is not an atheist because in his hallowed opinion, no true atheists exist at all because the Bible apparently teaches that every person is born with an innate knowledge of God.
It's all quite preposterous, as Ham's assertions all lie within a book written specifically to further an agenda that was used to control the unwashed masses of the time, and unfortunately that control continues to this very day.
One might take heart in the fact that as such wonky pronouncements continue to unfold in an increasingly secular world full of people waking up to the fact that religion is a sham, it's apparent that the "faithful" are becoming quite desperate to hold onto their flimsy fabric of belief.
