Desmond Tutu given $1.6m for being spiritual

More exactly, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”.

Last year the Dalai Lama won it. Someone should tell Richard Dawkins that there is big money to be made in “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”.

From here:

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has won the £1.1m ($1.6m) Templeton Prize for “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”.

Organisers said he was awarded the 2013 prize for his lifelong work advancing spiritual principles such as love and forgiveness that have helped to liberate people around the world.

The Templeton Prize

The Templeton prize is supposed to honour someone who:

has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.

This year, the winner was Martin Rees, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University who “has no religious beliefs”, but occasionally attends Church of England Sunday worship – where he fits right in.

It might be possible for this to be more mixed up, but so far we have Rees who doesn’t believe in God, but attends an Anglican Church sporadically, winning a prize for making an “exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension”.

But wait, there’s more: real atheists like Richard Dawkins reckon he’s let the side down by “blur[ring] the boundary between science and religion, making a virtue of belief without evidence”. Meanwhile, Dawkins continues to believe, without evidence*, that the excogitations of the grey soup beneath his thinning curly locks are of a weightier substance than Mr Gumby’s flower arranging instructions.

* J. B. S. Haldane: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…. and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms”