{"id":3930,"date":"2009-04-28T13:45:09","date_gmt":"2009-04-28T18:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anglicansamizdat.wordpress.com\/?p=3930"},"modified":"2009-04-28T13:45:09","modified_gmt":"2009-04-28T18:45:09","slug":"richard-dawkins-the-4-commandments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/richard-dawkins-the-4-commandments\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Dawkins: the 4 commandments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In his book, <em>&#8220;River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life&#8221;<\/em> Richard Dawkins maintains:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is an honest, bleak assessment of a universe without God. Dawkins does not manage to live down to his own belief system, however: in &#8220;<em>The God Delusion<\/em>&#8220;, in spite of the absence of good or evil, Dawkins maintains that atheists can be &#8220;moral&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>What does it mean to be &#8220;moral&#8221; in Richard Dawkins&#8217; view? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spectator.co.uk\/the-magazine\/features\/26844\/part_6\/a-man-who-believes-in-darwin-as-fervently-as-he-hates-god.thtml\" target=\"_blank\">Here<\/a>, we find the 4 commandments, written in naturally selected primeval\u00a0 soup, fossilised\u00a0 and handed personally to Richard by Darwin himself:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Richard Dawkins&#8217;s Commandments<\/p>\n<p>1. Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.<\/p>\n<p>2. Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.<\/p>\n<p>3. Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate science, and how to disagree with you.<\/p>\n<p>4. Value the future of things on a timescale longer than your own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It would be hard for any belief system to come up with a more bumper-sticker-worthy set of banalities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his book, &#8220;River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life&#8221; Richard Dawkins maintains: &#8220;The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/richard-dawkins-the-4-commandments\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[141],"tags":[2238],"class_list":["post-3930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","tag-richard-dawkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}