Lying for Jesus is still lying Mr. Sibley
“Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
These words were spoken by Steven Weinburg last fall. They reappeared a few days ago in an article by Robert Sibley in the Ottawa Citizen titled ‘The dangers of Militant atheism“. As you can probably guess from title of the article, the tone is “those atheists are out to get us!”. I was ready to dismiss it as just another persecution piece until I got to the part about Weinberg.
Steven Weinberg is a physicist at the University of Texas and the quote above is taken from his speech at Beyond Belief 2006 at the Salk Institute. You can watch his speech here, but here’s the full comment (about 26 minutes into the video):
“What do we do about this conflict? There are those who’s views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, to compromise it. For example, Steven Gould and Larry Krause feel that it’s most important to maintain the integrity of scientific teaching.
We should try to enlist the mainstream religions who are often perfectly comfortable with the teaching of Darwinism in school as (unintelligible part, probably “allies”) and not step on their toes by talking about a confrontation between science and religion. Ed Wilson, another dear friend, wants to enlist the mainline religious denominations as allies in the defense of the environment.
I respect their views and I understand their motives. I don’t condemn them, but I’m not having it. To me the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think that the world needs to wake up from it’s long nightmare of religious belief, and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in fact in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
What does it sound like to you? A man disagreeing with his peers about how his like-minded colleagues should behave towards religion or (from Mr. Sibley’s article after quoting Weinburg):
Anything? Did Weinberg ever consider what would be required to rid the world of religion? Plato gives a hint in The Republic when his character Socrates gains Glaucon’s agreement that the best way to achieve the just city is to take children away from parents and let philosopher-kings raise them.Left unsaid — or rather, left to the imagination of attentive readers — is the knowledge that trying to separate parents from their children would result in mass murder.
Plato was being ironic, of course, but there’s no irony — or humility — in the new atheists, as they’ve been labelled. I’m not suggesting they would endorse mass murder in the name of progress, but their “militant atheism,” to borrow journalist Richard Bernstein’s phrase, is dangerously fanatical.
A potentially dangerous fanatic that looks forward to the day when blackbooted atheists start kicking in doors and cracking parents in the head with the butt of a rifle when they won’t willing turn over their children?
From where I stand, it’s the former - not the latter and the fact that Sibley does his best to make Weinberg out to be a madman is frankly unbecoming. Yet, it does goes to show how far religious people will go to stop mere dissent.
In short, if you don’t kiss their ass on demand, you obviously want to bash their head in.
It was disgusting twenty years ago. It’s still disgusting today.
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I think you mean “lying”. It’s weird that it turns to a Y, but it’s correct.