Believe That, and You'll Believe Anything...

In spite of having to take a day or two off work with a horrible cold, I truly enjoyed Richard Dawkins' first of two programmes on last night's television - "Root of All Evil? 1. The God Delusion” channel 4 tv

In a promo he said something like:

"In a world without God you would still have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. It takes religion to get good people to do evil things..."

BIFF! POW!

Dawkins talked to some seriously scary people last night. A U.S. Fundamentalist pastor (and friend of GWB)who eventually threw him off his land, shouting “you're calling my children animals!” because he talked of evolution - so I guess that male pastor doesn't have defunct mammalian nipples. (That God, He’s such a kidder!)

A NY Jew converted to Islam living in Jerusalem who wanted Dawkins to stop his women walking around dressed as whores.

He also showed American freethinkers meeting in secret...I have to say, much though I enjoyed my visits to America, I really have begun to get scared by them as a culture...if about half of them really do think the world is no older than 10,000 years and everything in one of the English translations of the Bible has literal truth. The parallels in mindless group behaviour to Germany in the 30s, or the religious superstition and hysteria of the Middle Ages seem to have grown. Scary.

I reckon Dawkins best soundbite of the night went something like

"None of us believe in the Greek gods, or the pagan gods, or the old Chinese or Indian gods. Atheists like me have just gone one god further."

Don't miss Part 2! “Root of All Evil? 2. The Virus of Faith” Monday, 16th January at 8:00 pm on Channel 4.

Did You Know?

The word "God" does not actually appear in the original Hebrew or Greek manuscripts of the Bible, accepted as Holy by both Christians and Muslims. "God" is an old English word which developed from an Indo-European word, meaning "that which is invoked," which is also the ancestor of the German word Gott (meaning: God).

Some Christians unthinkingly say 'Allah is not God.' This is the ultimate blasphemy to Muslims, and furthermore, it is difficult to understand. Allah is the primary Arabic word for God. It means 'The God.' There are some minor exceptions. For example, the Bible in some Muslim lands uses a word for God other than Allah (Farsi and Urdu are examples). But for more than five hundred years before Muhammad, the vast majority of Jews and Christians in Arabia called God by the name Allah. How, then, can we say that Allah is an invalid name for God? If it is, to whom have these Jews and Christians been praying?

And what about the 10 to 12 million Arab Christians today? They have been calling God 'Allah' in their Bibles, hymns, poems, writings, and worship for over nineteen centuries. What an insult to them when we tell them not to use this word 'Allah'! Instead of bridging the distance between Muslims and Christians, we widen the gulf of separation between them and us when we promote such a doctrine. Those who still insist that it is blasphemy to refer to God as Allah should also consider that Muhammad's father was named Abd Allah, 'God's servant,' many years before his son was born or Islam was founded!"