What’s eating Dawkins?

Richard Dawkins has come up with a breakthrough in gastronomy

Professional atheist Richard Dawkins once wrote that Darwin taught us “everything we know about life”.

Now, atheists, no matter how breathtakingly clever, have preset limits to the reach of their intelligence. But even moderately clever ones wouldn’t commit such gibberish to paper.

Assuming that Darwin’s slapdash, politicised theory is correct in every detail – and even my hypothetical clever atheist wouldn’t assume that – it still doesn’t explain most things worth explaining, nor even tries to.

Before things evolve, they have to be: so what’s the origin of being, Richard? No response. How did the Earth come into existence? Ditto. What’s thought? Ditto. Why, by Darwin’s own admission, his theory can’t even explain such a comparatively simple thing as the human eye.

Nor does Darwin explain how an ideologised, manipulative nonentity like Dawkins became so popular. This, however, says more about modernity than about either Darwin or Dawkins, so let’s get them off the hook on this one.

Now that Stephen Hawking has gone to that great parallel universe, the field is clear for Dawkins to move in and propose universal solutions to universal problems, or those perceived as such.

One such problem is current, or especially impending, world hunger, and trust my friend Richard to solve it with one word. The word is cannibalism, using human flesh as a protein source.

One has to admit that the sight of a serving dish displaying roast Richard with an apple in his mouth isn’t without some aesthetic appeal.

But Dawkins precludes the possibility of such a culinary delight by specifying that the human meat he has in mind would be created from stem cells in the lab – not scavenged from the morgue or bought from some human abattoir where people would be culled for their buttocks. Thank God for that… sorry, Richard, wrong turn of phrase.

This way, explains Dawkins, we’d overcome the “taboo against cannibalism”. Perhaps. Equally possible is that an encouragement to coprophilia would rid us of the taboo against eating excrement, which, in book form, is the fare sustaining Dawkins’s readers.

The question is, why would we want to overcome such taboos? They are kind of cosy, customary and comfortable, like a pair of well-worn boots. Even for an atheist, who doesn’t believe in man’s special status, the sight of a humanburger would be revolting.

Precisely! That’s exactly the problem. For we live under the yoke of “yuck reaction absolutism”. Dawkins is happy to free us from this abomination by replacing it with “consequentialist morality”.

My friend Richard isn’t bright enough to realise that such ideas let the cat out of the bag. His brand of professional atheism isn’t new science – in fact, it’s no science at all. It’s new morality, or rather immorality.

Another moral guru, Princeton professor Peter Singer, hasn’t come up with a lofty term like ‘consequentialist morality’, but he too is keen to preach that there’s no moral difference between a man and a pig. I disagree, though I do admire his capacity for frank self-assessment. I also admire his logic.

Dawkins’ sermon of cannibalism logically flows out of his strident atheism, which goes to show that the premise on which the logic is based is perverse.

Likewise, Singer inadvertently debunks his Darwinist premise by allowing that humans and animals can have “mutually satisfying” sexual relations because “we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes.” Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”

With friends like Dawkins and Singer, Darwinist atheism doesn’t need enemas. For sound logical inference can turn any unsound theory into the sort of substance one sometimes steps into on the pavement.

Marxism, for example, logically leads to mass slaughter. What’s a few million lives when compared to creating paradise on earth? Yet those of us who suffer from ‘yuck reaction absolutism’ when treated to the sight of mangled corpses dumped into a ravine may begin to doubt the theory that leads to such practice – especially if we read what Marx, Engels et al actually wrote about genocide.

(This last phrase is for the benefit of the cerebrally challenged multitudes who insist that Marxism is a beautiful theory, lamentably perverted by the Soviets. Read your Marx, Engels et al, chaps, not their mendacious interpreters like Jeremy Corbyn.)

The mishmash of inanities that passes for Dawkins’s mind is proposing a cannibalistic solution to a problem that doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, really exist. There Darwin comes together with Malthus to crank out the phantom of a world starving to death because of overpopulation.

This is nonsense, as shown by empirical evidence. For example, Britain has four times the population density of Ethiopia. Yet Ethiopians periodically starve to death in vast numbers, whereas the British throw away more food than many Ethiopians eat.

Humanburgers won’t solve this problem because the problem isn’t physical but metaphysical, or civilisational if you will.

Our civilisation is capable of producing or buying enough food to feed our population without having to indulge Dawkins’s lucrative horror show. The Ethiopian civilisation isn’t so capable, and won’t be unless Ethiopians adopt our ways.

I suppose it’s too late for Dawkins to learn how to think, especially since many people encourage his idiocy by buying his books. I for one eagerly anticipate his next opus, The Kitchen Delights of Cannibalism.

P.S. And speaking of thinking, Manny Macron initially refused to support Mrs May’s puny punitive measures against Russia for lack of prima facie evidence.

But some conclusions don’t require it: they may be based on intuition, obvious inference, logical induction, ratiocination, common knowledge, expert opinion, etc. For example, there’s no prima facie evidence that cannibalism is immoral, that bestiality is wrong or that Manny is homosexual (not that there’s anything wrong with alternative lifestyles, I hasten to add).

9 thoughts on “What’s eating Dawkins?”

  1. Pope Urban VIII had an idea:
    Fair enough, Gallyo, you may be right. Suppose I check around?
    YOU HATE SCIENCE.
    Well, no. I just —
    YOU HATE SCIENCE.
    Gally, I don’t hate anyt–
    YOU HATE SCIENCE.
    Gally, there are other scientific things going on now, and some of what you say may be—
    YOU HATE SCIENCE.

    Sound familiar?

  2. I murmur this to myself all the time: “Muslim terrorists destroy our bodies, the New Atheists destroy our souls”

  3. Animals eating their own kind can lead to something like Mad Cow disease but is across the board regardless of species? This is undecided.

    Idi Amin Dada is reputed to have eaten human flesh but found it to be too salty for his liking. Idi such an expert on so many things he was.

  4. In science, a theory is just an idea that generates hypotheses that must be tested. Non-scientists (and that includes most career scientists nowadays but also arty types and political opportunists) can take a theory as fact (without any testing). In the past, this has given rise to the most preposterous and often immoral policies based on perversions such as ‘Social Darwinism’ and Eugenics.

    Cannibalism, by the way, is more common in Nature than most people think. Johnathan Swift beat Dawkins by nearly three centuries with his Modest Proposal. But of course, in those days satire and irony were much more practised and understood. Come on Dawkins, it’s not quite April Fools’s day yet, so upload a You Tube video of yourself shovelling down some stem cell fritters. However, I suppose the like most do-gooders such as eugenicists, your remarks are selflessly intended as a prescription for others and not for you to experience personally.

  5. I think the moving force behind test tube beef [meat of what ever sort] is some Hindu guy who doesn’t want cows killed.

  6. Ants, who are far more rational than us, eat those members of society who are not economically active. We could do the same with our unemployed, prisoners and pensioners.

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