Vox Day and Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh D'Souza is out promoting his new book What's So Great About Christianity. As a result, we get to enjoy some really bad editorials and interviews. This is what Dinesh D'Souza had to say in a recent interview with Vox Day:

The first is a case that I try to make that Christianity is responsible for the core institutions and values that secular people, and even atheists, cherish. If you look at books by leading atheists and you make a list of the values that they care about, things like the right to individual defense, the notion of personal dignity, equality and respect for women, opposition to social hierarchy and slavery, compassion as a social value, the idea of self-government and representative government, and so forth, you'll see that many of these things came into the world because of Christianity.

Let's just examine really quickly what the Bible has to say about each of those "values that secular people, and even atheists, cherish."

(1) "the right to individual defense"

First off, this seems like a weird thing to include. I don't think that Christianity, or any philosophy, can claim to be the source of "respecting individual defense." It's really just something that's reflexive, and it's common in every society ever.

Nonetheless, the Bible has some counter-intuitive things to say on the subject:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles."

[Matthew 5: 38-42]

(2) "the notion of personal dignity"

Again, is Dinesh claiming that Christianity is the source of "the notion of personal dignity"? This seems like another blatant case of over-reaching.

It's worth pointing out, however, that the Old Testament God all-too-frequently ordered his people to rape and kill innocent women and children. Here is one example:

Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ravished.

See, I will stir up against them the Medes, who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold.

Their bows will strike down the young men; they will have no mercy on infants nor will they look with compassion on children.

[Isaiah 13:15-18]

(3) "equality and respect for women"

Is Dinesh really going to make the argument that Christianity is the source of equality and respect for women? Here are just two samples of what the Bible says about equality for women:

women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

[1 Corinthians 14:34-35]

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

[Ephesians 5:23-25]

(4) "opposition to social hierarchy and slavery"

Whoa, there. Really?

"You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."

[Exodus 20:17]

"If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, 21 but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property."

[Exodus 21:20]

"Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh."

[1 Peter 2:18]

(5) "compassion as a social value"

Another case of some really amazing over-reaching. As if nobody thought of compassion as a social value before Christianity.

(6) "the idea of self-government and representative government"

You're kidding me, right? The idea undeniably pre-dates Christianity. This argument is simply a bad one.

It's one thing to say that some of these things were incorporated into Christianity somehow. It's quite another to claim (as Dinesh the exaggerator does), that Christianity is the source of all these wonderful things (and, as a consequence, that Atheists should be thanking Christians).

I'm glad that modern Christians and atheists (and lots of other people who don't fall into either of those categories) value these things today (sometimes in spite of what the Bible said 2000 years ago). But it really frustrates me when people like Dinesh D'Souza try to claim that their philosophy is the originator of all these values. It's a claim that's easily disproven, yet all-too-frequently made.

Dinesh D'Souza Builds, Burns Straw Man

Dinesh D'Souza is out promoting his new book What's So Great About Christianity. As a result, we get to enjoy some really bad editorials. Here is what D'Souza writes in the Christian Science Monitor:

This atheist attack is based on a fallacy – the Fallacy of the Enlightenment. It was pointed out by the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant erected a sturdy intellectual bulwark against atheism that hasn't been breached since. His defense doesn't draw on sacred texts or any other sources of authority to which people of faith might naturally and rightfully turn when confronted with atheist arguments. Instead, it relies on the only framework that today's atheist proselytizers say is valid: reason. The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know – reality itself. This view says we can find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. It holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.

D'Souza spends the rest of his article arguing against the proposition that we can "unmask the whole of reality." Never mind the fact that this is completely 100% not the atheist argument at all.

I also like this line of argument:

When atheists summarily dismiss such common ideas as the immortality of the soul or the afterlife on the grounds that they have never found any empirical proofs for either, they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain that is entirely beyond the reach of the senses. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of such evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence.

Translation: "Just because I don't have any proof at all doesn't mean I'm wrong!"

Here is the sweeping conclusion:

Atheism foolishly presumes that reason is in principle capable of figuring out all that there is, while theism at least knows that there is a reality greater than, and beyond, that which our senses and our minds can ever apprehend.

"So, I can't know if I'm, like, in the matrix "

Really, though, this is at best an argument for Agnosticism. Only if one defines Atheism as "the belief that we can in principle unmask the whole of reality through our human senses," rather than the more realistic "lack of belief in a personal Deity," does this line of argument make any sense whatsoever. I personally don't know any "Atheists" who fall into the first category, but I know plenty who say "maybe there is a God/Allah/Yahweh/Thor/Odin/Zeus, but in the absence of any real evidence, I don't see why I should positively believe in its existence."

Oh yeah, and this is the same Dinesh D'Souza who dated Ann Coulter, used the Virginia Tech shooting to denounce atheism, blamed liberals for provoking 9/11, and used stolen correspondence to out gay college students when he was editor of the Dartmouth Review.

(h/t Something Awful, falcon2424, corkskroo, spicychickenstyle)