Suicide linked to ‘The God Delusion’
I’ve seen this story in a few places, and it’s worth making mention of:
A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college, to the anti-Christian book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.
“He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong,” the relative wrote. “I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn’t wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences – that was all there was – just social consequences.”
Vox Day comments on the story with an observation that occurred to me as well: this young man was evidently smart enough to reason out the logical conclusion to secular humanist moral theory…and yet wasn’t bright enough to recognize that The God Delusion is not so much a scholarly work as it is the atheist equivalent of a particularly long-winded Jack Chick tract (replete with about as many fallacies and logical flaws as a Chick tract typically displays).
Vox puts it a bit more colourfully:
I’m not surprised that someone should shoot himself after reading The God Delusion. The thought of suicide has to cross any intelligent individual’s mind upon reading it and realizing that there are literally hundreds of thousands of dim-witted individuals eligible to vote who genuinely believe TGD to be a masterpiece of science, Philosophy, and reason rather than the insubstantial bit of intellectually fatuous, snipe-and-dodge evangelical atheism it actually is. Such a waste. It’s tragic to think that after reaching the correct logical conclusion to Dawkinsian moral logic, the unfortunate young man didn’t see fit to shoot the pretentious Archbishop of High Church Atheism first.
…the possibility of this sort of thing happening is one of the reasons I wrote The Irrational Atheist (buy it at Amazon.com!
) – readers may recall my assertion that sociopathy and suicide are among the logical consequences of rational atheism…
Sorry, but that’s pretty much the long and short of it: if Dawkins’ work shakes your faith, you aren’t that bright to begin with. And if you honestly believe that this life is all there is, and that there is no objective moral standard to which we are held, why not just off yourself? I mean, what’s the alternative? A life of illness, hard work, more illness, inclement weather, and (eventually) the ravages of old age, culminating (per Shakespeare) in a second infancy and a meaningless death?
Might as well just skip to the finish, no?
I started blogging back in 2004 -- in May, if the Wayback Machine is to be believed. Not that I remember the exact day. To be honest, I didn't take it that seriously then; it was a fun distraction, but nothing more.
That all changed, I think, once the Danish cartoons were published, and the assault on the right to freedom of expression became very visible. With the recent issues in Canada concerning the "human rights" commissions, the gravity of the matter has only increased, and my interest in blogging has increased right along with it.
I used to blog at a domain called Time Immortal, but it seemed to be the right time for a change -- there's been a lot of that in my life of late. Hence this blog: a fresh start, and proof positive that I won't shut up even if I get shut down once in a while.
