Grr. This is a video of Richard Dawkins on the O’Reilly Factor. O’Reilly is annoying, but then he pretty much always annoys me. Key points to take from this:
“Leap of faith.” O’Reilly is the one who takes a position of certainty. Atheism by definition is a lack of belief and agnosticism is a lack of knowledge. In and of themselves they are not positions of certainty (although there are atheists who go further than lacking belief in a deity believing there are no deities).
“Being humble is a Christian virtue.” Being humble may be a virtue but it is not an exclusively Christian one and you don’t get it by becoming a Christian, so no, it’s not a “Christian virtue”. Furthermore, Christians believe the universe has been made for them and that there is a god out there watching their every move. How is that a humble belief? It’s the height of egocentrism.
Ignoring the incorrect lumping of Hitler in with the others, O’Reilly misses the key point that Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot had more in common with the religious than the non-religious in the sense that they were pursuing goals in the name of dogma. Dogma is a core plank of religion and probably the major problem with it. Atheism in and of itself is not dogmatic: it is a lack of belief, not a proscriptive belief in that which does not have proof.
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