A letter to Professor Richard Dawkins

This is a letter I sent to Professor Richard Dawkins, who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, who is a respected biologist and outspoken atheist, who has repeatedly warned of the dangers of religion and the need for the questioning of blind faith.

Prof. Dawkins,

While I agree completely with your view that religion should not be exempt from logical criticism, or questioning, I am however quite disturbed by your view of religion as totally non-essential....while you may have not voiced out this opinion explicitly, it is however evident from the tone of your writing and speech...though I whole-heartedly agree that we don’t derive our moral values and social mores from religion, and that it is probable that it arose out of Darwinian selection and genetic misfiring, I feel that religion actually performs a far more useful role: as a vehicle to carry these values and to pass them on to society...it helps people to justify and explain why we follow these values and mores..though the stories told are probably lies and untruths, the point is it gets the message across to the common man on how he is expected to behave...and it interesting to note that a common man is more likely to follow the values and social niceties if you justify it through religion, rather than explain that it is a result of Darwinian natural selection. If you would for a moment shift your focus away from Judeo-Christian religions and turn your gaze upon the Asiatic religions, you would find, especially in Hinduism that this is the case. Very few people and I'm sorry to say I'm not one of them, have actually studied the Vedas, the supposed holy texts of Hinduism, but many people know of the messages within them..and it is interesting to note that these messages do not concern themselves with God or the prospects of Godhead....rather it is more towards how a person should conduct himself in society..and these messages are transmitted to the people not through the holy texts themselves but through the 2 Indian epics, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata...which were actually passed on through the oral traditions of storytellers who move from village to village....people to an extent do follow the messages contained therein, not because they are scared- as you put it-of the giant surveillance camera in the sky-but because the characters in these stories kind of play the part of a role model....Prince Rama (in the Ramayana) is supposed to be the very embodiment of the perfect man...the perfect husband, the perfect King and so on....but getting back to the point...it is not religion itself that you should target but rather the mindset of the people who would rather not question the logic of what they believe in. The real enemy is not religion; it is ignorance, blind faith, and an unquestioning mind. Target these and you might find much more support not only from fellow atheists but from the ranks of religion itself. And for the record, I am not a religious person, but I am not an atheist as well...I would rather describe myself as a secular humanist...the reason I am not an atheist is because I believe that absence of evidence is not justification enough to discredit an established belief; existence of counter-evidence is necessary...while it is pretty much clear that God or any other supernatural being is not responsible for life or the existence of man...I believe that the constants that form an integral part of the laws of physics are too finely tuned to have existed through natural selection alone, and while this alone is not justification enough for the existence of a god, it does mean that we cannot reject that theory outright until we find a plausible explanation for the existence of these constants. Now I do realize that you might counter-argue this using the flying spaghetti monster or the tooth faerie, but my point is that while the God that we think of most probably does not exist, there may be another form, or Force if you may call it (I’m an unrepentant Star Wars fan) that binds this universe together and while it would not be what we call a tangible being with intelligence as such, this Force could technically fill our definition for god.....it could be a much higher level of the Laws of physics which is responsible for the Laws that we are familiar with; a kind of Father-Laws, which through mathematical inevitability could give rise to the laws that define this Universe.....maybe it might be the Laws that define another Universe that could have given birth to the Laws that define this Universe...anyway the point is that while God does not and could not exist in the form that we think of...it could be something else entirely different that is responsible for the way things are....something that is so magical and marvelous and mysterious that we in our ignorance might mistake for God...and I’m very very sure that Science will someday find an answer....and in this aspect I might credit religion: it would provide the impetus to scientists to explore not just the laws of this universe but rather to start looking for the origin of these Laws themselves...to start looking for that magical and marvelous thing that is responsible for the way things are, whether it be a faerie, or Force, or Law or midichlorian......

Why McCain is the better choice than either Obama or Clinton, and why he's more likely to win..

1. He's started attacking Obama and Clinton while they're both still busy hacking at each other.

2. He's not Bush.

3. He 's a friggin POW man!! Plus he's been tortured so he can probably handle the heat of being Prez better than Clinton (who might cry) or Obama (who'd probably give very inspiring speeches but thats about it)

4. He has a FAR better record on climate issues than either one of those 2 jackasses-Senator McCain along with Sn. Lieberman has sponsored cap-and-trade bills in 2003,2005, and 2007. Obama and Clinton? Well......there's talk about them co-sponsoring the Lieberman-Warner Bill...but they may abandon it if it moves to the Right..as usual to avoid consorting with the Enemy

5. The man's a realist-he accepted that the Iraq war is an absolute mess-but he knows as much
as anyone else that the US has no moral right to abandon it-and he's accepted it and has been totally realistic about military presence in Iraq-maybe another decade or so....Clinton, on the other hand wants to start pulling troops out within 6 months--probably the worst mistake ever in the long sad history of bad mistakes, one that could rival the actual invasion of Iraq itself.

6. He has an excellent war record-POW for 5 years, been horrifically tortured to the point of disability-and yet refusing the offer of repatriation unless all of his comrades were taken as well-which kinda demonstrates the iron will needed of President.

7. Though he's a Republican and therefore technically an Enemy; he has a reputation for being independent, often challenging party leadership and estanlishment forces, even defying efforts to categorize him politically.

8. He has a son serving in Iraq, and yet chose not to brag about it or use it in his campaigning. His position on Iraq is therefore far more informed than either Obama and Clinton; since he has direct reports from his son on the battlefield.

9. He helped the US govt. to normalize diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995.

10.He would have been the US president instead of Bush had he not been defeated in the most dirtiest and battle for a primary (South Carolina) by Bush. (He had among others been accused of fathering a black child out of wedlock-his daughter Bridget had been adopted from a Bangladeshi orphanage; that his wife was a drug addict; and that he was a Manchurian Candidate traitor or mentally unstable from his POW days-he incidentally was tortured so much he can no longer lift his arm above his head.)