The Tangled Bank

In my house, we have one 19" television, which is relegated to the basement. We have basic cable (it's part of our deal to get high speed DSL to the house), and we get 40 or 50 channels. We get TBN and PAX, I can watch Benny Hinn and John Hagee just about any hour of the day (not that I bother), and even our local public access channel is clogged with broadcasts of church services. I can safely predict, though, that I will never see this show on my cable.

The Root of All Evil

Professor Richard Dawkins, the world-renowned evolutionary biologist, whose atheism has earned him the nickname of 'Darwin's Rottweiler', takes a personal journey through the world's three great monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Dawkins thinks it is time for science to stop sitting on the fence. In the light of overwhelming scientific evidence that, he believes, shows a supreme being cannot exist, and in a world in which religious conflict and bigotry are increasingly centre stage, Dawkins argues that for the good of humanity, religion needs to be challenged and disproved. Never one to shy away from a debate, Dawkins meets leaders from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions to find out how their beliefs fit with modern science's extraordinary knowledge of our world and the wider universe.

In The Root of All Evil Dawkins accuses the religious establishment of preying on people's desire to believe in a greater being; abusing reason and humanity in the process. Ultimately he asks how they can defend what religion has done, and is doing to us?

Can you imagine the shrieks if PBS put that on?

There's a bit of a review in the Sunday Herald.

If this piece of work gets those kinds of results [shaking the middle ground into thinking about the issue], it will be as much because of its tone as its content. Television, like the society from which it broadcasts, has found it expedient to display ever greater tolerance, indulgence and relativism in regard to lifestyle choices, particularly matters of faith. For this reason, Dawkins's eminently reasonable argument may come across as almost radical in its forcefulness.

That's just the thing: the arguments against the nonsense of religion are reasonable and rational, plain common sense, yet people get the trembly vapors in reaction to any criticism of religion. Even those who don't believe get all anxious, worrying that we might alienate that herd of sheep who happen to have the vote over there.

Ophelia Benson is all over it, of course, with quotes from the program. A new blog gets off to a bang with an excellent review of the program (someone who actually watched it last night! I am so jealous.) Dawkins boldly strolled into the lion's den, interviewing an evangelical pastor, Ted Haggard, and showing him up to be an ignorant fool.

One depressing aspect of this programme was watching Dawkins try to talk to the religiously devout. In the US, he meets up with an evangelical pastor, a staunch Republican who claims to have weekly telephone meetings with Bush, himself devout, and who has also hob-knobbed with Blair and other dignitaries. The pastor raises the issue of evolution, and ridicules the notion that the eye happened by "accident". Poor Dawkins must have feared his head would bust, as I did, when he heard this! He replied, incredulously, "Accident?! I've never heard any evolutionary biologist describe evolution as an accident!". The pastor carried on, unfazed, saying that if only Dawkins had read the books that he'd read, spoken with the scientists that he has spoken to, then he might see things differently. To his credit, Dawkins was forthright and said, essentially, that it was clear that the pastor knew nothing about biology, at which point the pastor adopted a slow, deliberate, patronising tone, and told Dawkins not to be arrogant - having just claimed that the bible is correct and unchanging and has the all the answers. He later chased Dawkins off the premises of his religious megaplex, threatening to call the police and accusing Dawkins of calling his children animals (presumably because Dawkins believes in evolution). Words fail me.

Nobody should ever call Dawkins arrogant. On the scale established by American televangelists, by Christians in general, he is a timid model of bashful humility. Pit a man who works for his knowledge, who willingly tests and reviews it continually, against a mob who trusts in revealed knowledge dogmatically, and I'll tell you who the arrogant ones are.

So, anyone know where I can get my hands on a DVD of this program, in NTSC and playable in Region 1? Also, who can I contact about getting the rights to show it—you know that local access channel that shows the Morris church services? I'd love to walk into the city hall and fill out the forms to get this show on the cable.

That Sunday Herald review makes a big deal about the polarizing effect of this kind of thing, and wonders if it is mere preaching to the converted. I don't think so. The thing is that most people are never, ever exposed to this sort of thing in this country—there's a kind of voluntary self-censorship going on—and confronting the issue head-on is exactly what we need. We don't need to convert people to atheism, but we do need to wake them up and let them know that there are legitimate arguments with their unquestioning acceptance of Christian dogma.

If nothing else, it would be good to make more people aware that sneaking into hearing rooms to annoint chairs is embarrassingly insane behavior for the religious to condone.

I just saw the program myself, thanks to BitTorrent. It's very good—especially since I've rarely seen anything that spells out the problems of religion so clearly shown here.

I must also say…Ted Haggard is extraordinarily creepy.