First Dawkins response to Boteach:
Richard Dawkins Responds to Rabbi Shmuley BoteachRichard Dawkins
Posted: May 8, 2008 04:28 PM
...I remembered many other Oxford debates in which Rabbi Boteach was the chairman, and I am sorry that the one debate in which he was a protagonist seems to have made no impression at all upon my memory
(it was twelve years ago). My (apparently) unforgivable lapse was exacerbated by the fact that Shmuley himself stated, in the Jerusalem Post (April 13th 2008) that the debate occurred in St Catherine's College, Oxford, when in fact it was in Oxford's Law Library: a trivial lapse of memory on his part which abetted mine, but it is in any case ludicrous to describe any lapse of memory, on either side, as an 'attack'. I eventually found a recording of this Oxford debate on Youtube. Unfortunately somebody has now taken it down. Why? Maybe Shmuley could post it again, so we can all enjoy his oratorical style. Which brings me to his main cry-baby complaint -- that I compared his style of speaking to Hitler's. I have already responded to this as follows:
Dear Shmuley,
I did not say you think like Hitler, or hold the same opinions as Hitler, or do terrible things to people like Hitler. Obviously and most emphatically you don't. I said you shriek like Hitler. That is the only point of resemblance, and it is true. You shriek and yell and rant like Hitler. Not all the time, of course. You also tell very good jokes, and tell them brilliantly. You deservedly get lots of laughs, as a good comedian should. But throughout your speeches you periodically rise to climaxes of shrieking rant, and that is just like Hitler. Incidentally, Dinesh D'Souza yells and shrieks in just the same way. I suppose it impresses some people, although it is hard to believe.
Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling. Hitler had nothing but nonsense to say. He spoke nonsense about race, nonsense about history, nonsense about Jews. If one speaks nonsense in a calm and sober voice nobody listens, so Hitler yelled his nonsense at the top of his voice and, unfortunately, people listened -- stupid, ignorant people. You have sensible things to say about sex and love, and you have no need to yell when you are talking sense. Unfortunately, when you turn to the subject of evolution, you don't know what you are talking about, so you yell and shriek to make up for it. Maybe yelling and shrieking works with an ignorant audience. It apparently worked for Hitler, but that is not a happy precedent. You should know better. Go and read some books about evolution, learn something about biology, and you'll then find that you can talk about it in a calm and civilised voice. You'll find that you won't need to yell and shriek like a madman, and you'll be all the more persuasive for it.
Just a piece of friendly advice
All good wishes
Richard
Instead of saying that Boteach shrieks like Hitler, what I should probably have said is that Boteach shrieks like a preacher (he has even won a preaching competition!) and Hitler too shrieked like a preacher because that is what, in a way, he was.
I am aware that, however just the comparison, there is a kind of taboo against invoking the name of Hitler at all. It's understandable. Yet Boteach himself is often the first to drag in Hitler's name, making the preposterous claim that Hitler was an atheist and that his odious behavior stemmed from that alleged atheism. This tactic is lamentably common among religious apologists. Only this week, the Head of the Roman Catholic Church in England made the remarkable statement that Hitler's regime was "a dictatorship ruled by reason, and where does it lead? To terror and oppression". Boteach's own version of this kind of nastiness is to be found in his description, on Beliefnet, of his debate with Christopher Hitchens.
Even Hitchens acknowledges that the world's foremost genocides have all been committed by secular, atheistic regimes who maintained the right to determine which lives were worth preserving, and which should be discarded. Hitler murdered at least twelve million. Stalin, another thirty million. Mao, perhaps 40 million. And Pol Pot killed one-third of all Cambodians in the mid-1970s. Indeed, the number of people killed by the secular atheist regimes of the 20th century dwarfs all the people killed in the name of religion from the beginning of recorded history until the present.
***
Are atheists in general to be smeared with shared guilt for mass murder and genocide? An obnoxious accusation, and one that needs more substantiation than Rabbi Boteach, or the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, or anyone else, can provide (it's rubbish, of course, as many have explained, including Christopher Hitchens in God is not Great). Yet Boteach has the barefaced cheek to throw a hysterical hissy fit when I suggest that he shares with Hitler something so relatively trivial as a speech mannerism. Motes and beams come to mind, as do pots and kettles. Which brings us full circle. The storm in this particular teapot has run its course and deserves no more agitation. Peace. Let's have a nice cup of tea and all calm down.
Richard Dawkins
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/2591 Rabbi Boteach comparing evolution and scientists to Hitler:
G-d Is Greater Than Christopher Hitchens
Atheists love to bash the Bible. But only biblical standards preserve us from a morality based on survival of the fittest.BY: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
He (Hitchens) began with a typically acerbic attack against religion, saying that Stephen Hawking had more wisdom in his little finger than all the pages of the Bible combined.
When my turn came, I responded that the great, wheelchair-bound physicist was fortunate that religion, rather than evolutionary thinking, had been the stronger influence on British morality. Hawking is a very incapacitated man, and many evolutionary biologists maintain that a life like his should never have been preserved in the first place. The Bible establishes the infinite value and indeterminable sanctity of every human life, whether healthy or diseased. Evolution, of which Hitchens is a firm devotee, advocates the survival of the fittest.
If you toss out the Bible and religion, you’re left with evolutionary morality in its place, with its emphasis on the value of life being determined by its quality. Sufferers of major illnesses like Prof. Hawking would never stand a chance.
Thankfully for Prof. Hawking, the society he lived in embraced biblical morality and rejected the evolutionary idea of survival of the fittest. Prof. Hawking is not the fittest, but that does not mean that he should not exist. It’s because societies abide by biblical standards that he’s been given ongoing medical care and continues to enrich humanity with his genius.
***
Hitler used this argument as the rationale for his program of euthanasia for the mentally defective. As quoted by Martin Borman in ‘Hitler’s Table Talk,’ the German leader said, "In nature there is no pity for the lesser creatures when they are destroyed so that the fittest may survive. Going against nature brings ruin to man...and is a sin against the will of the eternal Creator. It is only Jewish impudence to demand that we overcome nature."
***
Hitler also believed in "Do not murder." But it was he who determined to whom this law applied and to whom it did not. Even Hitchens acknowledges that the world's foremost genocides have all been committed by secular, atheistic regimes who maintained the right to determine which lives were worth preserving, and which should be discarded. Hitler murdered at least twelve million. Stalin, another thirty million. Mao, perhaps 40 million. And Pol Pot killed one-third of all Cambodians in the mid-1970s. Indeed, the number of people killed by the secular atheist regimes of the 20th century dwarfs all the people killed in the name of religion from the beginning of recorded history until the present.
Read the rest of this garbage
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2005/03/G-D-Is-Greater-Than-Christopher-Hitchens.aspx">here:
*make sure you check out the comments - Boteach gets a major smackdown for his dishonesty:
One would expect a rabbi to disagree with an atheist, but why tell lies? How positively disingenuous of you, s4p, I wish I could say I was surprised.
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