Richard Dawkins has hatched a plot to arrest the head of a sovereign state. We are talking about the Pope, who is the head of state of the Vatican:

Vatican City /?væt?k?n ?s?ti/ (help·info), officially the State of the Vatican City (Italian: Stato della Città del Vaticano, pronounced [?sta(?)to del?a t?i?t?a del vati?ka(?)no]), is a landlocked sovereign city-state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome, the capital city of Italy. It has an area of approximately 44 hectares (110 acres) (0.44 km2), and a population of just over 800.

Vatican City is a city-state that came into existence in 1929. It is distinct from the Holy See, which dates back to early Christianity and is the main episcopal see of 1.147 billion Latin and Eastern Catholic adherents around the globe. Ordinances of Vatican City are published in Italian; official documents of the Holy See are issued mainly in Latin. The two entities even have distinct passports: the Holy See, not being a country, only issues diplomatic and service passports; the state of Vatican City issues normal passports. In both cases the passports issued are very few.

The Lateran Treaty in 1929, which brought the city-state into existence, spoke of it as a new creation (Preamble and Article III), not as a vestige of the much larger Papal States (756-1870) that had previously encompassed central Italy. Most of this territory was absorbed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1860, and the final portion, namely the city of Rome with a small area close to it, ten years later, in 1870.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City

The supremely deluded Dawkins and his followers object to living in a society where the people who rule over them use religion as the basis of the law making. Specifically, they are talking about monsters like Ruth Kelly, Roman Catholic with four children, member of Opus Dei, being in a position to create laws that they have to obey, set school curricula etc etc. They want to replace the de facto theocracy with a completely secular state, where religion has absolutely no influence or place.

The error that Dawkins and the other shrill and irrational types like him make is that they are concerning themselves with the wrong problem.

The problem with people being religious is not that they use their religious convictions to control others, but that there is a state in the first place that provides them with the power to control.

Dawkins’ partner in crime Christopher Hitchens, neocon, lover of the good life, is a to the bone statist. He is way beyond help, and it is a waste of electrons discussing him.

Dawkins on the other hand, claims to be a scientist. Any properly thinking scientist would by now have come to the correct conclusion that the state itself is the problem when it comes to religion ‘being the bane of humanity’. He should have reasoned by now that democracy can be used by any religious person, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, all of whom will bring their terrifying brand of thinking to the levers of the machine. In order to be free of these deluded people, you need to have no machine at all, or at the very least, a machine with a lever the size of a fly’s leg, so that no matter who has their hands on it, they cannot pump their religious poison into the minds of children and force their religious laws upon unwilling citizens.

Then there is the matter of the logic in arresting the Pope. This is like singing a song to put out a fire, or holding a candle lit vigil to stop a war. Arresting the Pope will do nothing to solve Dawkins’ problem of the power of religion over people. Even if the Pope is put in prison, the Bishops will simply elect a new one, and lo and behold, in a puff of smoke, there will be another Pope!

More than that, Dawkins now has billions of people wishing that he was dead, and many others openly calling him a coward for not attacking Islamic figureheads; of course, he doesn’t attack Muslims because he knows that they will hunt him down and cut his head off for the slightest provocation. You could fairly conclude that Dawkins is just a crass publicity seeker, but he does highlight a crucial problem, albeit in an oblique way – the problem of the state.

I for one, find the idea of a state run by ANYONE highly distasteful, and a state run by the likes of Dawkins to be the worst of all possible states. Here we have a man, who, because he cannot get his way, is willing to personally use violence against the Pope. Imagine this monster and his legions of psychopathic devotees at the controls of the entire apparatus of the state!

Imagine how they would react to the idea (for example) that people have the right to refuse vaccination. They would without any hesitation, order the rounding up of all people who have not been vaccinated, frog march them to prison hospitals where the poisons would be injected under the restraints of leather straps. Of course, these people would be easily rounded up, because people like Richard Dawkins would have no hesitation in putting everyone in a national database where every fact about you is held; after all, they are not deluded by religion, they are clear thinking scientists who have logic and the laws of science as their only guide… they cannot by definition be wrong. Sounds a bit like the ‘heroes’ in this film.

For all their mass murder, child raping, stealing, brainwashing, currency counterfeiting insanity, Roman Catholics under restraint are greatly preferable to Richard Dawkins and his ilk. And I say greatly only because compared to the number 0, 1 is a great amount. A stateless space is of course, millions of times more preferable to a state run by Roman Catholics.

Richard Dawkins, if he really wants to be free of the influence of religion, should embrace Libertarianism.

The ethics of Libertarianism are not derived from religion. Its implementation produces the most natural and efficient spontaneously ordered, stable and just society possible. It is in formulation and by its nature, completely scientific and simultaneously absolutely human, since it is based on the reality of what a human being is.

Libertarianism allows everyone to believe whatever they like, whilst preventing anyone from forcing their beliefs on others. That means atheists cannot tell the religious how to live and what to think, and the religious cannot tell others what to do or think. It is literally the perfect solution to everyone’s problems, including the economic ones; true Scientists everywhere should be Austrians, because Austrian Economics is a science; any scientist who believes that value can be created out of nothing (fractional reserve banking, fiat currency) is nothing more than an alchemist.

But you know this!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Economics, Idiocracy, Insanity, Science, Someone Stupid Said, The Facts.