“If there is any consistent enemy of science,
it is not religion, but irrationalism.”
Stephen Jay Gould
Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, fancies himself to be “bright.” In a 2012 interview with Playboy magazine, the interviewer asked, “Is there a better word for a nonbeliever than atheist?”
“The word ‘bright’ was suggested by a California couple,” Dawkins replied. “I think it’s rather a good word, though most of my atheist friends think it suggests religious people are ‘dims.’ I say, ‘What’s wrong with that?’ [laughs]”1
(For more information on the Brights movement founded by Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, see the Wikipedia entry on the Brights movement.)
(See also Professor Dawkins’ own article on the Brights movement at Edge.org.)
Richard Dawkins, a British subject, is so pleased with himself and his self-proclaimed “brightness” that he feels emboldened to speak out on the American election, calling Mitt Romney a “massively gullible fool” whom no thinking person should vote for, based purely on the fact that Romney subscribes to the Mormon faith. Reporter Raf Sanchez of Britain’s London Telegraph explained Richard Dawkins’ views on Romney:
“No matter how much you agree with Romney’s economic policy, can you really vote for such a massively gullible fool?” asked Prof Dawkins during an outburst on Twitter that lasted several hours.
The Oxford academic focused his criticism on the Church’s belief that its founder, Joseph Smith, was visited by an angel in 1820s New York, who guided him to a set of golden plates buried in a hill.
Smith claimed to have translated runes engraved on the plates, and compiled them into the Book of Mormon. The text describes how Jesus Christ appeared in the United States after the Crucifixion and how Adam and Eve went to the site of present-day Missouri after being expelled from the Garden of Eden. . . . “Could you really vote for a man who thinks the Garden of Eden was in Missouri?” he said.2
(Read the entire report at the Telegraph website.)
Let’s consider Dawkins’ central question: “No matter how much you agree with Romney’s economic policy, can you really vote for such a massively gullible fool?”
Well, any truly informed, thoughtful, rational person would have to answer YES. We Americans have been presented with a binary choice, Obama or Romney. And voting for Barack Obama is simply not a rational option for any informed, thinking individual.
President Obama has produced a four-year record of abject failure. There were 2.7 million long-term unemployed when he took office; there are 5 million today. Middle class income has fallen almost $4,000 under Obama, from $54,962 to $51,002. Gasoline prices have more than doubled under Obama, from $1.85 a gallon to $3.86. Home values have dropped 11 percent, health insurance costs have risen 23 percent, college tuition rates have risen 25 percent, the number of Americans in poverty has risen from 39.8 million to 46.2 million, up 6.4 million. We’ve gone from 32 million to 47 million people on food stamps under Obama—up 46 percent. The consumer price index has increased 9.1 percent. The federal debt has soared from $10.6 trillion to $16 trillion, a 51 percent increase. And the United States has dropped from first to seventh place in global competitiveness. That is the most massive record of failure since the Great Depression.
There’s a reason why Barack Obama has failed so spectacularly. He believes in a superstition that is infinitely more pernicious and destructive to our society than any Mormon doctrine. Barack Obama is a Keynesian, and history has shown that Keynesianomics has never worked, not once, in the entire history of mankind. And logic tells us why it cannot work: the core idea of Keynesianomics is the economic equivalent of trying to raise the level of a swimming pool by bailing water out of one end and pouring it into the other.
Only the private sector can create wealth. Government can print money, but money isn’t wealth, and government cannot create wealth. So when the government tries to “stimulate” the economy through government spending, it is only injecting money it has already taken out of the economy through taxing and borrowing. That’s bailing water out of one end of the pool and pouring it into the other—and that’s why the massive Obama stimulus package, the biggest Keynesian stimulus experiment in the history of mankind, failed utterly. It did not increase the net amount of wealth in the economy.
(For a historical lesson in why Keynesianomics has not and cannot ever work, read “The Kennedy-Reagan Truth vs. the Obama Delusion” by this author.)
The superstitious economic fantasies of Barack Obama are destroying the American economy, harming generations of Americans, plunging the American republic into an unrecoverable tailspin of debt, and threatening the global economy with meltdown. The massively gullible fool in this race is President Obama, who clings to a false religion of redistribution and “trickle-down government.”
I’m not a Mormon and I do not believe in Mormon doctrines. But history shows that Mormon people are clearly able to engage in rational, productive, socially responsible activities.
Some of the greatest business minds of our times have been Latter-Day Saints, including former Dell CEO Kevin Rollins, plastics entrepreneur and philanthropist Jon Huntsman, Sr., hotel executives J. Willard Marriott and J.W. “Bill” Marriott, Jr., and JetBlue founder David Neeleman. Journalist Jack Anderson and motivational writer Stephen R. Covey were Mormons. Celebrated science fiction novelist Orson Scott Card is a Mormon, as is Ken Jennings, who won a record 74 straight matches on TVs Jeopardy quiz show.
Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television, was a devout Mormon. World-renowned cardio-thoracic surgeon Russell Marion Nelson is Mormon. Howard Tracy Hall, the inventor of synthetic diamonds, and Robert B. Ingebretsen, a pioneer developer of digital sound and robotics, were Mormons.
NASA computer scientist David Harold Bailey and NASA astronaut Don Leslie Lind are both Mormons. So was theoretical chemist Henry Eyring; he probably would have won the Nobel Prize for his transition state theory of chemical reactions if not for Dawkins-style anti-Mormon bias at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
So I ask you, Professor Dawkins, are all of these people “massively gullible fools” who ought to be disqualified simply because of their religion? Personally, I would trust a Mormon over a Keynesian any day of the week.
Professor Dawkins, there is much that I admire about your work. I have read and enjoyed your writings, especially The Selfish Gene. I even have a few nice things to say about your massively flawed screed The God Delusion. I love your invention of the concept of the meme, and I use it all the time.
But when it comes to economics and politics, I’m sorry, sir, but you are not “bright” at all. Your atheism has blinded you to facts and reason. It has made you stupid. It has even made you (to purloin a phrase) a massively gullible fool.
Notes
1. Chip Rowe, “Playboy Interview with Richard Dawkins,” Playboy, August 20, 2012, http://richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2012/8/20/playboy-interview-with-richard-dawkins#.UE-E8FGri9K.
2. Raf Sanchez, “US Election 2012: Richard Dawkins calls Mitt Romney ‘Gullible Fool’ over Mormon faith,” The Telegraph, September 9, 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9532199/US-election-2012-Richard-Dawkins-calls-Mitt-Romney-gullible-fool-over-Mormon-faith.html.