Open Letter to Richard Dawkins

18 March, 2007

Dear Prof. Dawkins,

This is a fan letter. I am writing to thank you for all that you have done and are doing to fight for the cause of rationality against the blight of religion. It cannot be an easy job. Going out on the lecture trail, maintaining an active web site, appearing for countless interviews, etc. exposes you to abuse and ignorance, which, day after day, must become extremely tiresome. People who are right are certainly to be admired, but people who are right and have the energy to fight in public for the truth are a valuable asset indeed.

For 30 years I taught philosophy, most of the time at a branch of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. I considered it one of the principal items on my teaching agenda to sow the seeds to skepticism in the minds of students, most of whom had been brainwashed by a particularly insidious form of Portuguese Catholicism. (The southeastern part of Massachusetts has a very high proportion of Portuguese immigrants and descendents of Portuguese immigrants.) I also taught a course in “Critical Thinking,” in which religious topics figured frequently. Over the years, I have concerned myself with many of the issues you raise in your books. I can surely never approach anything like your eloquence, lucidity, and knowledge, but I would claim a deep familiarity with most of the items on your roster of issues.

A couple of comments:

I share your sadness over what happened to Antony Flew. Early in my career, he was one of my heroes. But I sensed trouble when I was assigned to write a short review (in Library Journal) of his interchange with some Texas fundamentalists on the topic of Jesus’ resurrection (Gary Habermas and Antony Flew, Did Jesus Rise from the Dead: The Resurrection Debate, 1987). I was appalled by the way that Flew, the purportedly hard-headed Humean—granted his opponents all sorts of points that he should never have let get off the ground. I suspected that his attempt to be “just folks” with his hosts, who probably served him up lots of Texas BBQ and treated him “nice”, was partly responsible for his flaccid performance. I ended my review by saying that “Flew was not at his best.” I was honored to receive a letter from Flew thanking me for my generosity and saying that the trouble was the lack of time to get up to date on the relevant literature.

In an interview that I read on the net, I think you are overly generous to Jesus, as you are in The God Delusion. How was he a great ethical teacher and innovator? His renunciation of retaliation was clearly laid out by Socrates, and the advice in the Sermon on the Mount in praise of meekness, poverty etc. is surely questionable ethically. In addition, there are those aspects of his teaching which are clearly downright repugnant, e.g., his belief in hell, his condemnation of those who disagreed with him, etc. (Bertrand Russell’s catalogue of Jesus’ defects, in “Why I Am not a Christian,” strikes me as right on the money.) More generally, I fail to see how Jesus was anything like an attractive model for a good human life. (In contrast to, say, the ideal life sketched in Aristotle’s Ethics, Jesus’ seems downright impoverished.) E.g., Jesus didn’t know anything (with the possible exception of tedious and barbaric Talmudic law), and he had no interest in knowledge or in the natural world. Did he ever tell a joke or improve his body? I suspect that you’ll grant my general point, but I think your concessions give unnecessary aid and comfort to the enemy.

Again, thanks you for fighting the good fight. At this particularly depressing time in my country’s history, nothing seems more important.

Yours sincerely,

Rick Hogan

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth