Fatwa-burgers


"Scientists are sometimes suspected of arrogance. Sagan commends to us by contrast the humility of the Roman Catholic Church which, as early as 1992, was ready to pardon Galileo and admit publicly that the Earth does revolve around the Sun. We must hope that this outspoken magnanimity will not cause offence or ‘hurt’ to “the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz” who, in 1993, “issued an edict, or fatwa, declaring that the world is flat. Anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in God and should be punished”. Arrogance? Scientists are amateurs in arrogance."

This is Richard Dawkins reviewing a book by Sagan. However quotidian Carl Sagan's writings may have been, Sagan was never one for mincing words with irrationalists---even supposedly scientific and leftist ones who confuse the history of Islam with some obscure episode of Monty Python (yes, the Ottoman Turk episode!). Many of the wannabe-Darwinists and bourgeois skeptics apparently discovered atheism like a year or two ago when the corporate media became infatuated with the Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris crew: others read and understood Candide say 20+ years ago (as well as Darwin, Nietzsche, B. Russell, SJ Gould, etc.: if not the Dawkins of 1650, Thomas bloody Hobbes, pal of Galilleo and Descartes, who probably knew as much about the physical sciences as Chas. Darwin, one-time seminarian, did--and certainly far more about secular politics and economic materialism). Bon chance teaching Darwin or Dawkins (or Hobbes) in muslim countries; and many of the Daily Kos-like corporate liberals and Trotsky-lites (or perhaps Meyer-Lansky-lites) haven't quite realized that the Koran is at least as irrational and sanguine a text as Screepture is.