Richard Dawkins : Militant atheism

Richard Dawkins at TED2002  (transcript)
Militant atheism
Summary
Again, l thought that the story was really difficult for me, though, when l knew about the speaker who was a writer who wrote a famous book that I've just read, l started feeling that l might love the story. Hahaha〜〜 (The title of the book has been The Selfish Gene. )

An Atheist is, you know, a person who believes that God does not exist and militant means to be aggressive or combative. The title can be explained that there is an aggressive person who is an atheist, the speaker, and not American.

Why is he militant?

In fact, he is an atheist but he is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. I think that he wants people to listen to him and want people to think about our world scientifically. They must depend on God too much and they always say God. It’s saying too much because people don’t know that religion teaches them to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations, blinds them to the wonderful, real explanation that scientists found, and is massively financed by many foundations and institutions.
In America, the latest survey shows that Christianity that takes with nearly 160 million is the largest group, the third group is Jews with 2.8 million, however, the second largest group is non-religious or secular in fact. It’s strange because it’s cheated by politicians who want to win in an election thus something that is wrong with atheists who are lonely is not true.
Don’t be afraid of evolution and the scientific worldview must be so much more exciting, poetic, and filled with sheer wonder than the religious imagination.
The speaker tells us strongly that as a human, people have to understand the theory of evolution, atheists, and scientific arguments.

After writing this, the talk became interesting for me because many people are members of no religion in Japan, though, they are not atheists but not only Christianity but also religion, even Buddhism is not talked about. It’s a taboo. And then there is one more taboo story. Before World War 2, Japanese people believed that the Japanese emperor was our God. Thus Japan was a strong country which always won against other countries because people could strongly unite to protect our emperor who was God. When Japan lost World War 2, the Japanese emperor declared that the emperor was a human, people didn’t believe it, though.

Thus l think that this situation will be similar. People don’t think about well and they depend on God and emperor too much. The thought that God, emperor, and government help us should be stopped. We have to do by our hands.

Words in this story

trivial /adj/ unimportant, stupid, foolish

secular /adj/ worldly

sheer /adj/ pure