[分享]Laugh Out Loud! Richard Dawkins Supports Free Love

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[分享]Laugh Out Loud! Richard Dawkins Supports Free Love

Post by Jun » 2007-11-30 9:37

[quote]Banishing the Green-Eyed Monster

"Is sex outside of marriage a sin? Is it a public matter? Is it forgivable?"
No, of course sex outside marriage is not a public matter, and yes, of course it is forgivable. Only a person infected by the sort of sanctimonious self-righteousness that religion uniquely inspires would apply the meaningless word 'sin' to private sexual behavior.

It is the mark of the religious mind that it cares more about private than public morality. As the bumper sticker slogan put it, "When Clinton lied, nobody died." Officially, Bill Clinton was impeached not for sexual misconduct but for lying about it. But he was entitled to lie about his private life: one could even make a case that he had a positive duty to do so. Tony Blair should have been impeached for lying to the House of Commons about alleged evidence for weapons of mass destruction, because his lies persuaded Members to vote for a war when they otherwise would not. Lying to Congress by saying, "I did not have sex with that woman" should not be an impeachable offense, because where a man puts his penis is none of Congress's damn business. Nor is it any journalist's damn business whether a politician once took drugs at university. Or whether he is gay.

And please don't say the right answer to an impertinent question about your private life is "No comment", because we all know how that would be interpreted. Telling a lie is often the only way to convey an effective "No comment."

A censorious culture in which public figures are forced to answer impertinent questions about their past, or their private affairs, would lead to open season on everybody. Who, if challenged with a point blank question, could honestly deny some secret from the past that they know society would condemn? What is more, the revolting hue and cry that our religiously inspired society habitually raises over private sexual 'morality' serves as a dangerous distraction away from important matters of public morality such as the Blair/Bush lies about Iraq’s weapons.

Now, here's a more difficult case. How about public figures lying about their religious affiliations? Shouldn't we refrain from prying into a politician's private religious views, just as we should refrain from prying into their private sexual behavior? Shouldn't public figures be entitled to lie about their religious affiliations (just like the many atheists that the laws of probability tell us must be there in Congress)? Not always. The reason is that religious views, even if they seem private in themselves, can become public in their implications. John F. Kennedy asked voters to believe that he would not take orders from the Vatican when formulating policy, and in his case they probably were right to do so. But George Bush has publicly boasted that God told him to invade Iraq, and his religious faith obviously inspired his irrational stances on stem cell research, the Terri Schiavo case and many others. To push to an extreme, who would deny Congress's right to ask whether a candidate for Secretary of Health is a Christian Scientist or a Jehovah's Witness? Or take a Christian sect that fervently desires the Second Coming of Christ, and believes the key Revelation prophecies cannot be fulfilled without a Middle East Armageddon. Would you wish the nuclear button to be made available to a follower of such a creed?

So much is obvious. However, following an excellent Slate article by Christopher Hitchens, I would go further. Mitt Romney, as a self-confessed Mormon, has stated his beliefs about the Second Coming as follows: "Christ appears in Jerusalem, splits the Mount of Olives and stops that war to kill the Jews. We also believe that over the 1,000 years that follow, the millennium, he will reign from two places: that the law will come from one place, Missouri; the other will be in Jerusalem." The thing about Missouri, you see, is that it is the site (I’m not joking) of the Garden of Eden. Mitt Romney apparently believes that the Book of Mormon is the dictated word of God. The fact that Joseph Smith wrote it in 16th century pseudo-biblical English although he was a 19th century man marks him out
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