{"id":13995,"date":"2012-06-08T20:40:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-09T01:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.catholiconnection.com\/2012\/06\/dawkins-high-priest-of-humanity-calls-for-catholic-honesty.html"},"modified":"2012-06-08T20:40:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-09T01:40:00","slug":"dawkins-high-priest-of-humanity-calls-for-catholic-honesty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/dawkins-high-priest-of-humanity-calls-for-catholic-honesty\/","title":{"rendered":"Dawkins (High Priest of Humanity) Calls for Catholic Honesty"},"content":{"rendered":"
It appears Dawkins is at it again<\/a> today. This time I agree with his first few statements.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Prof<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

People who describe themselves as Catholic but do not accept the church\u2019s key teachings should be \u201chonest\u201d and admit they no longer belong to the faith, atheist author and scientist Prof Richard Dawkins has\u00a0<\/span>told a Dublin audience. <\/span>[Totally agree.]<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/div>\n
He said he was intrigued by this week\u2019s Irish Times\/Ipsos MRBI poll showing almost two thirds (62 per cent) of Catholics believed the bread and wine which was blessed during Mass \u201conly represents the body and blood\u201d of Christ. <\/span>[This is what happens when the liturgy doesn’t communicate belief.]<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/div>\n
Just 26 per cent said they believed the bread and wine transformed into Christ\u2019s body and blood in accordance with the doctrine of transubstantiation.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cIf they don\u2019t believe in transubstantiation then they are not Roman Catholics,\u201d Prof Dawkins said. \u201cIf they are honest they should say they are no longer Roman Catholics.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
The survey finding \u201cshould come in for a fair degree of ridicule,\u201d he added. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t hold back on the ridicule\u201d. <\/span>[I would say the belief that modern empirical science is independent of teleology or efficient causality is pretty ridiculous itself.]<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/div>\n
Prof Dawkins was speaking at a public interview in the National Concert Hall last night as part of the Dublin Writers Festival.<\/span><\/div>\n
He said he was encouraged by the growth of the atheist movement in Ireland, and a gradual shift towards \u201cscience and reason\u201d at the expense of the Catholic Church. [See the recent post on “If you want to be correct, you must belong to the club with “correct” in its name.<\/a>“]<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cThe number of priests is going down beautifully,\u201d he said. <\/span>
\n<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/div>\n
In addition, the child abuse controversy has eroded the church\u2019s authority and the \u201cextraordinarily ham-fisted way\u201d the church responded \u201chas helped\u201d.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Secular humanism is on the rise. It is the reasonable conclusion of a philosophy that\u00a0acknowledges\u00a0as truth only\u00a0material\u00a0and efficient causes. In this way, we can see why these men promote their ideas as ‘reason’. However, if they had a slightly better classical education (Dawkins has none….went straight into modern science) of course the\u00a0implicit\u00a0assumptions that only that which is physically\u00a0demonstrable\u00a0exists. The rest is in our heads.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears Dawkins is at it again today. This time I agree with his first few statements.\u00a0 People who describe themselves as Catholic but do not accept the church\u2019s key teachings should be \u201chonest\u201d and admit they no longer belong to the faith, atheist author and scientist Prof Richard Dawkins has\u00a0told a Dublin audience. [Totally […]\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[176,26,70,249,250,55,25,251,75,27,96],"class_list":["post-13995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-authority","tag-catholicism","tag-crisis","tag-dublin","tag-dublin-writers-festival","tag-empiricism","tag-modern-philosophy","tag-national-concert-hall","tag-news","tag-religion","tag-richard-dawkins"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonhaines.com\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}