Thanks To Neo-Atheists, New Zealand Teaches Primitive Pagan Nonsense As Equal To ‘Western’ ScienceAtheist Richard Dawkins may wash his hands of New Zealand’s pagan nonsense, but he is the useful idiot who made this all possible.BY: MICHAEL MORRIS
MARCH 20, 2023
Speaking of the liberals and social democrats of his time, the communist dictator Vladimir Lenin was said to have coined the term “useful idiot.” The etymology of the term is, at best, apocryphal. However it is a very potent phrase for describing those myopic groups of activists, engaged in revolutions of various sorts, who would only intend to go exactly this far — but no further. This is what Lenin was said to have meant when employing the descriptive about his comrades across the pond, who sought only-this-far socialism, which he believed would pave the way for a full-blown Leninist utopia.
I could not help but think of this phrase while reading a column by Richard Dawkins, who laments New Zealand’s recent turn toward genuflecting at the altar of its indigenous Maori gods. It turns out that, at the behest of former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government, “Science classes are to be taught that Māori ‘Ways of Knowing’ (Mātauranga Māori) have equal standing with ‘western’ science.” Some of the educated elite are also saying that requiring Maori children to read is a form of colonization. Air New Zealand has even gone so far as to invoke Maori gods in its new safety video highlighting Maori culture and religion.
Further, Dawkins laments that:
New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. Origin myths are haunting and poetic, but they belong elsewhere in the curriculum. The very phrase ‘western’ science buys into the ‘relativist’ notion that evolution and big bang cosmology are just the origin myth of white western men, a narrative whose hegemony over ‘indigenous’ alternatives stems from nothing better than political power. This is pernicious nonsense.
A point, might I add, on which we agree.
* * *
The pillars of Western progress are being demolished in New Zealand under the justification of religious equity. However, much to the chagrin of those pugnacious preachers of scientific humanism, Dawkins and his comrades are those useful idiots who paved the way for this saccharine pagan asininity that threatens the architecture of the scientific method.
Their relentless campaigns of framing the Gospels as irrational, some kind of vestigial tail of Bronze-Aged society, ushered in the contemporary absurdities infecting the Western liberal mind. Nature abhors a vacuum, and despite Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and company’s grand design of cultic worship at the altar of science, this should serve as a reminder that true religion animates the human spirit and that man shall not live on thin nerd gruel alone.
Tom Holland, in his book “Dominion,” adeptly illustrates the wide-ranging — and downright weird — cultural habits that animate our favorite new atheist’s universalist assumptions. “Dawkins — agnostic, secularist and humanist that he is — absolutely has the instincts of someone brought up in a Christian civilization.” Thus, Dawkins’ myopic sense of universalism in the domain of speech, inquiry, and debate are hard-won values unique to the Christian ephemera within which he was so fortuitously raised. Far from universal, these ideals must be cultivated, cherished, and guarded over jealously.
* * *
Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/20/thanks-to-neo-atheists-new-zealand-teaches-primitive-pagan-nonsense-as-equal-to-western-science/
