Ideas have consequences

I’m not surprised that someone should shoot himself after reading The God Delusion. The thought of suicide has to cross any intelligent individual’s mind upon reading it and realizing that there are literally hundreds of thousands of dim-witted individuals eligible to vote who genuinely believe TGD to be a masterpiece of science, philosophy, and reason rather than the insubstantial bit of intellectually fatuous, snipe-and-dodge evangelical atheism it actually is. Such a waste. It’s tragic to think that after reaching the correct logical conclusion to Dawkinsian moral logic, the unfortunate young man didn’t see fit to shoot the pretentious Archbishop of High Church Atheism first.

A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college, to the anti-Christian book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.

“He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong,” the relative wrote. “I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn’t wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences – that was all there was – just social consequences.

“He mentioned the book he had been reading ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins and how it along with the science classes he had take[n] had eroded his faith.

Now, obviously the young man wasn’t particularly intelligent or he wouldn’t have found Dawkins’s shoddy logic and nonexistent scholarship to be the least bit convincing. But the possibility of this sort of thing happening is one of the reasons I wrote The Irrational Atheist – readers may recall my assertion that sociopathy and suicide are among the logical consequences of rational atheism – and arranged for free electronic copies of it to be made available to anyone who might like to peruse it. In fact, Dawkins and company really should embrace TIA; its exposure of their fallacious arguments just might save their lives from one of their pathetic young converts one day.