Dawkins duplicity (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 11, 2013, 06:13 (4154 days ago)

When one has to cherry pick qoute out of context to defened your philosophic position, your position is very weak:-"Dawkins goes on to quote several founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, who made statement against the religion of their time. John Adams is quoted as saying, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it." However here is the complete quote in an April 19, 1817, letter to Thomas Jefferson:
 -"Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion at all!!!' But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell." (Letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 19, 1817.)
 
"In quoting John Adams out-of-context, Dawkins has made it seem that Adams said exactly opposite of what he really intended. No wonder he left out the part where Adams said the world would be "hell" "without religion." Adams directly refuted Dawkins' major premise of the book ... that religion is the great evil in the world ... and affirmed the opposite ... that religion keeps the world from becoming completely evil. In fact, John Adams said some things about Christianity that Dawkins probably won't be quoting any time soon such as, "The Christian religion, in its primitive purity and simplicity, I have entertained for more than sixty years. It is the religion of reason, equity, and love; it is the religion of the head and the heart." (Letter to F.A. Van Der Kemp, December 27, 1816.)-http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/the_god_delusion2.html