ARDERN, HIPKINS' 'LUDICROUS' - DAWKINS

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"Air NZ think it's a cute idea to invokeMāori gods in their safety briefing"
- and lift the ban on staff tattoos

Richard Dawkins, celebrity atheist and pop scientist, is " in New Zealand, climax to my antipodean speaking tour, where I walked headlong into a raging controversy.

Jacinda Ardern’s government implemented a ludicrous policy, spawned by Chris Hipkins’s Ministry of Education before he became prime minister.

Science classes are to be taught that Māori ‘Ways of Knowing’ (Mātaurang Māori) have equal standing with ‘western’ science.

Not surprisingly, this adolescent virtue-signalling horrified New Zealand’s grown-up scientists and scholars.

Seven of them wrote to the Listener magazine. Three who were fellows of the NZ Royal Society were threatened with an inquisitorial investigation. Two of these, including the distinguished medical scientist Garth Cooper, himself of Māori descent, resigned (the third unfortunately died).

I was delighted to meet Professor Cooper for lunch, with others of the seven. His resignation letter cited the society’s failure to support science against its denigration as ‘a western European invention’. He was affronted, too, by a complaint (not endorsed by the NZRS) that ‘to insist Māori children learn to read is an act of colonisation’. Is there an implication here – condescending, if not downright racist – that ‘indigenous’ children need separate, special treatment?

One presumes that an erudite chappie like Dawkins would know there is, if not conclusive proof, plenty of dispute over Māori claims to being indigenous. Maybe that's why he used sneer quotes. 

Ngapuhi leader David Rankin said books by authors such as investigative journalist Ian Wishart and historian Noel Hilliam presented "clear evidence" that some of New Zealand's earliest residents might have arrived before the Polynesians.

He pointed to numerous Maori oral histories which referred to people being here when the first Maori arrived, including fair-skinned people. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/rankin-maori-are-not-the-indigenous-people-of-new-zealand/JQ5D57RDLCVRZFMWQKOI7XPWTU/  

Perhaps the most disagreeable aspect of this sorry affair is the climate of fear. We who don’t have a career to lose should speak out in defence of those who do. The magnificent seven are branded heretics by a nastily zealous new religion, a witch-hunt that recalls the false accusations against J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock.

Professor Kendall Clements was removed from teaching evolution at the University of Auckland, after the School of Biological Sciences Putaiao Committee submitted the following recommendation: ‘We do not feel that either Kendall or Garth should be put in front of students as teachers. This is not safe for students…’ Not safe? Who are these cringing little wimps whose ‘safety’ requires protection against free speech? What on earth do they think a university is for?

To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori. Since only 2 per cent of New Zealanders (and only 5 per cent of Māoris) speak that language, this again looks like self-righteous virtue-signalling, bending a knee to that modish version of Original Sin which is white guilt.

Mātauranga Māori includes valuable tips on edible fungi, star navigation and species conservation (pity the moas were all eaten). Unfortunately it is deeply invested in vitalism. 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, 

... which is exactly what they are are ... 

a narrative whose hegemony over ‘indigenous’ alternatives stems from nothing better than political power. This is pernicious nonsense. Science belongs to all humanity. It is humanity’s proud best shot at discovering the truth about the real world.

Note that word, 'proud'. Pride goes before a fall. As Lucifer's pride went before his fall from grace. We note that in the pic of Dawkins accompanying this piece in the Spectator he looks remarkably young. 

Dawkins in Right to Life UK: it's 'sensible' to abort Down Syndrome babies

My speeches in Auckland and Wellington were warmly applauded, thoughone woman yelled a protest. She was politely invited to participate, but she chose to walk out instead.

I truthfully said that, when asked my favourite country, I invariably choose New Zealand. Citing the legacy of Ernest Rutherford, the greatest experimental physicist since Faraday, I begged my audiences to reach out to their MPs in support of New Zealand science. The true reason science is more than an origin myth is that it stands on evidence: massively documented evidence, double blind trials, peer review, quantitative predictions precisely verified in labs around the world. Science reads the billion-word DNA book of life itself. Science eradicates smallpox and polio. Science navigates to Pluto or a tiny comet. Science almost certainly saved your life.

Science works.

Like when the world followed "the science" during the Covid pamdemic shamdemic plandemic? Did science work then? Unfortunately, science is only a tool in the hands of fallible and/or evil human beings who unless guided by Truth Itself can make remarkable fools of themselves - and of humanity, as we tragically see now in the millions of excess deaths reported globally, following that oh-so-scientific Covid-19 'vaccine'.  

Richard Dawkins - as in the Spectator

Postscript on the flight out:

Air New Zealand think it a cute idea to invoke Māori gods in their safety briefing. Imagine if British Airways announced that their planes are kept aloft by the Holy Ghost in equal partnership with Bernoulli’s Principle and Newton’s First Law. Science explains. It lightens our darkness. Science is the poetry of reality. It belongs to all humanity. Kia Ora! https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-im-sticking-up-for-science/?fbclid=IwAR1ypej-N5Gy1pzHtewgfqyv6CVCvdSLtbshKnTnYFIrQZDzEBGhnRRehUw

 

The Descent of the Holy Ghost

 

Almighty God, in making known to us that His one divine Nature is possessed by three distinct Persons, reveals to us something of His own interior life. Let us, with the Church, say to the Holy Ghost, "Come, O Holy Ghost, and fill the hearts of Thy faithful, and kindle in them the fire of Thy love."