Why does Richard Dawkins want to eat human meat?

[Lady Vizsla]

by Lita Cosner

Social media does not encourage thoughtful, reflective statements. There are many public figures who manage to make fools of themselves on mediums like Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter. Someone can dash off an ill-considered, half-formed statement and publish it to the entire world without even thinking about it. And if you happen to be a personality with millions of followers around the globe, those statements get more attention than they deserve.

However, Richard Dawkins left his March 3 tweet up for more than a week (at the time of the writing of this article), so it’s fair game to criticize it:



Why would Dawkins want to overcome the taboo against cannibalism? There’s no evolutionary reason to do so, and there’s no utilitarian reason to do so (like Peter Singer, Dawkins claims to follow the philosophy of utilitarianism). It’s not enlightened, it’s not reasoned. Rather, the most likely explanation is that his religion of atheism tells him that humans are just animals. We eat animals, so why not human meat, especially if it can be procured in a way that doesn’t involve murder?

There are a number of reasons why we don’t eat human meat. First, humans are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). The only time Scripture mentions cannibalism is in the context of extreme famine or sieges as a result of severe judgment (Deuteronomy 28:53). Humans are permitted to eat other animals after the Flood (Genesis 9:3), but the Bible doesn’t even envision cannibalism in contexts other than extreme judgment.

Cannibalism today is limited to either very desperate circumstances, as faced by the Donner party, extreme criminal insanity, or pagan ritual cannibalism. There are very good reasons that sane people in normal circumstances don’t want to eat other people.

Besides the moral issue of denigrating the image of God, there is a health risk. Cannibalism can transfer all sorts of diseases from human to human, and culturing human meat in a lab does not remove this risk. According to biochemist Dr. Ambrose Williams:

Growing human meat would be dangerous because of adventitious agents - ie: any viruses that infect a human cell culture could also infect the human. IE a bad batch of beef is disgusting, while a bad batch of human tissue is biohazardous.

In short, there are no good reasons to eat people unless you want to thumb your nose at some supposedly prudish Christians, while there are both moral and pragmatic reasons why it is a bad idea.  

[Lady Vizsla]

Silvyee

He really seems to be obsessed with cannibalism.



And the funny thing is that he's acting as if it is a universal taboo, and it most certainly isn't. You would think he knows better but it's hard to tell in the context that he brings it up.

I've read most of his books but I don't own any to look through. I don't recall offhand what he's said about it before, but I'm sure he addressed it in The Selfish Gene in terms of evolution. That's not how he's posing it now.

This is what he has said before:

Quote:

“We agree that cannibalism is wrong. But if we don’t need to kill someone in order to eat them, can we discuss why it would be wrong? Why don’t we eat human road-kills? Yes, it would be horrible for the friends and relatives of the dead person, but suppose we hypothetically know that this person has no friends or relatives of any kind, why wouldn’t we eat him? Or is there a slippery slope that we should consider?” Do we proceed to discuss such questions rationally and logically with the professor of moral philosophy? Or do we throw an emotional fit and run screaming from the room?

https://www.richarddawkins.net/2014/07/are-there-emotional-no-go-areas-where-logic-dare-not-show-its-face/

Basically the same point in the YT video.

There are literally billions of non Christians who do not have "the taboo", and they may even be believers of their own religions. (I am not saying every non Christian religion does not have restrictions on cannibalism, but that many do not.)

It makes his arguments so much weaker.

Doesn't surprise me that he'd be talking about this with Peter Singer. I did a paper on euthanasia in university once that included a critique of Singer's radical views on humanity. He's a bioethicist who thinks killing disabled individuals is justifiable if they become a burden to people rolleyes  

[Lady Vizsla]

Silvyee

Lady Aryel

Doesn't surprise me that he'd be talking about this with Peter Singer. I did a paper on euthanasia in university once that included a critique of Singer's radical views on humanity. He's a bioethicist who thinks killing disabled individuals is justifiable if they become a burden to people rolleyes

He also thinks parents should have a month to decide whether they want to keep their infant or kill it among other things but he's mostly known for animal rights.

I don't think the link pasted through entirely, but it doesn't surprise me that he would think that. It's just interesting how atheists like him want to argue about morality for human beings and animals when they have no objective basis for their moral claims.  

[User 32423819]

This dude is an odd feller.