Closed to debate

Published on 11/08/2012 00:00

I READ Richard Lucas’s latest correspondence (Letters, 10 August) in amazement. Surely Mr Lucas has enough sense of ­history to realise that the Christian church in all its many forms has an appalling record of suppressing free expression. Boycotting is a new methodology. The Inquisition certainly suppressed by torture and death, anyone it deemed guilty of non- or aberrant belief. Any scientific thinking that queried a biblical and church views was quickly squashed and the scientist incarcerated, often murdered by the church.

The Catholic Church does not brook any debate and does not interact with non-believers except in a last-ditch attempt at proselytising them. The RC church is the ultimate dictator and not debate-oriented at all.

The LDOS (Lord’s Day Observance Society) in sending a call to boycott Dawkins’ appearance at the Faclan Hebridean Book Festival is doing precisely what dictatorial organisations do all over, they try to gag dissent.

Has Mr Lucas listened to Lane Craig? He is a character who ­condones, indeed applauds the killing of the Canaanite children and tries to convince his audience his god did good by taking the kiddies up to his heaven.

I am not a Christian and I certainly understand why Dawkins would not give a Christian apologist like Lane Craig the legitimacy he craves by sitting on a stage with him and calling it a debate. There is no debate. There never has been.

Lane Craig holds a faith-position on a non-subject. Dawkins is not a theist; he is a scientist. There is an unbreachable gap between the two. Lane Craig tried to make book on the fact that Dawkins wouldn’t “debate” him. It seems that Mr Lucas, like some others, has bought Lane Craig’s self-advertising.

Veronique Denyer

Parbroath Road

Glenrothes, Fife

Richard Lucas (Letters, 10 August) writes that “it is extremely unusual for Christians to behave like this” regarding the call by a Christian group to boycott professor Dawkins’ talk at the Faclan Hebridean Book Festival, and that Christians “are more often to be found encouraging debate and interaction.” Really?

I think most people with any knowledge of European history would raise their eyebrows at this, given the Church’s appalling record when it comes to silencing dissenting voices and uncomfortable truths, by any means at their disposal.

Indeed, according to the Bible, 1 Corinthians 14:34, no less than half the human population is ordered to shut up: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be submissive, as also says the law.”

Veronica Wikman

Malleny Avenue

Balerno, Edinburgh