Knights Of The Apocalypse No. 1

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“My approach to attacking creationism is to attack religion as a whole (…) religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith instead of always insisting on evidence.” Richard Dawkins in his lecture at TED.com

Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have been referred to as The Four Knights Of The Apocalypse by mystics who believe in the coming of the last revelation given by the Christian god in the last book of the New Testament written by the prophet John. In the book, these Four Knights were sent by god to bring plagues upon the world. The previous authors, all active atheists opposing mysticism have written dozens of books that have enlightened and educated millions of men who previously believed in these and more irrational and mystic stories.

The Red Horse, represented the plague of war.
The Black Horse, representing famine and poverty.
The Green or Yellow Horse, representing death and illness.
The White Horse, representing the final moment of life in which the Death reappears once again to redeem humanity.

To parody this Apocalyptic stories and to celebrate the Week of Atheism, I choose to remember Richard Dawkins as Knight No. 1.

Mr. Dawkins is the author of the famous book “The Selfish Gene” (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982), A Devil’s Chaplain (2003), The God Delusion (2008) Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), among many other works. His topics of interest have commonly been related to his advocacy on evolutionary biology, memethics, and a rejection of mysticism, irrationality and relativism. He’s maybe the most known atheist in today’s mass media and his ideas have fought a strong war against hundreds of theists and deists for half a century. His book The Selfish Gene was also the first book I read in a topic that continued to interest me until now.

Now, I leave you with one of the lectures by him that I have enjoyed the most. It was titled “An atheist’s call to arms” and presented at a TED talk in 2002. The topic of this discussion is a “full-on appeal for atheists to make public their beliefs and to aggressively fight the incursion of religion into politics and education” by a lobby group supported by Creationists.

Milton Friedman and Social Security Taxes

Agreeing with the economist Milton Friedman,

“one of the things that have always shocked me is how people, whom I would have trust with my pocket book in their private capacity and of whom I would never question their integrity, will in their public capacity -because they believe it is in the best interest of other people- lie to the American People.”

And this is exactly what happens with Social Security in the U.S. and with the immense Nanny State in Europe and with the corrupt welfare systems of Latin America; all of which I have been able of knowing. I invite you to take a look to this short video of Milton Friedman (1975) explaining how the Social Security taxes are fundamentally a lose-lose option for employees, employers and society.

Videoconference: Austrian Perspective on the Great Recession and its Aftermath (Socratic Seminar)

Gene Epstein, November 16, 2011 | Universidad Francisco Marroquín

Click here to watch the conference (70:07 minutes)

Gene Epstein is Barron’s economics editor and author of the column “Economic Beat”. Previously, he was senior economist at the New York Stock Exchange, and has taught at the City University of New York and St. John’s University. Epstein holds a MA in economics from the New School and a BA in history from Brandeis University. He is author of the book Econospinning: How to Read between the Lines when the Media Manipulate the Numbers.