No,
he is not entitled to his opinion.
This
is about Milan Ivkošić, Croatian politician (well, should I
write "politician"?) and columnist of the newspaper Ve černji
List, and above all -
Catholic. I was unlucky to spot his weekly column when retrieving
some old paper to start a fire in my heating stove, oh, this
spring is not overtaking the winter as expected. In the column
covering day-by-day the time period from June 27 to July 3, 2009
he manages to spill out quite a list of opinions, some of them
plainly unsubstantiated, some outdated in current public culture
(but not Catholic doctrine, of course), some profoundly
anti-atheistic, practi- cally none carrying some useful
information. Could all of that be swept under a carpet of "I’m
entitled to my opinion" ?
Why
I say that he is not entitled to his opinion? If "Everyone’s
entitled to his opinion" just means no-one has the right to
stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the
statement is true, but fairly trivial. But if ‘entitled to an
opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious
candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false. One
is only entitled to what he can argue for [a]. Milan
Ivkošić is not arguing, he is attaching labels, the labels
of his liking regardless of the real data and journalist’s
norms. For instance, he claims that the Michael Jackson
idolization is due to US atheistic wasteland. He should be aware
that there are higher percentage of true believers among US
population than in Croatia. The 86% Catholic affiliation in
Croatia is actually a political (nationalistic if not
chauvinistic) statement rather than theistic. Milan Ivkošić
should now better than use Michael Jackson for his atheistic witch-hunt.
But
the "gem" of his column is the attack on Darwin. He is
really after the evolution, the most dangerous anti-religious
idea, but an argumentative attack on evolution is well beyond his
horizons, so he tries to discredit Darwin by announcing there are
some racial and supremacist statements in the Darwin’s writings.
I don’t know, maybe the statements exist, probably when taken
out of contents, but what about the most dangerous idea, Darwin’s
or not (only) Darwin’s?
[ a]
Patrick Stokes: No, you’re not entitled to your opinion,
NY Times, Oct. 5, 2012. |
Milan
Ivkošić claims, as frontier Catholic, that all species today
are as they were created by God. Above is my attempt to redraw the
human tree of life to accommodate his claim.
|