APR 7, 2013  

MAR 31, 2013         MAR 24, 2013         MAR 17, 2013        MAR 10, 2013        MAR  3, 2013        FEB 24, 2013        FEB 17, 2013        FEB 10, 2013

EARLIER

 

to avoid address abuse, please type it yourself

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 Večernji 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June 27 to July 3, 2009 he manages to spill out quite a list of opinions, some of them plainly unsubstantiated, some outdated in current public culture (but not Catholic doctrine, of course), some profoundly anti-atheistic, practi- cally none carrying some useful information.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.

 

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