As noted yesterday, Richard Dawkins, who has devoted years of his long career to shutting down free speech on intelligent design and to insulating Darwinism from dissent, has been booted from a talk he was scheduled to give for radio station KPFA in (where else?) Berkeley. The snowflakes apparently can’t bring themselves to give Dawkins a platform, due to his “tweets and other comments on Islam.”

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. Richard Dawkins has been Expelled for challenging orthodoxy, in this case the orthodoxy that Islam is above critique.

Dawkins, in an email to the radio station, protested:

I am known as a frequent critic of Christianity and have never been de-platformed for that. Why do you give Islam a free pass? Why is it fine to criticise Christianity but not Islam?

Why, one asks, is it fine to criticize Islam, but not Darwin? Dawkins has fought mightily to “de-platform” intelligent design scientists and anyone who harbors even a shimmer of doubt about Darwinian theology. But now he’s shocked — shocked — that defenders of another religion get to silence heretics too.

Atheism and its Darwinian creation myth have gained ascendancy in the Western world over the past century, and in several unfortunate nations, have grasped state power. It’s been an ugly ascent, complete with gulags and holocausts and inquisitions. But there are other forces in play, and other religions in ascent as well, and they have a history of centuries of conquest. Despite the passion of today’s atheists for legally mandated indoctrination and censorship, they are pikers when it comes to faith-based jihad. One gets the sense that in many nations of the West, atheism is heading for the dustbin. Dawkins in his brush with Islam may have had his first glimpse of the broom.

Censorship is a fire that consumes any polity foolish enough to ignite it. Dawkins has been striking matches and spraying kerosene for decades. The message that he and his Darwinian inquisitors have been sending is that force, not reason, decides intellectual struggles. Dawkins and his clique of evolutionary Torquemadas have set the pace, closing science against any reasoned critique of atheism’s prophet and his theory. Now the fire has breached the enclosure, and turned on the arsonists.

Freedom of speech is in retreat in America and throughout the West. One suspects that in the years to come, even atheists and Darwinists may come to lament the injunction on dissent that they pioneered and so assiduously maintained.

Photo credit: Magnus Norden (151212035) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.