I sometimes wonder if Dawkins says these kind of things mainly to confound his critics. Nevertheless, I think he's right: society has become overly sensitive.
On the other hand, this is not, as the Church's communications director said and as Dawkins himself initially tweeted, a freedom of speech issue. The theater chains are private concerns and have the right to whatever policy they deem appropriate. (They currently do not run ads of a political or religious nature – and so would presumably refuse atheist ones as well.) So the theater chains are free to refuse the ad if they want. But of course anyone who disagrees with their policy also has the right to criticize them.
CAN ONE DERIVE AN “OUGHT” FROM AN “IS”?
Well, sorry, but I'm going to utter it once again: One cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” and it isn't hard to understand why. In deductive arguments, there cannot be anything in the conclusion that isn't already contained in the premises: All deduction does is “extract” some of the information included in the premises; it cannot add anything new. It follows that if the premises of a valid argument contain no “oughts,” then the conclusion cannot contain any “oughts” either (except in a trivial sense which is discussed in the note below).
Is the conclusion here “factually true independent of human opinion or belief”? According to Carrier's argument, it is! But who seriously thinks that it is a moral truth that Manson should acquire weapons?
Nor is it difficult to come up with a counter-example to the first argument. Suppose Mary is an extreme environmentalist and disagrees that we ought to want our cars to run at all. Can we demonstrate to Mary the “fact” that you ought to change your car's oil regularly?
No one has ever successfully bridged the is-ought gap. If you want to maintain that there are objective moral truths, you ought to find some other way.
2. Therefore, the earth is round or you ought to go fly a kite.
But this is irrelevant, as it is not a way to derive moral principles (the conclusion is true, but it does not actually say that you should go fly a kite).
Ben Carson has been criticized for his bizarre claim (made in a commencement speech seventeen years ago) that the Egyptian pyramids were used to store grain, and rightly so. But there was something else almost as bizarre about his claim that is actually more telling, and it is something most reports have ignored.
Yes, presidential candidate Ben Carson actually thinks that scientists (or at least “various scientists,” which is bad enough) believe that aliens were responsible for the pyramids. That says a lot about how much he understands science.
He was talking about an argument made by his father when he, Rush, was a child – an argument that he apparently still finds persuasive today. It goes like this: A loving God, Rush's dad told him, would not have created us with the ability to imagine a place like heaven – or eternal life, for that matter – unless it were real. For, to create beings capable of imagining such a thing if it weren't real would simply be cruel.
One can certainly have a serious discussion about climate change. However, the religious approach of Rush and his followers is essentially to not even have a discussion, not even look at any evidence, because after all, we already “know” that climate change can't be true! And that's scary.