Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

My bad, lucky you got to forgive me right

there prob are secular communities on the same scale as religious ones but theyre all like rainbow gathering or cults??

juggalos

My bad, lucky you got to forgive me right
--mister borges (darraghmac)

lol this was a Bill Hicks joke he told about being confronted by audience members who didn't like his jokes about Christians. "So? Forgive me."

needs a pinch more of contrition

juggalos were xian i thought

I am sorry for being mean to the theists

have we ever done a thread about communities + belonging to them?

― Mordy, Wednesday, April 3, 2013 5:15 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd like to read this thread.

I thought mordy had done something tbh

i am a hermit, or at least have the personality of one.

turns out that dissing Dawkins on Twitter is a good way to get smug undergrads to limply try to tear you apart, whoda thunk it.

:D

http://24.media.tumblr.com/5546855eaa4fe107ae7115199f36d85c/tumblr_mlh28xuMrH1qarn5zo1_500.jpg

just so it goes in its proper place

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/statuses/311802605263273984

making a strong bid to be the douchebag's douchebag in 2013

this man is an idiot

"Can pig feel more?" v quickly becoming a catchphrase for me.

lose weight with this one weird pig feel more

"How is babby formed? Can pig feel more?"

LOL I read this guys books a long time ago (like over a decade) when I was an aspiring biologist and I was deeply underwhelmed, then I learned more about him w/r/t his pissing contest with Stephen J. Gould (who's books are actually fucking great reads), and basically Dawkins is in my mind not only a shitty political/ideological "thinker," he's also not a good scientist --- and he's especially terrible as a "representative" of science.

So unless he's secretly a great cook or something, Dawkins is basically an all around a bad person who is terrible. I'm very surprised the "atheist community" or whatever hasn't completely disowned him, though maybe they have cause all the atheists in my life regard him as a joke.

also he married the wrong romana

chuch

have u read any steve jones? he turns up as an amazingly zingy talking head on british tv a lot & i'd be into reading something of his

xp to vr

No I haven't I will check him out! I need more good science lit. in my life.

The "atheist community" is a huge sample, and huge groups aren't as picky or think as critically as the "community" of a single thread. He holds the baton and leads the blanketed points of atheism and in such a way that is attractive to frustrated new atheists. He is also quicker to disrespect philosophical arguments for theism as they sidestep truth claims, so he smugly dismisses them. From what I've seen.

Would you appreciate a more thoughtful, non "Old White Male" type being in charge of the atheist baton, Evan? No subtext really, just wondering. If I was an atheist I would probably want a strong, egoic figurehead who wouldn't bend over backwards to accommodate lazy religious thinking that sidesteps falsifiability, etc., but IMO Dawkins is himself a lazy thinker...

Anyway, this conversation just led me to create S/D - Popular Scientists on Television. Come join the fun!

As a leftist I appreciate strong, bullheaded types to lead the charge, but then again that doesn't mean I like Glenn Greenwald except in very small doses.

As an atheist I don't see a need for a figurehead at all, much less Dawkins (or Hitchens).

Combating religious bullshit when it moves into laws or the public sphere doesn't require being an asshole to theists just for the sake of being an asshole, IMO.

this motherfucker is still a patriarchal, racist, misogynist piece of shit

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/324802551516106752

Would you appreciate a more thoughtful, non "Old White Male" type being in charge of the atheist baton, Evan?

I personally don't mind an "old white male" holding the baton, and clearly neither does the young majority of r/atheism types.

A more thoughtful figurehead of any side of the argument is preferable. Healthy debate gets more done and prioritizes critical thought over cheap zinger material that can later be an image macro along with pictures of galaxies.

why not have both with capt picard?

feel like Dawkins' position doesn't need much explication - you're an atheist, theists are subhuman morons misguided, got it, cheers. where do you stand on being a spiteful dogmatic bigot, son?

i don't know why i clicked those twitter links. reading what this turd has to say always leaves me pissed off and frustrated. god and the sycophantic dweebs that hang on his every word. hate u mr dorkins.

Dick Dorkins

I don't know if atheism really needs a figurehead at all

The biggest personality spewing relatively watered down, compact thoughts is generally the more noticed voice for any given position out there and shouldn't be surprising to anyone.

Figureheads emerge whether they're necessary or not.

While all decisions must be made collectively, sometimes it is necessary to employ a mouthpiece to translate complexities to the uninitiated. However, any mouthpiece that strays from the will of the collective has outlived its usefulness and therefore must be destroyed.

^^^ knows what time it is.

in nanoseconds.

But the larger the majority, the shallower this mouthpiece often is.

can pig feel more?

that quote is all-time, really

http://www.amazon.com/The-Science-Delusion-Questions-Culture/dp/1612192009 this could be interesting, excerpt (which gets a bit muddled at the end) here - http://jacobinmag.com/2013/06/dna-a-parasite-that-builds-its-own-host/

A writer who transitions (using the words "For example") from this paragraph

This is a dramatic example of science borrowing from art. But some scientists do not limit themselves to borrowing from the paint box; they want to argue that, so far as beauty is concerned, they have entirely displaced the arts.

. . . to an excerpt from one of Dawkins's books in which he has lunch with James Watson and discusses whether life has a purpose; but that writer pretends that he hasn't changed the subject from "art" to "religion," has not written a book that I care to read.

Interesting stuff!

that jacobin mag article made no sense to me.

i mean, it made literal sense, but i have no idea why the author thinks he's discovered some kind of damning hypocrisy in contemporary scientific discourse.

I only skimmed it on my phone but it does seem to point to a maddening thing about Dawkins in particular: he can't help but try to express science according to values of aesthetics or religion. Hence the "Romantic" turn that scientific discourse seems to take. This is only pernicious because it's in the service of making his ideology immune to criticism from those very perspectives. Not unlike how fundamentalists embrace "scientific" proof of the Flood or whatever. It's folding everything into the one master discourse he feels is the legitimate one.

Not sure if White is any better in that regard, really, but if he's drawing on romanticism that's obviously a complex and highly fraught tradition in its own right.

mhm, I don't think the points that the article has are really anything we haven't said here but they're points it would be useful to have out there in a more public space. In mainstream public intellectual terms Dawkins and his crew go fairly unchallenged. It seems White may not have quite the right response - the closing passages suggest a romanticism that opens itself to being taken as a relativism, and that kind of misreading of this intellectual tradition is one of the reasons for nu-scientism emerging in the first place - but I feel that him doing this is basically a good thing.

Yeah otm. It's a better discussion to be having in any case--one that at least can acknowledge the historical context of the debate in a way that goes beyond "dark ages" vs "enlightenment."

i agree that dawkins's elevating of "science" as being superior to all other human activity is willful and kind of ridiculous on its face. and i think his romantic (or Romantic, which is not entirely the same thing) paeans to science are typically kind of shallow and corny. but I don't think any of that invalidates the apparently gloomy idea that we are just "products" of natural evolution. art and culture can be understood in terms of evolution, as adaptive or exaptive -- probably a little of both.

i mean we're all trying to find moment-to-moment ways of making meaning in a universe--it might be built in to our construction of a self--that doesn't really serve to "mean" anything. i don't really begrudge dawkins's attempts to do the same, no matter how hackneyed.

maybe i am misunderstanding. (i have all kinds of problems w/ dawkins btw. just not really this one, again if i am understanding it correctly.)

I don't begrudge him that either! I do begrudge his attempts to make his own meaning-making universal.