Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

the problem with this thread premise is that the anti-christ will prob be a great thinker

he was

who has won out in the Gould vs Dawkins debates? I never kept up with that.

― ryan, Thursday, August 8, 2013 1:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

re: punctuated equilibrium

― ryan, Thursday, August 8, 2013 1:11 PM (Yesterday)

Gould won, P.E. is taught in evolution classes in college as part of the basic theory. He's not alive to defend his legacy unfortunately.

& I really liked that PZ Myers article. I wish I could take one of his classes.

pz myers is occasionally as guilty as dawkins of boorish scientism tbh.

But he at least appears to understand what it looks like.

http://i.imgur.com/MKC1uca.jpg

nagl

You'd think he'd understand at least something about the social background to being a scientist, Jewish history, how living in a society that is unfriendly to you can be a spur to say 'screw you, I'm going to work extremely hard and achieve a lot' ...

Easier to just blame it on religion.

dawkins otm - jews are the best

if i was jewish i would have a nobel prize by now for sure

So who else is there, in terms of popular promoters of science who are actually good?

Neil deGrasse Tyson san?

neil degrasse tyson was given an honorary degree thing by my college, and so was sitting up on the stage during graduation. the entire time he kept talking to my friend, openly ignoring all of the speakers.

that's pretty rad, most graduation speakers are insufferably boring.

I suppose Michio Kaku is over-saturated but I still like him, I think he's really good at showing that science can be really creative and imaginative and exciting.

So who else is there, in terms of popular promoters of science who are actually good?

I actually think Pinker himself is good! His books of popular science (e.g. THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT, THE BETTER ANGELS) are thorough and careful and novel in exactly the ways you wish his tendentious op-eds would be.

Brian Greene is good.

Martin Rees is the best working astronomer who popularises his subject IMO. He mostly avoids this boorish public intellectual bullshit, not coincidentally.

Even I found that pinker article infuriating and very very thick indeed

cosign re Brian Greene

the fucktheory post seems boomingly otm to me. he clearly has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to the humanities to the extent that he can't even win an argument against a straw man of his own design. lol what a dummy.

he's been banging on about this for years, although it seems he's become seduced by the negative attention the likes of dawkins get for their pronouncements. this aaron swarz rip post about a 2004 talk he gave makes his take seem a little less shrilly combative: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001475. (less shrill btw, but more explicitly stupider: "Fiction. Why do people spend so much time reading about things that never happened?"). lol what a dummy.

week 0 of my freshman science course has a seminar called "what is science". going to set the pinker thing and the fucktheory things as optional reading i think.

this otm too, never mind the humanties: even his discussion of the history of science is idiotic: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/08/13/211613954/the-power-of-science-and-the-danger-of-scientism.

richard dawkins is the cleverest racist of his generation.

he doesn't even win that while James Watson's still alive

Nor morrissey

he said "cleverest"

Shit sorry im reading from the phone, thought it read worst singer

He's certainly the "brightest" xenophobe... say what you will about Hitchins' Islamophobia, he didn't pretend to stand on some untouchable pillar of scientific truth.

this aaron swarz rip post about a 2004 talk he gave makes his take seem a little less shrilly combative

though the post does not exactly cover schwartz himself in glory

well yeah i doubt he would have written a significantly better new republic article himself

http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2013/9/7/dawkins-under-attack-for-his-lenient-view-of-mild-sex-abuse-the-times

Dawkins not fussed about "mild paedophilia", it didn't do "any of us any lasting damage".

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/336048706853937152

It didn't do "any of us any lasting damage", when calculated for certain values of "us".

He said that he could not condemn the “mild paedophilia” he experienced at boarding school. “I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours,” he says in an interview published today in The Times Magazine.

“Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild paedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”

Isn't he near constantly slagging off Biblical cultures in his book for ... oh, what's the point

I mean, come on, a lot of his schtick is all about the Bible as an awful bronze age book of dastardly backwardness and hate and racism and sexism. But now he's saying you can forgive someone as recently as his own school-days for a bit of mild pedophilia ... because that was how people were back then.

anybody who's seen The Fastest Gun Alive can join me in sharing a tiny drop of sympathy for Big Dawk as he's cornered himself into flailing ever more feebly along in the public eye

I was always the one to defend this guy until I read his twitter page.

ffs. this guy. every time I see the thread title I think "what now?". not sure how he can top himself next.

Well ...

Nigel Farage ‏@Nigel_Farage 18 Oct

Follow my column every Friday on the Express website. Here is today's... http://fb.me/2rBeMWIGy
Retweeted by Pat Condell

“Brash. Uncompromising. Brilliant. Hilarious. Pat Condell has found a simple formula for success: stating the obvious without restraining himself with the conventions of unwarranted piety. Pat flenses sacred cows, and after slicing away the fat and gristle of tired apologetics and mindless tradition, he exposes the hollow carcass of a culture’s hypocrisy…and we laugh.” – PZ Myers, ScienceBlogs.com/Pharyngula

NTSC All Region
1 DVD
Run Time: 180 minutes

Subtitles: none

Episodes:
01 – Introduction
02 – Hello America – 18 February 07
03 – What have I got against religion? – 04 March 07
04 – The trouble with Islam – 16 March 07
05 – What do I believe? – 28 March 07
06 – Happy Easter – 05 April 07
07 – Absolute certainty – 13 April 07
08 – Religion in the UK – 17 April 07
09 – In Jesus’ name – 25 April 07
10 – United States of Jesus – 03 May 07
11 – Why are we friends with Saudi Arabia? – 14 May 07
12 – Am I a racist? – 20 May 07
13 – Miracles and morals – 29 May 07
14 – Catholic morality – 04 June 07
15 – Origin of the species – 13 June 07
16 – The myth of Islamophobia – 21 June 07
17 – What about the Jews? – 29 June 07
18 – Politics and religion – 10 July 07
19 – Why does faith deserve respect? – 19 July 07
20 – God bless atheism – 03 August 07
21 – Islam in Europe – 17 August 07
22 – Unholy scripture – 31 August 07
23 – Video response to Osama – 11 September 07
24 – Hello angry Christians – 25 September 07
25 – More demands from Islam – 09 October 07
26 – What’s good about religion? – 23 October 07
27 – Was Jesus gay? – 02 November 07
28 – A word to Islamofascists – 14 November 07
29 – Why debate dogma? – 27 November 07
30 – Laugh at Sudan – 03 December 07
31 – Pimping for Jesus – 18 December 07
32 – Partying with Baby Jesus – 24 December 07
33 – Hook, line and rapure – 08 January 08
34 – O dhimmi Canada – 19 January 08
35 – God the psycho – 02 February 08

oh good something for everyone

a simple formula for success: stating the obvious

TRUTH BOMB

12 – Am I a racist? – 20 May 07

wait, i know this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz4PjxSmtoI

17 – What about the Jews? – 29 June 07

finally someone answers the Jewish question

That video. Good grief. All you can do with someone like that is try to stay far away from them.

pat condell was put on this earth by god to reveal the true, full & awful character of richard dawkins

If he weren't allowed to make those videos, he'd probably chew his own arm off out of the sheer need to chew on something.