Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

why do you hate the dong

― El Tomboto, Wednesday, 18 July 2018 19:39 (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

because of the wang

I've only spent a few nights in Islamic cities, but in Male, Maldives, in a local B&B with blinds rather than windows, the pre-dawn adhan was astonishingly beautiful, certainly better than any racket I've resorted to as an alarm sound. As its being played simultanously from loudspeakers around the town, there's this natural echo/ambient effect...

Aren't all of your books Atheism for Children https://t.co/SQTn2PBig7

— woke space jeremy (@JeremyMcLellan) August 22, 2018

quality lol

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/d35ana/talking-to-the-guy-who-invented-the-word-meme-richard-dawkins

This video here is from the Saatchi show in Cannes. You were playing some kind of amazing instrument—what was that?
The advertising company Saatchi and Saatchi were producing a film to introduce the festival and they chose the theme of memes. And so they had me giving a short three-minute lecture on what a meme is and then I walked off the stage so they could show a kind of psychedelic light show with my words displayed and whirling around. It made it look as though they had taken words from my lecture and immediately put them into this film. But of course what they had really done was have me give the lecture word for word before, so they could extract the phrases and words they wanted to use, then at the end I had to walk onto the stage again with my ewi, which is an electronic wind instrument, a kind of electronic clarinet or oboe.

How did you come to play the ewi?
I played the clarinet at school and the fingering of the ewi is pretty similar to the clarinet. I was able to pick it up very easily. I actually played it as a trumpet because the sound is actually dependent on the software.

Who were some of your musical inspirations?
Well I love schubert, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.

Racist media site interviews racist

Was it nature, a particular moment or work of art that inspired you to denounce your Anglican upbringing?
I wouldn't say "denounce." That might be putting it a bit strongly. Christianity is somewhat harmless compared to some alternatives. I suppose at about 15 or 16 I decided that there was no God

Lol @ “somewhat harmless” - inquistion, crusades, mostly harmless

Is it our duty to enforce secularism, because in the West we think we know better?
I don’t like the idea of enforcing anything. I prefer to let people to think for themselves and in the case of science, you’ve only got to lay it out. It’s just there and it's so utterly convincing. I’m guessing your sister has a mobile phone, how does she think that works? It's science! Cars go because of science! Planes fly because of science! They don’t go by magic carpet or something. She is completely surrounded by a world in which everything she does, everything she touches, is designed on the basis of science. That’s why it works but I'm not in favour of a dictatorial enforcing.

Do you have a new project underway?
Yes, a children's book. A children's version of The God Delusion. Atheism for children, provisionally called Outgrowing God. It’s an attempt to break the cycle whereby children are automatically religious whether they like it or not, simply by inheriting the religion of their parents. I’m hoping children will read this book and then realise there is no God. You could give a copy to your sister.

Dawkins is racist?

Yes

How so? Genuinely curious.

Load all messages

Lol

Because he's a white British dude who doesn't spare Islam either? Seems like a simplistic view.

Unless I'm missing something here.

did you load all the messages?

Yes, and I read them all a minute ago.

Οὖτις, nowhere has Dawkins stated that people from Middle-eastern or Maghreb backgrounds are intrinsically, genetically inferior. He's just said that the culture surrounding Islam is, in sum, an inferior culture.

Maybe its cultural bigotry, but it isn't racist.

I mean if you get him at the right moment he'll go on for hours about the terrible evils of Christianity, but on the other hand he's prone to unguarded comments like the one up there about Christianity being somewhat harmless compared to other religions.

There are plenty of atheists who disguise their racism as opposition to specific non-Western religious dogmas but I am not convinced that the latter necessarily implies the former.

I assume he meant that Christianity is relatively toothless in its modern incarnation.

Ur taking that part of the scripture wherein outis pronounced that Dawkins was a racist very literally

On the one hand, mea culpa. On the other hand, you should be wary of this phrase because it comes from the Confiteor.

Xp Most pervasive racism isn't people going around literally saying other races are inferior, it's usually this kind of between the lines, tossed out stuff.

Cracking down on ambiguity just to be on the safe side comes with its own set of problems but ymmv.

Re: Islam vs Christianity and which is The Worst, there's an interesting book by Steve Bruce, where he does some accounting and comes to the conclusion that Islam and Roman Catholicism of all religions have tended to be tangled up in authoritarian politics more often than others (but with the caveat that all religions turn up all over the political map). Which he argues pretty convincingly but the reason it's convincing is because he's not really interested in which is The Worst Religion

But saying Dawkins isn't racist because he hasn't literally asserted the racial superiority of some group is itself cracking down on ambiguity

If u ask Richard Dawkins which religion is the Worst Religion he consistently answers the one w a majority of brown ppl as adherents. This is not a coincidence. This is a conclusion that he argues w out empirical evidence, and w remarkable consistency. He regularly praises (and makes excuses for) the institutions of British empire, such as the Anglican Church. This is also not a coincidence.

I’m on my phone so thats as succinct an answer yr gonna get from me

From a purely theoretical point of view (assuming such a thing exists), The Worst Religion is the one that is least amenable to a non-literalist reading. In practice, however, it varies from context to context, in time and space, and much of this Worstness is inseparable from extra-religious politics, i.e. The Quest for Power in general.

xps

I didn't say Dawkins isn't racist, by the way. I said I'm not convinced that he is.

That's a fair point Outis, especially if the sweepstakes cover all historical periods.

Dawkins is not making a good faith argument, theoretical or not, about Worst Religion. He is making one that looks and sounds racist in its underpinnings and consistency.

That said, a case could be made, along the lines of Marcel Gauchet, that Christianity is the religion that leads away from religion and hence the religion that sows the seeds of atheism. If the latter is your end-goal, I can see why you'd favour Christianity.

But I doubt that's Dawkins's argument (I haven't read him and nor do I intend to).

Judaism has a way deeper tradition of non-literalist and intellectual rigor than xtianity imo but i am biased.

I agree with that. But that's precisely why Christianity more readily dispenses with the Book.

From a purely theoretical point of view (assuming such a thing exists), The Worst Religion is the one that is least amenable to a non-literalist reading. In practice, however, it varies from context to context, in time and space, and much of this Worstness is inseparable from extra-religious politics, i.e. The Quest for Power in general.

xps

― pomenitul, 25. december 2018 22:07 (thirty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Anyone who thinks like this would conclude Islam was The Best Religion after spending two minutes with the Quran...

'This is the book of which there is no doubt' – its claims to inerrancy are self-referential from the get-go. It even goes so far as to explicitly eschew self-contradiction: 'If this book were from other than GOD, they would certainly find much variation and contradiction in it.'

That's not the first Surah, that's the one called THE COW, which has this story about a Cow:

And when Moses said to his people: Surely God commands you to sacrifice a cow. They said: Dost thou ridicule us? He said: I seek refuge with God from being one of the ignorant. / They said: Call on thy Lord for our sake to make it plain to us what she is. (Moses) said: He says, Surely she is a cow neither advanced in age nor too young, of middle age between these (two); so do what you are commanded. / They said: Call on thy Lord for our sake to make it clear to us what her colour is. (Moses) said: He says, She is a yellow cow; her colour is intensely yellow delighting the beholders. / They said: Call on thy Lord for our sake to make it dear to us what she is, for surely to us the cows are all alike, and if God please we shall surely he guided aright. / (Moses) said: He says: She is a cow not made submissive to plough the land, nor does she water the tilth, sound, without a blemish in her. They said: Now thou hast brought the truth. So they slaughtered her, though they had not the mind to do (it).

Anyone can see you get nowhere trying to deal with the Quran literally.

But lol, you have your anti-Islam quotes at the ready. Very telling.

No literal reading of a purportedly holy book gets you anywhere, but an exceptionally high degree of self-referentiality makes for additional complications. Incidentally, that line is near the very beginning of the book – it's the second verse of the second Surah. And the first Surah consists of merely 29 words.

The 'very telling' is a pretty shitty assumption on your part, by the way. I think the Quran is a beautiful text and its unique hermeneutical challenges are fascinating to me.

You can get pretty far with a literal reading of Leviticus. And that's a part of both the Jewish and the Christian bible. There is nothing like that in the Quran, though it at times seems like it would want to. It quite obviously lacks the editing.

It's been noted many times already on ilx that in any Venn diagram of Christianity, biblical literalism would be a much smaller circle within the larger whole. It is ridiculously easy to target biblical literalism as internally inconsistent and rationally insupportable, but thinking you've pulverized "religion" or "Christianity" as a result is childish. Dawkins exemplifies that kind of childish inability to grasp the essence of religion.

There's also the 'Mother Book' verse, which espouses a more Platonic view of the Quran, implying that the book as you know it (originally written in Arabic) is a mere copy of another Book, one that is beyond human language.

I think the 'intensity' of these self-contradictions (a good thing imho) is in a sense greater than that of either the Jewish or Christian Bibles. Due to its apparently stable authorship and shorter genesis, the Quran comes across as more coherent and self-contained than its predecessors' sprawling fragments. It seems to be aware of this risk, which it seeks to actively mitigate through self-referential statements that only serve to exacerbate the ambiguity (at least as far as I'm concerned – a believer would no doubt have a completely different take on this).

But then again, the fact that there are no less than four distinct Gospels – four witnesses, each one unreliable in his own right – that often contradict each other hasn't prevented generations of Christians from subscribing to a literalist reading of the Bible.

xp

What any religious text says on the page will always in real life go through a whole load of editing and interpretation (both official and personal), which doesn't mean that a quote from the page is completely useless, but ... limited use, imo. Whether we're trying to position the religion as positive or negative.

xp

I really don't get how you can say the Quran is the most coherent text if you've read them all? Yeah, the Torah is composed over a much longer period, but that final editing is pretty tight. And for all the contradictions, the four gospels are remarkably similar, and are pretty obviously based on similar sources (like, say, oral or written testimony about the actual life of Jesus...) The Quran, on the other hand, seems unplanned, chaotic, verging from idea to idea, subject to subject, without at all cohering. Nor trying to.

Anyways, cardamon otm, in the end the shape of religions has a lot more to do with how much it has been adapted to serve the interests of autocracies, imo. And, well, it's hard to argue against Islam very quickly turning into a caliphate.