Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

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.

Obviously the best religion is one that has no basis in a text at all and thereby completely sidesteps questions of interpretation, literal or otherwise e.g. voudoo

Xp to self.

But back to the point: there are, for example, Christian militias in Africa who rival their Islamic militia competitors for violence and abuses of human rights; there are in America, and Dawkins knows there are, extremely potent right wing Christian groups some of whom are like African or Middle Eastern militias, just white, and as it were waiting in the wings for the conditions to come right.

Obviously what he says in the article is a throwaway, but it's also a give away imo

Taoism has a text that negates itself. Zen has texts that attempt a similar negation. Most animism is purely orally transmitted.

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.

I'm not saying it's the most coherent text. I'm saying it's the most consistent in its drive towards formalist rather than narrative coherence due to its greater emphasis on self-referentiality as well as, tangentially, its purportedly single authorship and shorter compositional period. In repeatedly doubling back on itself, it asserts its status as the Book of Books even more forcefully than its predecessors. It strikes me as more aware of itself, as it were, which makes sense given its historical position relative to the the other two scriptures. Incidentally, I don't agree that the Torah's final editing is tight and that the Gospels are remarkably similar, but that's a minor quibble – I see where you're coming from. Anyway, I'm fascinated with the Quran's attempts at tempering its own chaos. Whether these attempts are successful (and whether they need to be) is a different matter.

Of course the reading – and especially its political variant – is the most important thing. But I'm not convinced that a text is merely what you, the reader, make of it. Maybe I'm biased, but it seems overly dismissive of its singularity, its rhetorical force, which does at least create a context, no matter how feeble, for how you may or may not exert power.

Does Dawkins ever talk about this stuff btw? Or he is always like 'you contradicted yourself there, lulz I pwned you again'?

He tends to think literalism is the intended reading of religious texts, and that people who follow the religions in a non literal way are faking it or making excuses.

The idea I think is that ancient times people were all ignorant and superstitious, and must have intended these texts as literally true, because they were really stupid.

Yes that is a key problem w his thinking

I do wonder sometimes whether the key ingredient to becoming a public 'intellectual' is relinquishing nuance and strawmanning the shit out of your opponents, thus making yourself look like a smug cretin, which you probably are anyway.

Yup. He's also an example of post 9/11 literature.

'But I'm not convinced that a text is merely what you, the reader, make of it.'

Sure. What it says on the page does matter, and we will struggle to 180 it, but ...

Same goes for legal texts, which overlap with religious ones obviously. All of it is liable to get 180'd but part of the process of writing laws is trying to ensure that it won't happen. Always in vain, of course, but to varying degrees.

In the last two days Dawkins has tweeted about eugenics ("It would definitely work on people, just look at cows and dogs!") and cannibalism ("We could culture meat made out of humans!") I don't think he's OK.

Human steak could of course be cultured. Would you eat it? I wouldn’t, but it’s hard to say why. It would be cultured from a single nameable person. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall served human placenta, also clone of 1 person, in this case the baby. I wouldn’t eat that either.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 18, 2020

It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 16, 2020

I've given it some thought and I'm finally about ready to land on "great thinker". Now time to see what this revive's about and take a big sip from my mug of liberal tears....

I wouldn’t, but it’s hard to say why.

This sounds an awful lot like superstitious thinking to me.

BURN THE WITCH

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science

It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans?

The types of genetic selection practiced on cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses aim at highly simplistic outcomes attached to increasing their utility to humans, or just to gratify human whimsicality. That is the measure of what "works".

Subjecting humans to genetic selection to increase their utility to other humans, or to gratify human whims, would fall under the heading of treating those subjects as property, which may well be classified as "ideological, political, moral grounds", but these categories address the question Dawkins studiously avoids, namely who would benefit when eugenics "worked"?

Yeah, exactly, to say that something 'works' requires some sort of ideological, political, or moral paradigm in the first place to define what ends the thing is supposed to work towards. It's not a purely factual thing. One would think an evolutionary biologist would know better. (Ofc, it's also questionable how well breeding works in all of those other cases, even on its terms.)

Maybe this is what people were trying to get at in the other thread idk.

I believe that we can selectively breed human beings such that, within a generation or two, we all look like Mr. Peanut. And yes, the monocle and top hat will be part of the genetic package.

*even on its own terms

on the other thread we are mainly just clowning a permanently silly man tbf

Ha, I meant the race thread, didn't know there was another thread about Dawkins.

"Eugenics: it works, bitches" - Richard Dawkins

He probably means ‘works’ in terms of population growth? I’m guessing there’s more cats & dogs than there used to be.

He expanded that what he meant was that just as we can breed cows to produce more milk, we could breed humans to run faster - but of course, he deplores the idea of eugenics; he's just stating the facts.

i really don't think we need to give him the benefit of having a clue what he's saying

Richard Dawkins is just a racist guy online, the things he says don’t have to mean anything

this fuckin dummy

Dawkins has spent much of his career calling anyone who believes in God or who studies religion a huge dumbass, so pivoting to being an anti-“war on Christmas” guy is.... something. pic.twitter.com/pBcEZH3taQ

— hannah gais (@hannahgais) December 24, 2020

His performative atheism has taken second place to his actual racism for years

dreaming of a white holiday huh

Great Thinker.

believes in the very real objective science of calipers and bell curves

for dawk so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son (the word "meme")

I would like to approach Richard with the idea of a "Dawkins Reacts" youtube channel, reckon there's a decent amount of grift out there currently up for grabs.

I guess it's irrational anger about something innocuous and I would never write an asinine tweet about it... but i loathe "happy holidays".

it comes from a place of acknowledging that significant numbers of your population have a non-Christian faith tho

happy holidays ledge

dick dork has always been a white supremacist first

yeah i sometimes feel inappropriate saying happy xmas but I can't bear the americanism, sorry to be racist against americans.

it doesn't work in a UK context because "holidays" means something different here.