Dawkins Demolished

[MrGongGong]

Mr GG - Towards the beginning of this thread, which is called "Dawkins Demolished", I predicted that it would turn into a thread about religion versus homosexuality. Sure enough this has happened.

Sadly that's because some (SOME ) "religious" people are more than a little obsessed with who sticks what where !
I blame the "Paulists"

[John Skelton]

Returning for a moment to Richard Dawkins, and to recap: have we established that it’s OK when Richard Dawkins writes “that Islam is such an unmitigated evil” or says: “I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world, and I fear that we have a very difficult struggle there” in a way it wouldn’t be OK for Melanie Phillips or a neoconservative American commentator? That when Dawkins writes about Islam and unmitigated evil and speaks of “a very difficult struggle” it in no way feeds into Islamophobia, or offers a potential justification for further military intervention against “one of the great evils of the world”?

Just as, after Christopher Hitchens died, his strong support for American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the American project in Afghanistan appeared to become evidence (if perhaps a touch disagreeable for some) of Hitch the great contrarian and in no way comparable to the sort of stuff you could get from an American neocon or on Fox News? Incidentally: when was the last time Richard Dawkins raised his objections to the Iraq War and occupation? Did he raise the subject in his New Statesman interview with Hitchens, which I’ve not read? He certainly doesn’t mention Iraq here http://richarddawkins.net/videos/643...opher-hitchens

other than to quote Hitchens: “Who are your favorite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy.” (Didn’t Tony Blair offer that as a reason for war, once the WMD claims were shown to be bogus?)

nor did Hitchens mention Iraq in his acceptance speech

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011...s-award-speech.

Or is it OK among British progressives to propagandise for a war which otherwise those progressives regard as abhorrent if you are a hero of atheism? (Hitch and Dawkins having assured one another, of course, that the left-right 'spectrum' is just so yesterday).

[scottycelt]

Yes it would.

They want to run a business, they're subject to antidiscrimination laws like everyone else.

'Discrimination' can be very selective. If Ams and Flossie were hotel owners would they welcome a party of Catholic priests or 'Creationists' as guests ? Maybe they would have absolutely no problem with a BNP convention? Or possibly the hotel would might just be conveniently full?

Anyway, Lat is right ... this is getting nowhere as there is little attempt from some here (not you, Jean!) towards a meeting of minds regarding social equity and individual liberty, merely increasing torrents of abuse.

So, I'll gladly clear off and leave them to it ...

[Lateralthinking1]

JS - I think it is all ok if you agree with free speech. Phillips criticizes from a certain kind of Christian perspective, Dawkins from an atheist perspective and neocons from a capitalist perspective. There is a big "what I want" in all three stances. I am concerned about the totalitarianism and poor human rights record in fundamental Islamism. My "I want" is a general absence of cruelty so far as that is possible. Why should I nail it on to something big?

[Bryn]

In return the Party promotes atheism in schools but undertakes "to protect and respect religion until such time as religion itself will disappear".>

The last sentence (yes, even 'poisoning' little minds in school, eh?) needs no further comment from silly old me ... and some have the mind-boggling gall to accuse Christians of 'hypocrisy' !

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14838749

In general the article you link to reinforces the point I was making re. your "silliness". Oh, and the Chinese schools' promotion of atheism is to protect them form the 'poison' of religion, surely? Mind you the oft 'quoted' "Religion is poison", attributed to Mao Zedong, actually comes form the Dalai Lama, in his autobiography, Freedom in Exile, hardly the most reliable source. Meanwhile, when they fell out, the Albanian communists declared Mao to be basically a Taoist.

[John Skelton]

JS - I think it is all ok if you agree with free speech. Phillips criticizes from a certain kind of Christian perspective, Dawkins from an atheist perspective and neocons from a capitalist perspective.

Well I wasn't saying it wasn't OK as in this man shouldn't be allowed to say these things. And I'm certainly not saying anything should be exempt from a critical perspective. I was attempting to discover why statements which if they didn't come from Dawkins would be roundly criticised by people with a record of criticising such statements seem to receive a different response when they do come from Dawkins. Something similar happened when Hitchens died (incidentally, given Dawkins' voluminous praise for Hitchens and him awarding Hitchens a prize which Hitchens accepted I don't think it's unfair in this context to discuss them together).

I'd be astonished if Dawkins is anti-capitalist, by the way.

[amateur51]

And maybe, therefore, some might practise what they constantly preach and allow Bideford Council and others to conduct business as they see fit without interference from busybody atheists with similar principles?

And there's absolutely no need to shout, Flossie, you have quite a loud enough voice as it is ...

The Bideford Council ruling only stopped people from praying as part of official business scotty - as well you know. I wish that had been all I had to deal with thanks to Christian religions in UK

[amateur51]

And obliging Christian hotel owners to accept homosexual practices on their own property is not an imposition of a particular set of beliefs on people who don't want it? Would that be missing the point as well?

Be a bit more careful before you throw around words like 'hypocrisy' ...

Oh dear scotty - 'their property' was a place from which they ran a commercial business and which they happened to occupy as a home. People have to obey the law - simples. Another example of Christians picking & choosing which laws to obey

[amateur51]

Yes - the point was that the prayers were part of the agenda of the meeting, so that any councillor who didn't attend until they were over would be marked down as late.

She wouldn't even know when the meeting proper was supposed to start.

They could have had optional prayers before the meeting, which should have satisfied everyone.

The idiot Eric Pickles has now tweaked the law so that the prayers can be reinstated. I do not think Pickles is a particularly religious man, but he sees himself as defending a culture against outsiders of all sorts.

[amateur51]

'Discrimination' can be very selective. If Ams and Flossie were hotel owners would they welcome a party of Catholic priests or 'Creationists' as guests ? Maybe they would have absolutely no problem with a BNP convention? Or possibly the hotel would might just be conveniently full?

Anyway, Lat is right ... this is getting nowhere as there is little attempt from some here (not you, Jean!) towards a meeting of minds regarding social equity and individual liberty, merely increasing torrents of abuse.

So, I'll gladly clear off and leave them to it ...

Well as I would be running it for commercial profit, of course I'd take the Catholoc/Creationist trade. Are there BNP Catholics, I wonder?

As Mr Dacre would say, I think it's a bit ripe for scotty to kvetch about a paucity of 'meeting of minds' since he continues to repeat the same old same old even after having been corrected (and not just by me )

Poor Mrs scotty - a morning of Bruckner at maximum tilt in propect

[MrGongGong]

Do members of the Inquisition get a discount at Scotty Towers B&B ?

[Ferretfancy]

Well as I would be running it for commercial profit, of course I'd take the Catholoc/Creationist trade. Are there BNP Catholics, I wonder?

As Mr Dacre would say, I think it's a bit ripe for scotty to kvetch about a paucity of 'meeting of minds' since he continues to repeat the same old same old even after having been corrected (and not just by me )

Poor Mrs scotty - a morning of Bruckner at maximum tilt in propect

Are there any BNP catholics? Well, considering that they paved the way for Hitler in the 1930's, were Franco's main supporters, did a deal with Mussolini, were friends with Marcos and Imelda, not to mention most of the dictators in Latin America, I would hardly be surprised !

[amateur51]

I agree that I'd want to question Dawkins closely about what he means by 'unmitigated evil' John Skelton.

Does the fact that Hitchens gave the same response as Blair to a question immediately corrupt Hitchen's answer?

As Whitman remarked: 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.' No politician would sign up to that

[jean]

Mr GG - Towards the beginning of this thread, which is called "Dawkins Demolished", I predicted that it would turn into a thread about religion versus homosexuality. Sure enough this has happened.

I would not have predicted that, possibly because I have not much experience of similar threads on this board.

What I did wonder when I posted the links in my #117 was whether it might, as I think you noted, turn into a discussion about what Dawkins thought it meant to be Jewish.

But it didn't. Fortunately, probably.

I can't think of one post in which someone has said "blimey, I hadn't seen it like that before". It is obviously always going to be that way.

Not always!

Jean - A fair point.

[aeolium]

have we established that it’s OK when Richard Dawkins writes “that Islam is such an unmitigated evil” or says: “I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world, and I fear that we have a very difficult struggle there” in a way it wouldn’t be OK for Melanie Phillips or a neoconservative American commentator?

I don't know that anything has been established on this thread. My view about that statement of Dawkins is that it was crass and wrong, although I do think that there are many aspects of Islamic theocracies such as Iran or Somalia or Saudi Arabia which are deeply damaging in terms of restriction of political and civil liberties, interference into many aspects of private behaviour, and inequality of rights under the law for women and other groups. It wouldn't surprise me if Dawkins, like many others, considers these things to be evils. After all, societies with strict implementations of Islamic sharia law do in some cases apply punishments directly prescribed by the Quran, rather as if Levitican prohibitions and punishments were to be applied in an extreme Christian theocracy. You will not, however, hear many condemnations of these things from Marxists - religious oppression is not important, only economic. My view, which will probably be regarded as Western supremacist by some, is that secular states where there is respect for the rule of law and an independent secular judiciary are infinitely to be preferred to states where there is a strong clerical participation in government and where the judiciary are predominantly clerics.

Dawkins has fairly regularly criticised the Iraq war, in his book The God Delusion for instance and here. Still, if you have evidence that he has changed his mind about it, I'd be interested to see it.