Apparently Richard Dawkins was worried that people might have forgotten what an asshat he is. So, helpful fellow that he is, he decided to give us all a demonstration of why he’s one of the atheist movement’s biggest liabilities, a “humanist” who has trouble remembering to act human.
Earlier today Dawkins decided, for some reason, that he needed to remind the people of the world of a fairly basic point of logic, and so he took to Twitter and thumbed out this little thought:
However petulantly phrased this is, the basic logic is sound: If I say that Hitler was worse than Stalin, I’m not endorsing either Hitler or Stalin. Unless I add “and Stalin was totally awesome and I endorse him” at the end.
The trouble is that Dawkins didn’t stop with this one tweet. He decided to illustrate his point with some examples. Some really terrible examples.
Yep, that’s right. He decided to do what comedians call a “callback” to some terrible comments he made last year about what he perversely described as “mild pedophilia.” And then he added asshattery to asshattery by suggesting a similar distinction between “date rape” and “stranger rape.”
Anyone seeing these comments as insensitive twaddle designed to minimize both “mild” pedophilia and date rape has good reason to do so. As you may recall, in the earlier controversy about so-called “mild” pedophilia, Dawkins told an interviewer for the Times magazine that
I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.
He went on to tell the interviewer that when he was a child one of his school masters had “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.” But, he added, he didn’t think that this sort of “mild touching up” had done him, or any of the classmates also victimized by the teacher, any “lasting harm.”
Huh. If Dawkins says that a teacher groping him was no big deal, I guess this kind of “mild” abuse shouldn’t be a big deal for anyone else, either, huh?
I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of logical fallacy here.
Given his history of minimizing these “mild” sexual crimes, it’s not a surprise that his crass tweets today inspired a bit of a twitterstorm.
Dawkins has responded with his typical petulance, and has stubbornly defended his comments as an exercise in pure logic that his critics are too irrational to understand.
What I have learned today is that there are people on Twitter who think in absolutist terms, to an extent I wouldn't have believed possible.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2014
.@mikester8821 Yes, it is so obvious it is painful. But they aren't debating, they are emoting.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2014
If you take a few moments to go through his timeline you’ll find many more tweets and retweets reiterating this “argument.” Dawkins is not the sort of person to admit to mistakes. Indeed, he so regularly puts his foot in his mouth it’s hard not to conclude that he must like the taste of shoe leather.
But these recurring controversies can’t be doing much for his reputation. Indeed, they seem to cause more and more people to wonder why anyone takes Dawkins seriously on any subject other than biology. Even his critics on Twitter are growing a bit weary.
https://twitter.com/somegreybloke/status/494045464308629505
https://twitter.com/markleggett/status/494044606342782977
https://twitter.com/endorathewitch/status/494071064008597504
Good lord. Look at Dawkins feed. Like every third tweet (or sequence) is something deplorable.
— 🦇VaginoplASCII🦇 (@nataliereed84) July 29, 2014
It seems that no matter what point Richard Dawkins tries to make, he only ever ends up proving that Richard Dawkins is a tosspot.
— Steph. 🏳️⚧️ (@EccentricSteph) July 29, 2014
Seems like it. I’m beginning to wonder why any atheists — at least those who are not also asshats — continue to think of Dawkins as an ally of any kind.
Putting Doug Spoonwood on moderation for being a dick in a discussion of rape.
Thanks, David!
Somewhere in my late teens I came to terms with the idea that I just couldn’t know whether there is a god and therefore I had to live with that uncertainty. Certainty is so much easier, but if you can’t have it, you can’t have it.
You can argue that the universe couldn’t exist without a creator, but then you have to ask, “What created the creator?” We live in a concrete world, and abstractions like eternity, infinity, or the ultimate source of the universe are just not concepts that our experience in this world prepares us to understand. I had to confront this problem when I was considering whether I could claim to be a conscientious objector. The law (as extended by the so-called Seager decision) stated that my objection to war had to be, in effect, the result of a belief in an external force that I felt compelled to obey and not of personal moral views. I decided that I probably did not qualify (though I did use a CO defense at my trial, which I now regret).
There’s something about this which I think hasn’t been pointed out yet. “Mild” incidents of sexual assault and/or rape are usually not isolated incidents, they’re part of a pattern of increasing severity of incidents, so someone who has been a victim of a “mild” incident is more likely to be victimized in the future, often in more aggressive ways.
It’s bad science to declare something 100% true or false. I’m pretty confident that there is no god because I haven’t seen any positive evidence for it. However, it’s impossible to disprove say, an uninvolved god, a god that purposely hides itself or a god that exists in an another universe.
If Dawkins says he 100% sure there isn’t a god, he isn’t manSTEMlogicking properly. I would say I’m 99 sure but leave room for evidence should any ever exist.
Yep to all the above. So if Dawkins and Harris are the deep thinkers of the atheist movement, it doesn’t say much for the atheist movement.
For me, it’s never been that it couldn’t – I was agnostic-bordering-atheist for years – and it’s never been a question I’ve been that concerned about. Writing off a fundamentalist take on Abrahamic religion, the one that fills so much of the news, was good enough (reading A History of God was a good eye-opener on how extremely limited such thinking is). On the “who created the creator” question, it always seemed slightly odd: nobody, we’re talking before time, I guess. But as I said, for me it’s a meh sort of thing, not my focus at all. I wouldn’t actually care if there wasn’t a deity (or deities): all that matters to me is that my loved ones are alive, and that’s something where I’m more than happy with my own experiences.
That’s another area where His Assholiness and his kind of uber-rational-sceptic-dudes irritate the hell out of me: it’s like “are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?” I’ll trust my own interpretations of my own experiences, not the so-called reason and logic from someone who plainly despises everyone not like them and sneers at any sort of feelings other than WITCHHUNT RAGE INQUISITION ORWELL BLARGHLE. (Because those feelings aren’t feelings at all, they’re totes rational observations, amirite?)
I’ll bet there are a hell of a lot of deeper thinkers than either of those two blowhards. Difference is they’re not being shitfaces as well.
Oh my, love this quotation:
From Sex and Privilege
As to Sam Harris — my FIL sent my wife a copy of his book “The End of Faith”, and I happened to open it to his diatribe against pacifism — he calls it “flagrantly immoral”. You can imagine that I had a teensy-weensy problem with that.
Roald Dahl HATED being caned. But oh well, Dawkins trumps Dahl, I guess, with his superior logics.
Also, I am so glad that Spoonwood is on moderation; I do not appreciate being used as a beating stick on feminism. (Hint: it wasn’t a feminist who raped me, and feminism helped me RECOVER from it!) I HAVE encountered a college professor who creepily went on and on about how men are extraordinarily difficult to rape, and I tried to speak up but was flustered and upset and just made an ass of myself, which I think he enjoyed. (He didn’t know I was male. Or a rape survivor. To him, it was all amusing hypothetics.)
He was a sexuality professor. With tenure.
Also, writeathon is OPEN! Make me write the stuff you want to read!
Just a tad!
Another good point about Dawkins:
Even if he had the logic right, or formal logic had anything to do with the subjects he chooses to slime on, this says a lot about him.
Which is exactly the suspicion I have about all these men pulling this shit – and part of why I would never, never want to sit in philosophy lectures or anything where professors think mind-games with people’s lives are
an entertaining pastimeterribly important hypotheticals.(Why yes, I’m being emotional about choices I would make.)
Well, since people have started going beyond just what an asshole Dawkins is on a personal level, I have to confront some of the statements made here. I mean, this isn’t a “theist/agnostic” blogs, so I think atheist rebuttals should be in order 😉
Making a case for atheism is not the same as saying all believers is stupid, just as making a case (e.g.) for Keynesianism is not the same as saying all neoliberals are stupid. I mean, this kinda is a core point, maybe THE core point, of this whole New Atheism thing (which, yes, isn’t really new and maybe not much of a thing anymore): There is no reason to be apologetic about one’s atheism. Atheists have some pretty good points in their favour, so why shouldn’t those be espoused?
That’s not much of an argument against Dawkins, considering he claims this is true for most theists and that this, ultimately, a good thing. So, no Dawkins very much does recognize the existance of moral theists. He just says that *as a system* theism tends to lead to bad things. That doesn’t mean theists, the *people*, are evil. I think you’re building up a strawman of Dawkin’s positions here. As much as he should never open mouth again on anything regarding society or women, his arguments in regards to atheism/theism are sound.
There “could” also be Russel’s famous teacup in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Of course there theoretically could be a god, and Dawkins even admits that (has anyone here even read his stuff?). But is indeed just a theoretical possibility. We do not pay close attention to the fact that there could be fairies and invisible unicorns all around us – we can’t disprove them, either, after all. Why pay any attention to that there could theoretically be a god? Might as well state “There is no god” – that’s as good as stating “There are no fairies”, a statement most of Euro-American society would have little problem with. (The neopagans here might disagree, of course)
Besides, as I’ve stated, New Atheism’s point is to not be apologetic about atheism anymore. So people should be able to say “there is no god” with the same conviction as people saying “there is a god”.
And what do you know, he never does. His position comes down ” ‘God’ is so improbable we *might as well say* there is no god”.
Dawkins has actually addressed most points raised as arguments here. It is relatively easy to accuse him of superficial thinking while being in, ah, somewhat of an echo chamber.
Though Harris is an ass with no good arguments, no logic and really poor rhetoric. I have to concede that. He always came off as not only unethical, but also simply stupid to me.
Well, then you might as well cut out the middleman and say the universe has existed forever.
But we do know that human senses, even the human intuition for logic can be faulty. Hence why scientists must adhere to such stringent methods to make sure no observation biases, no personal preferences or anything of that sort have crept into their work. Besides, I mean, we have valid mathematical proofs today that are too large for humans to grasp and have to be calculated by computers – basically, humans just have to accept their word. We have quantum mechanics, which run totally counter to human sense of logic, but the math checks out and it is supported by scientific observation. Just “personal experience” is not cutting it anymore, basically.
I mean, the whole point of the scientific method is to get away from personal experience and establish objective, or at least intersubjective, theories. In short, just because it’s your personal experience doesn’t mean it’s universally true. Which doesn’t only go for you, but also for me, and well, everybody.
Damn, LBT, that’s a tempting theme. For some reason I’m having a tiny sad at the moment and just think “Write about MR K!” which really isn’t something to ask. I’ll try to come up with a more reasonable idea.
I’ll look at sponsoring something when my new credit card gets here. Mine’s expired. Poop.
Octo, you’ve been asked before not to start in on this topic. Absolutely nothing good will come of it.
The fact that you take time out of your day to come here and comment at us? And are apparently reading the replies?
Right? Like the unexpected cartoon boomerang, he swings his fist out to hit someone else and it comes flying back into his face. Oh, thanks for sharing that image!
I felt the same way. I realize that there’s a time and place when it;s important to describe exactly what rape entails, especially when you have people denying that men can be raped at all. But I’m not sure the graphic details added anything to this conversation. At the very least, someone who actually gave a shit about male survivors would have offered some kind of warning.
That’s the point about it being Dawkins and his ilk – they don’t just make a case for atheism (and I agree, there’s a good case for it; I just don’t happen to go that way myself). They are asshats to everyone who disagrees with them. It’s the asshattishness, and as Dawkins shows, he applies it everywhere.
Except I’m not equating a creator with the universe.
I’m talking specifically about my inner life here, and interpreting things that happen to me. The assumption that people who don’t come down on the “it’s all imaginary” side are wrong, or uninformed, or not thinking about it, or engaging doubt, seems to underlie this. That’s incorrect. I have thought about it and come to my own conclusions and they are not what Dawkins or his fanboys would go for – and don’t believe for a minute they wouldn’t be dismissive of that. It’s about emotions, after all! It’s about trusting one’s own feelings after asking questions! Can’t have that, can we, Lord Dawkins? That’s what wimminz do.
Nobody’s arguing against atheism. I sure as hell am not; as far as daily practice goes, or thoughts on secularism and law and society, I am one. It’s Dawkins and the Asshats who are the problems.
And the aggressor is likely to escalate as well.
Warner Brothers really need to do a cartoon of Dawkins. It would be perfect.
Which comes back to the point of using a hypothetical at all. If the hypothetical isn’t embedded in any type of reality, then what the hell is the point? It’s not going to make people think through how they would act/think/reflect in the situation being examined, because it’s a purely hypothetical situation that will never happen. It is not a teaching moment, it’s a “I’m purposely going to upset people because I can” moment. Slow fucking clap at this point, because that is abuse of power by a teacher.
If Dawkins and his starry-eyed acolytes are going to stay purely in the realm of “but it’s only hypothetical”, then fucking use a hypothetical like purple space mushrooms on Venus, or something else.
The consequentialist test I was asked escalates in awfulness (from my perspective) from one scenario as a step function. It stops once the person doesn’t select the pure consequentialist position – because no fucking further information is necessary. If the person won’t divert the train, they’re also not going to push the person onto the tracks.
Leaping to the worst possible scenario straight away is pointless, because there are graduations in each philosophical position, and most people aren’t at the extreme end (who would normally only be the people subjected to the worst possible scenarios – because of the way they have answered previous less-bad but escalating scenarios).
Dawkins is just using this as an exercise in being a shit in philosophy. It is truly stunning how many disciplines he is proving himself to be a shit in.
LOL Dawkins should have this pasted over his keyboard:
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
He might even take notice of it. It was said by Stephen Hawking.
My wonderful colleague who retired last year, and who was my partner in library-crime, had two sayings that I adopted as my own:
“You are most dangerous when you think you know what you’re doing.”
and
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
She was fun to work with.
I inherited all her high-level permissions when she retired, which means now I am the person who is most dangerous when I think I know what I’m doing. :: cackles evilly ::
Those sayings are worthy of Pratchett – doesn’t he identify “It can’t hurt to try” and similar things as disastrous human lines?
If I were to write my autobiography, “seemed like a good idea at the time” would be the biggest chapter.
That was the most pathetic attempt at a “no u!” ever seen, Woody. Do try harder.
Doug really is a creeper, isn’t he? It’s the same as what’s going on with Dawkins, you can tell that he loves talking about this stuff precisely because he’s imagining how much it might upset people and can hardly keep his hand out of his pants at the thought.