Hey, I said the same thing! Twice! This makes the third time an atheist pointed out that Dawkins was just being a boring ol’ bigot, so we must be right.
Gosh, I hope none of his defenders start crying over the repeated rebuke. Although they deserve it, criticizing Dawkins gets them mad and they start sending me unpleasant hate mail.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice!
You know how actual Christians ignore all of the dumb/contradictory/inconvenient parts of the bible. Cultural Christians do that with Christianity. Dawkins, Harris et al, all rail against the misogyny, terrorism, and human rights violations of other religions, Islam in particular, whilst ignoring extremist Christians who openly state their longing to do so to others.
Somebody should keep an eye on Dawk. He might have the vapors since “that woman” mentioned his name again.
I’m surprised right wing blogger Jerry Coyne didn’t go after Mehta too:
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/richard-dawkins-says-christianity
Dawkins, Harris and others read religious texts the same way radical fundamentalists do. That is, they see the text as univocal, having one singular “message” that can be deciphered if you read the text “correctly”. They ignore, renegotiate, and emphasize the parts of the text that suits their vision of the proper interpretation. Hence how Harris can claim that the Koran automatically indoctrinates people to be jihadists in a way that doesn’t happen with other texts. He’s conveniently interpreting religious texts differently, and claiming that anyone disagreeing him is factually incorrect, because “only one possible meaning”. They’re as dogmatic as the worst kind of religious demagogues they claim to be more rational than.
The greatly missed Ed Brayton frequently had posts titled “Mikey Gets Mail” publishing hate mail sent to the leader of a group fighting religious discrimination in the armed forces.
Those messages were quite an unintended source of merriment. Let them come!
For some reason I’ve been seeing a lot of video clips of Dawkins on FaceBook where he goes on about what a ridiculous, unnecessary and atrocious thing all religions are. However, I noticed that when he cites some atrocities he focuses on things like flying airplanes into buildings. By “cultural Christian” I suppose he means people who think that the atrocities they commit in the name of their god aren’t as bad as other people’s atrocities.
Dawkins prefers Christian holidays to Muslim holidays. It’s always heartwarming to see a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice.
@1. seachange : Betelguese! Betelguex! Alpha Orionis!
f cours eif that red supergiant star magically turns up our solar system is in very big trouble trouble.. & we’d allbe inside the star our sun and all the inner planets included.
.***
Is anyone actually threatening or tearing down Cathedrals in Europe? If so, would be first I’ve heard of it.
Seems more likely those doing so would be property developers rather than Muslims who do have that whole “people of the book” thing.
@8 there was an Islamist terrorist plot against the Cathedral of Strasbourg in 2000
And there is the issue of the Sacré-Coeur Basilca in Paris (the one were the end of John Wick 4 takes place)
That thing was financed by the French Republic as a “penitence” for the Commune of Paris, the failed proto-communist revolution of 1870. The law that allowed the construction (by the use of eminent domain) was voted by the then royalist (and very Catholic) majority.
As a result, there is cultural hatred of that church by the political Left, including an actual attempt to bomb the site and a petition to the Paris mayor to have it destroyed a few years ago. For a vocal minority, the basilica is an insult to the tens of thousands people that were killed when the Commune was suppressed
StevoR,
Well… https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2023/jul/23/russian-missile-strike-damages-cathedral-odesa-video
But seriously. Old trope, right wing. cf. https://www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/islamophobic-populism/
So yeah. But it’s nothing new.
Um, playing around with semantic shifts is not something to spam pointlessly.
Iconoclasm, antipathy, profiteering are all different, yet all will tear down property.
—
BTW, as per Wikipedia:
“Born Clinton Richard Dawkins
26 March 1941 (age 83)
Nairobi, British Kenya”
He’s as relevant as one thinks he is.
—
And, seriously, not trolling — but come one, remember the Expelled experience via this blog?
(You, the probable reader, very probably do not. Us archaic denizens do)
I noticed (at least) one of Coyne’s fanboys still trashing Watson, still all butthurt or something over the whole Elevatorgate thing. So, yeah, I’m gonna bet PZ gets a bit of hate-mail from people who both support Coyne and still hate Watson for saying “Guys, don’t do that.”
For a vocal minority, the basilica is an insult to the tens of thousands people that were killed when the Commune was suppressed
But they don’t understand that the Christians crushed all those evil commies with LOVE in their hearts! It was to protect the little babies and keep them from being led into darkness by atheistic Communists who wanted to be good without God! /s
#10, I still occasionally watch the catchy “Beware The Believers” video made for that Expelled movie.
[Apparently, it’s not just cicadas that have a period of dormancy]
It’s a good video. The thesis is Dawkins is at heart a white supremacist and subscriber to Great Replacement Theory, and that informs his cheer-leading for Christianity.
Who is this jim1990 person, someone trying to be Dennis Markuze/David Mabus?
FTB used to get a better class of trolls, once upon a time…
I’m guessing from the nym that “Jim1990” is in his mid-thirties. You’d think he might have grown up by now.
people who lack wisdom and compassion are hardly representatives whose example I would follow. what a pitiful display.
[meta]
Basically. Episodic frenzied outbursts, then PZ clickety-clicks and it all poofs away.
But going on for years now.
Huh I see our intermiitant trans fetishist fantasising nuisance is back clearly still unable to find the trans Ph o r n he clearly seeks to invigorate his dull sad lack of imagination. Oh well, the pathetic troll’s diarrheaous leavings here will soon disappear like an early morning mist on a planet of a superluminous blue hot supergiant star. His spittle-soaked rantings all for nowt and him the one most annoyed and impotent in his creepy, crappy obsession.
Really troll go google trans Ph or n and jerk yourself off doing that not here.
^ PS. Of cours eit doesnt ahev tobe a particualrly bright spectral type of sun to burn away the dullbraiend fog of the likes of our currently nymned jim1990 troll.
Clatity fix : Of course it doesn’t have to be a particuarly bright spectral type of sun to burn away the dull brained fog of the likes of our currently nymned jim1990 troll..
Stevo,
1) You’re pissed. Again.
2) Don’t bother. All the comments to which you refer will be gone like the morning dew.
@ ^ Silentbob : 2) I know that was my point.
1) I wish I could blame my typos on drinking. Sadly, still happens when I’m sober.
Thought I might indulge in a little troll roasting when I saw the flood of comments, but I looked, and there’s no meat to any of this guy. It’s just boring old schoolyard insults. I guess Jim lives in Never Never Land alongside Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, given the 1990 and utter lack of adulthood.
@ ^ Bronze Dog : /Comic Book guy Worst Peter Pan evah!
.***
Linked inthe clip inthe ZOP Ithink but FWIW Rebecca Watson’s The Great Replacement: The Past & Disturbing Present of American Nazis clip here – 17 & a half minutes~ish.
Twenty fucking twenty-four.
And we still have nazis?!
KG: I’m guessing from the writing that “Jim1990” is in his mid-thirteens. Then again, I’ve known boys at that age who wrote (and spelled) a lot more maturely than that.
Aryans have been in the business of ‘great replacement’ ever since their ancestors entered neolithic Europe and brought with them yersina pestis (to which they, but not the central/western europe farmers, had a degree of resistance).
.
Of course, people like Netanyahu and various third-world dictators (like in Myanmar) show ‘replacement’ is a widespread vice.
StevoR @ 38
The ‘meme complex’ thing is one of the Dawkins ideas that seems true:
I can understand people being attracted to some nasty revenge fantasy that is also connected to the whole Goebbels/ Leni Riefenstal propaganda narrative. But not so many being attracted to the original Italian variant.
A meme complex centered on domination and revenge cannot be successful if attached to such a total loser as Mussolini.
@5 Dave Bot: sounds like how some members of SCOTUS read the Constitution.
Christmas has this objective advantage: it’s near the winter solstice, so it’s a ‘natural’ holiday. The sun is low, the days are short, dark, cold, and wet; trees and animals are dead or hibernating; so get together with your friends and throw a party. It’ll do you some good.
The solstice season is a time-share that’s often been swapped. The Romans called December 25th the Saturnalia, dedicated to the god Saturn. Later the Christians took over and changed the name to Christmas and the god to Jesus. Much later, the Capitalists bought the time-slot, kept the name, but changed the god to Santa.
I think that the “cultural christian” of the christian society I grew up in including “the church” and the contrast with what I understood of the teachings and tenets of the religion helped me to shed the illusion of any of it being actually physically true and real in any way. It just illustrates with mythology attitudes and ideals and is about as relevant to truth as any other mythology from ancient or modern times. Some relevance maybe but far from the reality of how life on earth is currently working it self out, a gruesome and sloppy business to be sure often far more destructive then “necessary”
The term ‘secular Christian’ is better. The term secular Jew is well defined and understood. Cultural Christian is much less used and the folk who do use it tend to be rather unpleasant.
Christianity, Islam and Judaism are all political codifications of a common ancient core. Islam was codified later but it is clearly based on much older traditions. The archetype of Jesus was probably knocking about back in 500BC or so. Man has always created God in his own image and angry violent men created angry violent Gods.
What we think of as ‘Western values’ is actually desperately recent. Until the 1960s or so, the West was just as bigoted and intolerant as any of the countries Dawkins likes to bigot against. And people like Dawkins were the people holding us back.