Light On Dark Water

The Cult of Richard Dawkins

He's always seemed an evangelist for the religion which he calls "reason" or "science." But I had no idea he had begun to emulate the fund-raising techniques of American (and other?) evangelists, as described in this Spectator piece. Notice that the writer is associated with the left-wing Guardian. Apparently Dawkins has been offending the left for a year or two with comments offensive to Islam and feminism, with the result that he's getting less indulgence from that quarter.

Or maybe it's just that his nuttiness has become impossible to ignore:

At this point it is obvious to everyone except the participants that what we have here is a religion without the good bits.

Maclin Horton

17 responses to “The Cult of Richard Dawkins”

  1. Louise

    “At this point it is obvious to everyone except the participants that what we have here is a religion without the good bits.”
    Heh!

    Reply
  2. Marianne

    I’ve always thought Dawkins craved the limelight, so maybe it’s not been focused on him enough lately?
    May be the same reason he took off after fairy tales a while ago — from the Telegraph:

    “I think it’s rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway,” he said at the Cheltenham Science Festival.
    “Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it’s statistically too improbable.”
    Statistically too improbable?! Haw. OK, it’s now official. Dawkins has completed his transmutation into a parody of himself.
    Now, as someone who thinks of himself as two drinks short of atheism, I have always quite liked Richard Dawkins. But in recent years it has been like watching Michael Jackson gradually become weirder and weirder, leaving those who respect him behind.

    Or maybe it’s simply for this reason:

    But then, perhaps I’m taking Dawkins too seriously. In his early dotage – he is 73 – he has clearly allowed himself to become the country’s foremost grumpy old man, which in itself is a great British tradition. In the final analysis, there’s nothing wrong with that.

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  3. Mac

    I read as far as the quote about the frog, and thought “he’s turning into a joke” before I read the next paragraph. He is certainly becoming a parody of himself.
    Still, I can’t quite believe all those televangelist-style fund-raising gimmicks. Surely he doesn’t especially need the money. I wonder where it goes.

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  4. Marianne

    Maybe the money will pay for more things like his atheist bus campaign from a few years ago. Remember that? From the linked Guardian piece:

    A £140,000 advertising campaign aimed at persuading more people to “come out” as atheists was launched today with a plan to broadcast a message doubting God’s existence on the sides of buses, the tube and on screens in central London.
    Its slogan – “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” – can already be seen on buses in central London. A total of 200 bendy buses in London and 600 buses across England, Scotland and Wales will carry the slogan from today and tomorrow following a fundraising drive which raised more than £140,000.

    Wonder how many converts that brought over to his side?

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  5. Paul

    Attention seeking. Today there’s this.

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  6. Mac

    I think it’s a fairly common sentiment, but naturally he would need to grandstand a bit.

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  7. Marianne

    Damian Thompson, formerly at the Telegraph and now sometimes at the Spectator, made the following comments on Twitter in response to Dawkins’s advice to parents awaiting a baby with Down’s Syndrome to “abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice”:
    The Nazi executions of Down’s Syndrome people were a clue, a big clue, that their ideology was the antithesis of Christianity.
    and
    Always worth remembering that the Nazis had a particular hatred of mentally handicapped people.
    and
    The intellectual snobs of Bloomsbury also wanted ‘feeble-minded’ people out of the way.
    I imagine Dawkins simply shrugs.

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  8. Louise

    “Dawkins Shrugs.” New book?

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  9. Louise

    “The blasphemy is not ours. It is enough for us that our enemies have retreated from the territory of reason, on which they once claimed so many victories; and have fallen back upon the borderlands of myth and mysticism, like so many other barbarians with whom civilization is at war.”
    – G.K. Chesterton, from the Introduction to Fulton Sheen’s book “God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy”.

    Reply
  10. Mac

    Apart from the quote itself, which is excellent: I didn’t know GKC was aware of Sheen. That’s pretty cool.
    I hate to say it, but I come pretty close to shrugging at Dawson’s remarks, too, but for totally different reasons. I’ve gotten somewhat jaded. I expect people like him to say things like that.
    I was, however, shocked by something one of our Supreme Court justices, Ruth Ginsburg, said: can’t quote it exactly, though it probably wouldn’t be hard to find, but it was something to the effect that we need abortion because there are some populations we don’t want to have too many of. Shocked that she said it, shocked that liberals apparently were not shocked.

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  11. Paul

    And now this: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-technology/dawkins-now-just-telling-random-strangers-why-he-hates-them-2014082189774

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  12. Marianne

    According to the writer at Slate who got that Ginsburg quote and Ginsburg herself, Ginsburg was talking not about her own views but about “general concern in society”. From a follow-up article, first the original quote:

    Three years ago, I interviewed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the New York Times Magazine. At one point, we talked about the lack of Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women, because of a 1980 Supreme Court decision called Harris v. McRae. She said then:
    “The ruling surprised me. Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.”

    And in the follow-up article:

    I should have sought more clarity, because that’s what journalists are supposed to do to clear up confusion, however misplaced. On Thursday I had a chance to do that, in an interview I did with Justice Ginsburg before an audience at Yale College. I read her back her 2009 quote and asked her what she meant by it.
    “Emily, you know that that line, which you quoted accurately, was vastly misinterpreted,” she said. “I was surprised that the court went as far as it did in Roe v. Wade, and I did think that with the Medicaid reimbursement cases down the road that perhaps the court was thinking it did want more women to have access to reproductive choice. At the time, there was a concern about too many people inhabiting our planet. There was an organization called Zero Population Growth.” She continued, “In the press, there were articles about the danger of crowding our planet. So there was at the time of Roe v. Wade considerable concern about overpopulation.”
    I asked if she was talking about general concern in the society, as opposed to her own concern or the concern of the feminist legal community. Ginsburg said yes…

    Full article is here.

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  13. Mac

    Good to have that clarified. It’s hard to tell just how much she agrees with the use of abortion for population control, but I guess it’s irrelevant since she’s very firmly pro-abortion.
    Good to know that about Dawkins, too, Paul. It’s almost believable. By the way, I was disappointed to learn a while back that his wife played Romana, one of the Dr. Who companions. But I guess if he was going to be married to any of them, she’s the most appropriate.

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  14. Louise

    The headline about Dawkins struck me as rather hilarious, but reading the article, I think he is mentally ill. He needs medical help. That could happen to anyone, not just an atheist, so I don’t mean it as an insult or anything. I’m just very concerned about the mentally ill.
    I’ll pray he gets the help he may need.

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  15. Mac

    I was assuming that was an Onion-style joke. If not–good heavens!
    Even if it is, you can still pray that he gets the help he needs.:-)

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  16. Paul

    Yes, the Daily Mash is an attempt at something like The Onion.

    Reply
  17. Louise

    Thank goodness! I really need to check the sources better!! In that case, it’s quite hilarious. 🙂
    I’m sad to say that I actually know people who behave like this. :/

    Reply

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