Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy

Hardly. Dawkins can be very blunt, be he is hardly a fundamentalist. How do you think he should act?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After Shaftgate, many noticed that Dawkins quit speaking on the issue.

Many put up guesses as to why this happened, and I think the 'why?' is now clear. Dawkins has shown with his actions time, time, time and again, that he is supportive of everyone in science and skepticism. When it became clear that words, discussion, reasoning were useless against what he was up against, he stopped using words, discussion, and reasoning, and kept doing what he do, which is, to 'do':

>The dawkins foundation is going to pay for childcare so moms can attend future cons. Feminist cred reestablished, well played

More twetters:

>Childcare at future TAM to be sponsored by Dawkins Foundation

AWESOME!

ERV translation:

>You all keep throwing your bordello parties and pajama parties and getting drunk all the time and acting like overall jackasses in the name of 'supporting women in skepticism'. Im going to actually support everyone, including women, by providing childcare at future TAMs. flipseveryoneoff

The non-response this move has gotten, the stunned silence from the True Feminists mirrors that of the duped Evangelicals before. Stricken dumb by being too dumb to understand what just happened. Its hysterical.

I wish I could take an ounce of credit for any of this-- providing childcare at meetings is something I have been talking up and down since the Texas Freethought Convention last year. Camp Quest provided 'day camp' for the kids of attendees. That was such a weight off of so many parents, especially single parents, including single moms, shoulders. Furthermore, having low-stress, kid-friendly activities has helped the OKC Atheists grow exponentially-- picnics, trips to zoos and museums, meet-ups at a pizza place instead of a bar, etc. Weve gotten so big we actually had to make a break-off 'secular parenting' group (though all are still welcome if they are doing something cool and you want to tag along).

You want more members?

Have more low-intimidation, social meet-ups. Not every skeptic group has to meet in a pub. Not every meeting needs to be a lecture. Yes, karaoke nights at a bar are my favorite, but something as small as a few 'kid friendly' events, or day-care for day-long events goes a fuckovalong way to generating a warm, welcoming group.

Anyway, I rant all over the place about this, including to Dawkins very recently, but I cant take any credit. Apparently this move has been in the works for a long time, with Camp Quest. Apparently before Twatson fell down and threw a temper tantrum and demanded everyone kiss her invisible boo-boo.

She made her move. A rash decision.

Dawkins made his. Carefully planned for some time.

Check-mate.

-----------------------------------------------------

http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2011/07/dawkins_coup_de_grace_in...

Is this sarcasm? Maybe it's too late for me... Robertson, Falwell, and Phelps will be rightfully lost in the tides of history but C.S. Lewis and Dostoevsky had important things to say and conveyed them quite well. (I don't know Berry.)

It's just flat strange and saddening to me, to know that there are those who truly think that the Santa Clause analogy would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien. That the existence of reflective intellectual Christians like Annie Dilliard, Flannery O' Connor or Walker Percy so long after Darwin is merely an anomaly to be ignored.

I am a non believer, not quite interested enough to be an "atheist", but I never paid much attention to the arguments atheists made. They seemed contrived and unnecessary. When I attended college and started meeting people from many different backgrounds, I couldn't help noticing that there are hundreds of different faiths. Which one any given person belongs to depends more on their friends, family, and geographic location than anything else. This is pretty arbitrary for something ostensibly so important and serious. So it seemed to follow that all religions must have been made up over the years.

As the years have worn on since college I've discovered that the reason I fell out of faith so easily probably had to do with how my mind worked. Like Dawkins in this respect, I had a hard time taking theology seriously. I just though it was an offshoot of history and literature but it seems people believe there is actually some philosophical credibility to it. I can actually read texts from the history of modern religion/science (like Aquinas and Lucretius) and find them interesting but modern theology I cannot digest for some reason. So it is particularly difficult for me to engage with serious theists.

That being said, I also don't read atheist texts. Seems like a waste of time. And I don't need an encyclopedia of arguments for something that seems plainly true to me.