I just wanted to share this video clip of Richard Dawkins reading some of his hatemail. I am most likely not the first to post it.
My favorite line is, “I hope you get hit by a church van tonite and you die slowly.”
The hypocrisy is almost to much to bear.
I laugh everytime I watch this. He has such a soft voice and to hear him read this filth tickles my funnybone. 
Indeed, was posted by a Doper previous. The straightman tone was what had me ROTFL (because you can bet that it wasn’t written in that tone).
Is it any wonder why I want to disassociate myself from my fellow Christians sometimes?
I posted it before but it’s definitely worth posting again. Very amusing.
Is that Lalla Ward giggling in the background?
I used to escort women at a local women’s clinic. The anti abortion protesters knew when the clinic performed abortions, and they’d show up during those times, and yell stuff at both the escorts and the women who were getting various procedures done (not always abortions). One woman repeatedly told us that she was “praying a curse” upon our heads. This never particularly worried us, but it DID make us giggle.
If you think Christianity’s all about lovinjg your neighbour, you haven’t met a lot of Christians.
Of course, for some Christians, it really IS about loving your neighbour. A lot of Christians feel God compels them to go out and help the less fortunate. They fly under the radar a lot, but they’re out there. Just look at the Salvation Army. There’s a lot of dedicated Christians in the front lines there. I am fond of saying that I don’t believe in God, but the Salvation Army is still doing God’s work.
But to be honest religious faith is used as an excuse for whatever a person wants to do anyway, and if it’s not charity, it’s often something bad.
I get to drive in the States a lot and now and then tune into religion radio. The great, great majority of the talk radio part of it, I’d guess at least two thirds, is about hating people. It’s really quite astonishing; the amount of talk airtime given to exclusion, fear and hate outweights the time given to forgiveness and the messages of Christ by a ratio of ten to one, at least. (The rest is technicalities of dogma and largely pointless, albeit often creepy, life advice. A lot of it, at least from my impression, is about the importance of beating children.) For most of the last decade the concentration was on hating homosexuals, though lately, hating Obama and “socialists” is beginning to creep up the ladder.
Lucky they didnt shoot you. I seem to recall this happening at a clinic only recently.
Does anyone have links to him reading anymore of these hate emails?
Would love to hear more.
Everytime someone tries to “convert me” they end up getting bent out of shape and upset. Which only reaffirms my view that I want nothing to do with these so called “christians”. Wouldnt it be great if jesus would appear and slap the snot out of the next one who wishes death on you? Then you could say “You got knocked the F%$k out!!”
“I have three words for you: ‘You are a fool!’”
I loved that one! It reminds me of a Robert DeNiro line in a movie: “I’ve got just two words for you. Shut. The fuck. Up.”
Do you really think it is only a Christian trait to get riled up when someone makes derogatory comments about your beliefs? I don’t argue that Dawkins is incorrect, but his style of approaching the subject can be quite confrontational. Heck, you can work up a lot of people into a tizzy just by insulting their favorite sports team, let alone their favorite religion.
If I posted something on this board about how it is child abuse to raise a child without a firm foundation in religion (not actually my belief, but something very analogous to what Dawkins has said about people raising their kid in religion), I’m pretty sure I could get some people spitting mad without much effort.
Every public figure gets hate mail - and in the age of the Internet and anonymous postings the volume and vitriol certainly hasn’t decreased.
I recall seeing some interesting hate mail when I was interning in Rick Santorum’s district congressional office in 1993. The mere existence of such wouldn’t convince most posters here of the wisdom of his positions one way or another, nor the general position of his more sedate opponents.
Right?
Some sports fans I’ve met, there is no difference.
I’d love to see that argument. I have to say though that even though I like Dawkins and most of what he’s doing, he’s not making a particularly good case in the raising children as being of a particular religion (important distinction there) equals child abuse proposition. And I personally think the case can be made quite convincingly that religious upbringing, in many occasions, certainly more than most people (even non-believers) would accept at right now, but not in general.
I just listened to a talk with Hitchens where Hitchens describes the difference between him and Dawkins (wrt attacks to religion) as being that Dawkins is attacking the preachers and “religious leaders” while Hitchens goes directly for the “faithful”. I think that was quite insightful and also explains somewhat where Dawkins sometimes seems off-key - the demarcation between religious leaders and “general believers” is fuzzy at the best of times.
And while I was rambling on I missed the edit window to correct this sentence:
And I personally think the case can be made quite convincingly that religious upbringing, in many occasions, certainly more than most people (even non-believers) would accept right now, but not in general [edit…] is child abuse.
There.
No, I know we don’t have the market cornered on vitriol, but I can’t disassociate myself from non-believers (or sports fans for that matter) because I’m not one.
However, an amendment might be necessary: “Is it any wonder why I want to disassociate myself from my fellow humans sometimes?”
(Although it’s easier to have people assume I’m not a Christian by looking at me (as I could look just like a non-believer) than assuming I’m not human by looking at me.)
My favourite part* of the video is hearing Lalla Ward (I presume) and friends laughing off-camera.
*OK, my second favourite part, after the opening pan up from the fireplace
My impression is that Santorum was more the source than the target of hatred.
Right. Absolutely, 100% right. Santorum’s hate mail was the result, mostly, of his own bigotry – his incomparable stupidity was the thing that skewed opinions with respect to his wisdom.
One of them doesn’t really seem all that hateful to me. It’s this one: “If you do not have God in your life, then what is the point of your life? Pointless. When you die, that’s it. Game over. How pointless is that? I really feel sorry for you all, but it’s not too late to turn to God.” (1:20–1:36)
Sure, the guy is saying that Dawkins’s life is pointless, but it seems like a mostly benign concern. One Dawkins doesn’t share, to be sure, but not anything I would call hate mail. I wonder why this one got included? There’s no way he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
I agree with Confused Matthew on this. Dawkins’s argument for atheism is rather poor. But, what he has latched onto is the fact that poorer arguments can be more convincing.