Because even if you believe it with all your heart, it insults two billion people who believe something quite different. It’s one thing to bravely stick up for the disenfranchised and voiceless, to speak truth to power etc. It really is a different category of thing to scream insults at people because their beliefs differ from yours.
It may be a different class of vile from blatant misogyny, racism, or homophobia, but in my book it’s pathetic and grossly rude.
Why stop there? When Dawkins talks about religions holding back the people and socities that practice them, he’s really insulting about 6.8 billion or so.
I believe that is so, however since he is neither a politician nor an American this is something of a derailment.
“scream”?
Attacking him is on topic, but explaining the attack and your very interesting choice of words isn’t?
I searched for anything vile by Obama and did not find any. The ones published as vile were not, and at worst were just dumb things he said. The ones I included, I said as much.
That’s exactly the sort of thing I was talking about in my earlier post. There’s a very concerted effort to paint Dawkins as being psychotic and foaming at the mouth. I guess it’s easier than trying to address his actual positions.
I wonder if any of these people have ever actually seen him.
Perhaps you could start a new thread about him in GD or The Pit, and we can discuss your inability to deal with differing opinions and your abnormal aural sensitivity there?
It is par for the course. Dawkins et al typically reflect the religious beliefs back to the believers in a measured way and are met with exactly the accusations you highlight above. He is a liberal, a moderate a secularist and a humanist but somehow still is accused of having a militant outlook. Not so.
Many only hear what they imagine he is saying rather than taking the time to read and understand the words actually used because…hey…he’s critical of religion and we don’t do that do we?
No one said it better than Douglas Adams
I just want to say that this incredibly silly. In the post I actually say: “not very nice”, “harsh” and that it’s understandable that Christians are unhappy with it.
The Elevatorgate stuff is somewhat hard for me to evaluate, it’s so weird. I don’t seem to understand what he’s mocking, or what he is trying to achieve. I don’t mind going with vile on that particularly, it quite possibly is vile. Or perhaps just insane or something? Anyway, I’ll also just drop the hijack.
As just a side point: AFAIC a sort of “ignorantia juris non excusat” applies. Honestly thinking that women’s bodies have ways of shutting down pregnancy resulting from rape doesn’t mean it isn’t vile. He shouldn’t believe that in the first place. And if you’re going to make public statements about the subject it is simply your duty to educate yourself. So from me, nobody gets a pass for just being ignorant. It’s perfectly possible to be vile in your ignorance.
“if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. Period”
B.H.O.
It appears some of you have a tenuous grasp on the meaning of the word vile.
A lot of that vile goes to the health care insurers, plenty of time to make the change less painful and still they followed the usual procedure of cancelling plans to moving them to a different one instead of making upgrades.
As I pointed before, the ACA is the last chance private industry had to show that competition and private industry could do it, dropping the ball like that is a bit of info to use against them when future administrations do look to offer public options and single payer.
But with the most recent soundbites, the ones we’re talking about in this thread, he’s gotten a lot of bad press from his own “side”. The liberal atheist crowd. (Full disclosure–I’m a marginal member of that crowd myself, and I do find his comments objectionable.) In these comments he goes from criticizing religion to making sweeping generalizations about muslims.
What has he said that could be classified as “vile”?
Dawkins has some odd views on pedophilia, which has lead him to say some stuff that is pretty vile. Like comparing a kid learning about religion, unfavourably, to being sexually abused - which he, personally, found wasn’t really all that bad.
http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/118
It is of course written with typical British-don type understatement, but the basic message is clear: people who teach kids religion are, in effect, as bad as - or worse than - child molesters. Justified, in his position, because he thinks child molestation isn’t necessarily all that terrible.
He does go on to “up the ante” as it where - towards the end of the article, being forced to perform oral sex is more or less comparable to “… what churches ? and also mosques and synagogues ? do to child minds in their care, in the normal course of events.” While the article plays with the notion that this “brainwashing” is what made the rape possible, it also plays with the notion that the rape is comparable to the instruction.
These are his own positions, in his own words. I’d say most would find the comparison odious. I’m an athiest myself, and I do.
I vote for vile. And I’m an atheist who went to Anglican schools and wasn’t fondled.
When was Dawkins a politician? When he was an American? Somebody was trying really, really hard to find vile words from an American Liberal Politician–and failed.
Whereas, finding something of that sort from The Other Type of American Politician is too easy. I’ll be back…
It’s a fair point. Dawkins is neither a politician nor an American. I piped up because the question was asked, not because he’s an example for the OP.
Personally, I think vile statements from liberal American politicians are rare as hen’s teeth, in comparison with their opposite numbers.
But I would submit that’s because liberal American politicians are, by nature, more in the centre of the overall political spectrum, when measured against the developed world, while their opposite numbers would be considered more fringe. Fringe types are always more prone to fanaticsm, which breeds vileness - the basis of much vileness is that the fanatic often cannot accept that those holding opposing views are not actively evil.
No, he was very clear that his experience was not that terrible. He has been equally clear that the experiences of some under the care of the Catholic church had it far, far worse.
The point from that chapter (and really, it should be read in full for for the crystal-clear context) was that to purposefully implant a fear in a small child that their unbaptised or non-church-going friends will burn forever in internal torment is…unquestionably…a form of abuse. Strip that action from its religious context and consider how you’d view such a mental assault? And yes, that can be even more emotionally disturbing than the low-level physical abuse he himself encountered.
What you take as “British-don understatement” is nothing of the kind. He is clear, concise and precise. He simply does not say, mean or think that “people who teach kids religion are, in effect, as bad as or worse than child molesters”
I repeat…he does not say that, ever.
He does however say that children should be taught about religion. Or did you miss that bit? It is something he has written about often and stressed that point over and over but people seem to neglect it as it doesn’t fit with the Dawkins fantasy they choose to construct.