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Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is starting his own cult. The scientology church is probably envious. :lol:

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http://donate.richarddawkins.net/?page=CiviCRM&q=civicrm/contribute/transact&reset=1&id=7
 
It's all aimed at the Yanks it seems.
Do they give him more credence than us? Or just more money?

Our Beginnings
Founded in 2006 by Richard Dawkins, the foundation’s mission is to realize Richard’s vision to remove the influence of religion in science education and public policy, and eliminate the stigma that surrounds atheism and non-belief.

Our Focus and Values
We believe people should be free to be open about non-belief without risking their job, business, personal and family relationships or standing in the community.

The foundation focuses on alarming statistics. Both of which have serious implication for America’s ability to innovate and compete in the 21st century:

1) Forty-six percent of Americans tell pollsters human beings arrived on this earth in their present form within the last 10,000 years. (Gallup, 2012)

2) Fifty-three percent of Americans say they are unlikely to vote for a politician who is an atheist on that basis alone — a percentage that far exceeds the number of Americans who say they won’t vote for a gay politician or a even an adulterer. (Pew Research Center, 2014)

Think about it. A huge percentage of Americans reject what we know about human evolution. And more than half of Americans say they are less likely to vote for a candidate simply due to the fact they subscribe to an evidence-based view of the natural world. Meanwhile, politicians who say the earth is fewer than 10,000 years old routinely win election.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation sees its job as nothing less than changing America’s future.


Why Our Work Matters
These facts have real-life consequences. They lead to political attacks on science’s understanding of climate change that prevent us from acting to avert disaster. They interfere with stem cell research, setting back medical advancements. They hamper the ability of health teachers to provide young people with comprehensive sex education, leading to more unwanted pregnancies. And still, to this day, they lead to attacks on biology teachers who teach evolution in our schools.

America will lose its standing in the world if this does not change.

http://richarddawkins.net/aboutus/
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If you do believe in an omnipotent God (or multiple life-affecting deities) it makes perfect sense to define your very identity with respects to that power, but is the opposite really true? If there are no gods, is their absence really the most important thing in your life? Or about humanity? I understand that Christianity has more 'hard power' in the U.S. compared to the more gentle (but certainly real) sway of the church in the UK, but if I were an atheist on the opposite side of the Atlantic, I think I'd just be getting along with life, trying to persuade others that my perspective is true, not lobbying to ban crosses and prayers. Despite what the quotation above suggests, most people in the US are freer that almost anyone else at any time in history. Atheism may not be popular, but it's completely tolerated (in the traditional sense of the word).

The best way of undermining a church is not to enforce laws against the exercise of their influence but to sap the religion of followers. The problems of school syllabii and elected officials will magically solve themselves if you are able to convert believers into unbelievers. Personally, when I see atheists on the street en masse - or in the media - they're usually insulting or sneering at someone; on the Internet, well, you've see the superiority complex of Dawkins's followers - calling people ignorant sheeple and slaves is not the way to win influence.

My advice to atheists who think their society is unjust would be: strike at the root, not the flower and stop talking to yourselves.

Edit: If I were an employer with a majority Christian workforce, I may roll my eyes and be less disposed to employ someone who wore this:
tgd-tshirt-mockup.jpg


And then somebody would cry 'discrimination!'
 
Try wearing a T-shirt with the simple slogan

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." and a picture of the Koran.

See how long it lasts before it is deemed offensive. And yet, if you are an atheist, it is not insulting , it is a simple factual statement of the consequences of believing a certain man was a prophet of the deity you regard as entirely fictitious.

You could even simplify it to - there is no such thing as God's Prophet because there is no God. Still will get banned, I reckon. Yet abuse about the Christian God is apparently entirely permissible.

PS - the last sentence could be misinterpreted - I think the abuse should be permitted because it is part of freedom of speech, unless of course the abuse is used to justify or incite acts of violence, but there must be consistency, not special cases for certain religions. Or for that matter for atheists.
 
Edit: If I were an employer with a majority Christian workforce, I may roll my eyes and be less disposed to employ someone who wore this:
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Fair enough, but surely this could be addressed via a workplace dress code?

Individual employers are able to set dress codes and I think it would be reasonable to restrict employees from wearing t-shirts with slogans which may annoy or upset their fellow workers. This t-shirt would fall into that category but so might a "Tories are vermin" shirt or even "Meat is Murder". That's not about religious privilege or preventing free speech - it's about creating a comfortable work environment. There's no reason why someone shouldn't wear such a garment outside of work.

The display of religious symbols seems to cause more problems; I don't see why an employee should not be able to wear a cross or a star of David pendant, for example, if s/he would be permitted to wear a necklace without such a decoration. If no jewellery is allowed then the rule shouldn't be changed simply to accommodate followers of a particular faith.
 
Watched a Dawkin's documentary and found it quite squirm-inducing as he pompously tried to put the boot in Cistercian monks suggesting they wasted their life in quite spiritual contemplation.

Sorry but I don't see these guys taxing the planets resources too much, compared to many, they appear to be doing very little harm to anyone. What's wrong with contemplating everything even if it is contained within a rather rigid monotheism?

There are many academics who devote their entire careers to subjects that are so narrow in focus and have very little application outside of their academic circle - but I'm guessing Dawkins wouldn't have an issue with that?

The patronizing way he spoke about a street cleaner from India accepting that his job was futile. Richard ultimately most people's jobs are pretty futile. A top surgeons job is futile as he/she is only postponing the inevitable.

I actually used to have a lot of time for Dawkins when he first appeared but his arrogance these days is horrendous. I also find it quite nauseating the toadying from Gervais and Izzard.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
Watched a Dawkin's documentary and found it quite squirm-inducing as he pompously tried to put the boot in Cistercian monks suggesting they wasted their life in quite spiritual contemplation.

Sorry but I don't see these guys taxing the planets resources too much, compared to many, they appear to be doing very little harm to anyone. What's wrong with contemplating everything even if it is contained within a rather rigid monotheism?

There are many academics who devote their entire careers to subjects that are so narrow in focus and have very little application outside of their academic circle - but I'm guessing Dawkins wouldn't have an issue with that?

The patronizing way he spoke about a street cleaner from India accepting that his job was futile. Richard ultimately most people's jobs are pretty futile. A top surgeons job is futile as he/she is only postponing the inevitable.

I actually used to have a lot of time for Dawkins when he first appeared but his arrogance these days is horrendous. I also find it quite nauseating the toadying from Gervais and Izzard.
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He does go OTT at times.

But he spends the vast majority of his time on popularising science.
 
This Is My Vision Of "Life"
A Conversation With Richard Dawkins [4.30.15]
Introduction by:
John Brockman

My vision of life is that everything extends from replicators, which are in practice DNA molecules on this planet. The replicators reach out into the world to influence their own probability of being passed on. Mostly they don't reach further than the individual body in which they sit, but that's a matter of practice, not a matter of principle. The individual organism can be defined as that set of phenotypic products which have a single route of exit of the genes into the future. That's not true of the cuckoo/reed warbler case, but it is true of ordinary animal bodies. So the organism, the individual organism, is a deeply salient unit. It's a unit of selection in the sense that I call a "vehicle".

There are two kinds of unit of selection. The difference is a semantic one. They're both units of selection, but one is the replicator, and what it does is get itself copied. So more and more copies of itself go into the world. The other kind of unit is the vehicle. It doesn't get itself copied. What it does is work to copy the replicators which have come down to it through the generations, and which it's going to pass on to future generations. So we have this individual replicator dichotomy. They're both units of selection, but in different senses. It's important to understand that they are different senses. ...

http://edge.org/conversation/richard_dawkins-this-is-my-vision-of-life

Vid at link
 
Thanks, hadn't seen that before! Or the previous one, come to that.
The biatch-pronunciation lesson is particularly illuminating.
 
Swifty said:
He is capable of self depreciating humour though
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Wow. That level of visceral hate is horrifying. Driven by fear of understanding, a rejection of explanation, the mob has it's own fuzzy momentum of certainty. The civic style of Salem's witch trials certainly lives on.

Dawkin's does rather set himself up for this kind of rabble response. Both just by his sheer presence, and also by his precise clinical exorcism of superstition.

I still clearly remember back to 1992, watching the Royal Society Childrens' Christmas Lectures on BBC2, his blisteringly-good "Waking Up in The Universe" series. I still have it somewhere on DVD. Just brilliant.

I do accept that he is viewable as being a bit of a reductionist, that if it cannot be measured, captured, analysed, it does not exist. But I still view him as being a hugely-positive force...he need to be intense, to act as an antidote, for all these hoardes of breeding fundies.
 
And he needs to stop having sexy time with Satanic Monk-eyes ...
 
Sex with satanic monkeys?
 
This is when the Dawk is at his best. Apart from that seven point scale of belief from The God Delusion. That's drivel that continues to make new atheist bloggers and tweeters look like twonks.

When he's at his worst is when he tries to convince that religion is the main source of evil in humanity, in spite of two world wars in one century that had no realistic connection with religion.
 
PeteByrdie said:
This is when the Dawk is at his best. Apart from that seven point scale of belief from The God Delusion. That's drivel that continues to make new atheist bloggers and tweeters look like twonks.

When he's at his worst is when he tries to convince that religion is the main source of evil in humanity, in spite of two world wars in one century that had no realistic connection with religion.
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But within those two wars were Holocausts where people were massacred because of their religions by those of opposing religions.

Christian Armenians massacred by Islamic Turks in WW1.

Jews massacred by Christian Germans, Ukrainians & Balts in WW2.
 
ramonmercado said:
But within those two wars were Holocausts where people were massacred because of their religions by those of opposing religions.

Christian Armenians massacred by Islamic Turks in WW1.

Jews massacred by Christian Germans, Ukrainians & Balts in WW2.
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But the Ottomans had been oppressing Christian minorities since long before ww1, and the Jewish people could have suffered the same fate for the same reasons if they had merely been an ethnically distinguishable Christian community. In a wide reaching war, all ethnical differences become a factor in who opposes, or oppresses, whom. I'm not saying that people don't harbour hatred for those different from themselves, including those culturally different, especially if that difference contains a religious distinction. But those two wars weren't predicated on those kinds of tensions.
 
ramonmercado said:
But within those two wars were Holocausts where people were massacred because of their religions by those of opposing religions.

Christian Armenians massacred by Islamic Turks in WW1.

Jews massacred by Christian Germans, Ukrainians & Balts in WW2.
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Of those two only the Armenian genocide could be said to be primarily based on religion. The Nazis' antipathy towards the Jews was based on race, not religion, which is why non-practising Jews and Christians who happened to have Jewish ancestry were also targeted. The Nazis were at best nominally Christian in any event - some hankered after old-school Teutonic paganism, and Hitler expressed admiration for Islam which he saw as a much more warlike faith.
 
Quake42 said:
Of those two only the Armenian genocide could be said to be primarily based on religion.
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And wasn't the cause or direct result of the Great War.

Quake42 said:
The Nazis' antipathy towards the Jews was based on race, not religion, which is why non-practising Jews and Christians who happened to have Jewish ancestry were also targeted. The Nazis were at best nominally Christian in any event - some hankered after old-school Teutonic paganism, and Hitler expressed admiration for Islam which he saw as a much more warlike faith.
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To be fair, it's difficult to separate Nazi Germany from the influence of Martin Luther, and his antisemitism. But there were a lot of convenient influences ready to be twisted to that cause as and when it suited, including as perverse a corruption of evolution theory as we could imagine.

I've had these arguments time and again online, with both theists and new atheists. It's become a point of partisan point scoring, and as always in such a situation, everyone's brain's fallen out of the backs of their heads and even the supposed rationalists look only to find vindication of their points of view. The number of times I've heard the 'Hitler believed in God' argument, as though that proves the numinosity of his motivations. And the most contorted explanations as to how Stalin's methods were inherited from the Russian Orthodox Church, and his atheism was incidental (not central to his philosophy).

No more useful is the 'there wouldn't be morals without religion' argument, when it's self evident that an awful lot of religious people not only lack basic morality, but commit acts of morality in the name of their religions. In the effort to prove that their personal beliefs are the most moral, both atheists and theists will dismiss the atrocities of there own kind (or even find a way to attribute them to the other side), and claim the beliefs of those of the other kind the primary reason for their atrocities.

I think this is all possible because it's impossible to remove religion from the equation. Even today, it could be said that almost all humans have some kind of spiritual belief. In history, that can be said to have been even more the case. As far as I can tell, a bad person, whether the bigot in the pub or the genocidal dictator, will pervert any paradigm available to them to justify doing what they think will further their cause, be it religion or science or political philosophy or history. Throughout history, religion has been an obvious focus for those looking to incite hatred and rally support. But we can't assume that in a secular world that drive won't simply be focused elsewhere. After all, most groups of people contain some who feel empathy towards possible victims, even in the face of pressure from their peers, and if they believe they will be judged in the next world, I'm sure that's stayed a few hands in the past, though clearly far fewer than it should have.

A world in which nobody believed that judgement from a higher power awaited them in another life would be great if we could be sure a secular life would lead to a total acceptance of liberal values and equality. At the moment, where those values are apparent in the new atheist community, I suspect it's largely because that community has much to prove regarding its liberalism. When the politicians decide again to corrupt scientific theory to justify atrocity (and it likely will be the politicians, not the scientists) there may be no fear of any higher powers.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps a secular world will be free of violence, as nobody will have either a reason to hate their fellow human beings, nor a belief in an everlasting glory to be won by doing an omnipotent being's dirty work for him. But I don't think that case is proven either way, and I don't think either side is much interested in finding the truth of it when it's more important to score points in an argument about who's most moral. And we'd better be sure, because as secularism seems to be on the rise, and science becomes the new focus for those wishing to get us all riled up against some poor sods, nobody is going to be able to say, as they did during the crusades, 'but, isn't this against our morals?' Science has no morals, and no overseer of right and wrong, meaning it's down to the gits in power to interpret it as they have religion, but more freely.

Sorry, this has become somewhat long winded.
 
excellent stuff PeteByrdie - need a double like button :)
 
And a lot of the hatred towards Jews was based on (a complete misunderstanding of) what passed for genetics back then. The Jews were inferior genetic material, and so had to be expunged in favour of the true Aryan race. (Odd a short, dark Bavarian saw the ideal as tall, blonde Nordics.)

Of course, it was complete crap, and a corruption of the actual science. In the same way a lot of the religious driven hatred is a corruption of the original message. Some people just aren't able to see that if it can happen in their world, it might just happen in someone else's.
 
Rangers fans do tend to be cross-eyed and have receding foreheads though.
 
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