I hate that I get to use this so often 😒
Did people still like Dawkins before this? I’m not an atheist or super interested in his particular field of biology, but every time I heard him get mentioned after his initial New Atheism stuff it was him being islamophobic/racist against Arabs, Iraq war apologia, being an apologist for sexual harassment, etc. He seemed pretty bad for a while.
Yikes. Disappointing. “The reality that I recognise as true is the only reality that can exist and everything that doesn’t fit is religious dogma” sounds awfully familiar.
Realism is a poison and underlies all oppressive ideologies - monotheism, capitalism, monarchism, race supremacy, gender essentialism. All progressive ideology is so because on some level it rejects belief in objective reality.
Can you elaborate? This sounds very interesting to me but I’m frankly not sure what the right questions would be here.
I wrote an antirealist manifesto and put it online at http://soulism.net/
First of all, I can’t remember the last time Dawkins was even relevant or newsworthy. As a kid growing out of religion, he was a source of support and inspiration for me. But after growing up, even still being a complete atheist, I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the guy. He lives in a constant battle against theism, and frankly, I have better things to worry about.
Second, let’s remember that even people that we truly respect and value for their contributions to a given field does not mean that that translates to other fields. Even absolute genius in one area doesn’t translate to other areas. Newton created his 3 laws of motion, first described gravity, and developed Calculus, but he was also an advocate and practitioner of alchemy. Einstein was an amazing physicist who gave us relativity, the energy of mass, etc, but he believed quantum physics was hokum.
Sometimes that even goes beyond simple incompetence outside of their area of expertise and into outright bigotry. H.P. Lovecraft was an amazing horror author that essentially created the genre of cosmic horror and whose influence continues to this day, and yet he was WILDLY racist against literally anyone not white. Henry Ford dramatically increased the efficiency of modern manufacturing, made automobiles affordable for the average American, implemented the 40 hour 5 day work week, and paid his workers double the standard of the time, and he was also a huge anti-semite that put out a newsletter filled with anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and Hitler even wrote of him favorably in Mein Kampf.
Plus Hawkins is 83 years old. He’s been spending the majority of those 83 years thinking about, arguing about, honing his views about, and publically speaking about atheism. It’s little wonder he is considered an authority in that subject. Undoubtedly, though, he’s given nowhere near that much thought (or any at all) to trans politics, so it is no wonder that he does not have a well formed and nuanced view there. He’s more likely to fall in line, then, with the societal view of his generation’s time. So of course he’s an idiot about it.
It’s little wonder he is considered an authority in that subject. Undoubtedly, though, he’s given nowhere near that much thought (or any at all) to trans politics…He’s more likely to fall in line, then, with the societal view of his generation’s time.
He’s also more likely to be full of himself.
Old man yells at cloud.
