Things you didn't know until very recently...

@best of: I agree.

BestOf, may I ask what your opinion of PZ Myers is? I've definitely seen criticism of him, but I'm not aware of any specific incidents he's been involved in.

Dawkins has made numerous comments about Islam that come off as very condescending and downright snobbish in the past. I remember one comment that made fun of how Muslims were incredibly advanced during the Dark Ages but now they don't contribute a thing to society. I know quite a few atheists who detest him for his comments on Islam.

Christians bash Dakwins for never bashing Muslims; Muslims bash Dawkins for only bashing Muslims. There's a lesson here somewhere.

To be honest, I hate Hitchens more than I hate Dawkins.

I'm actually trying to think of anything he's said that could be construed as hateful or bigoted against Muslims. The worst I can think of is when he pointed out that one or two universities in the UK - maybe it was Cambridge, or that and another one - has more Nobel laureates that all Muslim-majority countries together. I know that was a very controversial comment.

Of course there is a context for it: in debates against Muslims he's usually given the argument that there's all sorts of scientific truths allegedly hidden in the Koran, about things that scientists are discovering just now. Needless to say, the argument is vacuous, as it's based on far-fetched interpretations that are made after the fact, which you could do with just about any text of sufficient length. (For instance, look up Bible Codes.) Dawkins' response is usually along the lines that if it was true that you could make groundbreaking discoveries in all fields of science by studying one ancient book very closely, why aren't Muslim scholars dominating those fields? Why aren't they making those discoveries and having scientists verify them, rather than the other way around? I'm about 99% sure that the tweet about this or that university beating Muslim countries was in response to this argument.

(Of course the real reason one or two universities can beat those countries combined is basically that those countries tend to be fairly poor, and of course the Nobel committee might have all sorts of biases, as well, on top of any barriers that scientists from those countries might have to overcome to get published in the first place. Some of those barriers might have to do with Islam - wars based on religious identities, lack of education for women, a preference for theology instead of science, etc - but it wouldn't be the only reason.)

EDIT: Ninja'd by a few posts. Instead of editing this I'll make a new post.

edited 10th Sep '16 10:47:36 AM by BestOf

There was another time where he'd accused that Ahmed Mohammed kid of lying about his clock or something, but that whole issue is so muddied that I don't remember it too well.

I don't recall any anti-Muslim comments from him. As has been said before, he's more anti-religion in general rather than targeting one in particular.

What I didn't know until recently was how popular the "Put Thornberry's face on another character" thing was. It seems to be rather common on Tumblr.

Dawkwins has actually sided with the alt-right and even those who call themselves Neo-Nazis in his opposition to Islam, and even said of Geert Wilders, often described as a fascist: "if it should turn out that you are a racist or a gratuitous stirrer and provocateur I withdraw my respect, but on the strength of Fitna alone I salute you as a man of courage, who has the balls to stand up to a monstrous enemy,".

He's also made a few comments about what he calls 'mild paedophilia' which have set off more than a few tempers off, and in the same comment said that some rapes are worse than others.

There was also an issue called 'Elevatorgate' which many had issues with due to it exposing a sexist side of skeptic communities wherein he made a few comments about something that had happened to Rebecca Watson in an elevator, and it sort of snowballed from there.

Said comments were basically saying "Shut up, women in the Middle East have it worse than you", which is the equivalent of saying "Shut up, there's children starving in Africa".

He's also made fun of feminists in the west for fighting for rights because women in the middle east have to wear burqas, therefore they should stop complaining because they could have it worse.

edited 10th Sep '16 10:59:29 AM by BaconManiac5000

Perhaps we should start a separate thread for this?

Complaint threads aren't generally looked on too favorably.

Besides, we're mostly done with this topic anyway.

Eh, it'll be over soon enough.

edited 10th Sep '16 11:06:03 AM by Spinosegnosaurus77

Ok, if you say so then.

It would have to be a complaint thread, more of a discussion thread. I for one had nothing to complain about.

You'd have to find me that quote for me to believe he said it. I'm pretty confident you're misremembering it. It's true that there was a golden age of science in Muslim countries in the Middle Ages, and Dawkins might very well have remarked that that age has ended and currently it seems fundamentalism is dragging the region away from another such renaissance. That's not a controversial statement, and similar things have been said by lots of people. I don't believe Dawkins would say (or imply) that Muslims aren't contributing anything, though. He might say they're not pulling their weight, in terms of sheer population, but I'm not sure he'd even go that far.

Hitchens was certainly quite ready to engage in a dialogue of hate. That's one thing that certainly sets him apart from others that have been considered "leaders" of "New Atheism"; Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris would never make things personal.

(To clarify: they would argue with your claims, even if you said those opinions are very dear to you, but they wouldn't attack you personally. Anything you present as an argument can be addressed as an argument, and that's where the line is drawn. Usually when people take offence it's because they present an argument but also want to have it treated with a special reverence, such as that one video of a guy saying he can't lose faith in God because he's dedicated his life to it, to which Dawkins basically replies that the effort spent on a false premise doesn't validate that premise, so he'd have to present an actual argument for his position instead.)

I think Hitchens was also mostly very good about following that line, but if someone did argue (let alone do) something that he considered immoral he would have at them on their terms. Note that he wouldn't have done anything like impose quotas or restrictions on people based on religious identity, or ban religious education of any given faith, etc - so he's still more tolerant of Islam than mainstream Republicans.

Sam Harris has recently taken what I consider a genuinely bigoted line, in terms of suggesting (similar to what Trump says) that Muslims should be subject to extra attention from immigration authorities. This is a massive deviation from the line that other so-called New Atheists would suggest.

I'm actually a massive fan of his. I read his blog daily. (It's called Pharyngula; it's mostly about evolutionary biology, pseudoscience and responses to it, and politics.) Currently the most sort of boiling conflict around him is with other atheists. He's for so-called "Atheism +", which is a movement that advocates for atheists to take a stand for all oppressed minorities and for equal rights and so on - so LGBTQ stuff and feminism and all that.

There are loads of right-wing atheists who are firmly against these things, and they think atheism should only be about protecting the rights of atheists, and nothing more. Their attacks on what they perceive as "Social Justice Warriors" tend to be quite petulant and rude and in some cases downright violent, which might be why PZ Myers is one of the most visible people (within atheism) very strongly and publicly positioning himself in Atheism +.

The most significant controversy he's ever been involved in is about the Eucharist. A student had taken a host (which apparently is the term for the bit of bread you're given in a Catholic mass) and, instead of consuming it, brought it home. Catholics were furious because according to their doctrine it was literally the body of Jesus that he was disrespecting.

Myers wrote and talked about the incident and condemned people for sending death threats and such to that student, and said that if anyone brought him such a "cracker" (as he calls it) he'd desecrate it just to make the point that, whatever anyone says, a cracker is a cracker is a cracker, and nothing more. He was eventually provided one, and he did push a nail through it and throw it in the trash (along with pages of the Quran and Dawkins' The God Delusion).

I don't necessarily agree with this action, because I don't think there's any point offending people when you can easily avoid it, but on the other hand he did have a valid point: it's obvious that the cracker isn't the body of Christ, and any book he spoils (I think he said he had multiple copies of each book so it didn't matter to him) is just a waste of paper and nothing more.

The response he got, obviously, was death threats from basically all directions, but fortunately no one managed to kill him and I'm guessing everyone's mostly forgotten about that whole incident by now. If what he did was wrong - which it might be, in that he went out of his way to do something that was of no benefit to anyone, and hurtful to some - the response was massively more wrong. That doesn't justify it, obviously.

You could draw a parallel between this and incidents of flag burning and so on. I think it's fine as long as you're making a point that isn't just about hating something. In other words, if it's speech but not hate speech it's fine and IMO should be allowed. If it's only about thinking up a specific way to insult people, though, I don't think there's any valid reason to do it, and indeed it would be OK to ban it.

In that one incident (and that really is the only one) Myers did walk that line and I wonder if he's maybe come to regret it. It's clear that people were offended, but again there is a point that when claims are made publicly - eg, that a piece of bread literally becomes flesh - they're open to questioning and ridicule. It's not right to allow entities that make public claims to demand special privileges or protections for those claims. Private individuals, of course, deserve respect and protection; not so for public claims. I think Myers was attacking the latter, but most of his audience took it as an attack on the former.

That is something that I think everyone in these discussions should always consider; both the people who think they're being personally offended, and the people committing the actions or making statements. Every human makes mistakes with this, and New Atheists are certainly not immune to those mistakes.

He (Dawkins) was talking specifically about his own childhood and an incident where he was abused. The point he was making - it was in his autobiography - was that that case was wrong, but not as wrong as cases where children are actually raped. (Dawkins was abused but not raped.) He even pointed out that if he had said that his case was as serious as what has happened to others who were hurt much more he would be belittling their suffering, which I agree with. There are degrees of severity to every crime, and it's not wrong to point out that milder cases are less wrong than worse cases.

I think he supported Wilders because the Netherlands had had some prominent cases of Islamic violence and Wilders was leading the stand against it. Dawkins did say he's not really familiar with Dutch politics, and if I were him I would have looked into it before supporting someone like Wilders. Dawkins is sometimes too eager to speak up, and he compensates for it by giving a number of disclaimers and such ("if this is true, then..." or "I'm not fully familiar with this case, but from what I've heard..."). That's fine in a face-to-face conversation, but when you're doing it on Twitter, with the disclaimers in subsequent or preceding tweets, you're bound to get misunderstood. And that's on top of the folly of stepping into arguments you're not familiar with in the first place.

The thing was overblown on all sides. The kid did sort of lie, in that he didn't design the clock - he built it on instructions from premade pieces, IIRC, and that's what Dawkins was talking about. I'm forgetting this incident because it's been a while, but I think he was mostly talking about how the media was overhyping a trivial achievement. The whole thing had nothing to do with the child's identity, religious or otherwise.

That was the stupidest thing Dawkins ever said. He has subsequently apologised for it, when he was discussing similar fallacies that are made in discussions about atheism. ("Why should atheists be allowed to hold public office in the US states where they're currently banned, when in country x you get executed for apostasy? How can you talk about the US when another country is worse?")

He did make that same fallacy, and was correctly called out for it. It took him a while to realise what he'd done, but he did come around, which is to his credit (although it doesn't eliminate the stupidity of the original act.) For what it's worth, I'm completely on Watson's side in that one. The incident she was describing was creepy as fuck, and for Dawkins not to see that is a clear testament to his privilege.

(It's not right to accuse him of misogyny, though; he is kind of stupid about some aspects of modern feminism, but he is supportive of equal rights for women and was publicly so even when most of his peers in academia weren't. He's blinded by his privilege sometimes but it's not quite as bad as people claim it is. It's still somewhat bad, though.)

I'm not for starting a thread for this. There's little to discuss, despite the size of my post. (I had so many things to reply to!)

As you can see I'm (still) a fan of Dawkins. As I said he's kind of stupid and behind the times about modern feminism, but he's still more up on it than most people in the US or UK. Unfortunately he's made acquaintance with some people who are very "anti-SJW" and they're dragging him down, but hopefully criticism from people he respects - such as PZ Myers and Lawrence Krauss and Neil DeGrasse Tyson - will at some point correct that trajectory. If not, his legacy will suffer for it, and mark him clearly as a product of his time. (His academic career basically peaked in the 60s, 70s and 80s before he transitioned full-time to raising public awareness about science in general, as well as the atheism stuff.) He could've been a face of the early 2000s but I suppose he'll instead be remembered for who he was and what he did in the 70s - and back then he really was much more progressive than the majority of academia, even among liberals.

edited 10th Sep '16 11:27:43 AM by BestOf

PZ Meyers was the guy who went to the Creationism Museum and rode on that Triceratops they have there like a cowboy, right?

He's done it but I'm sure he's nowhere near the only one. As I understand it their Triceratops actually has a saddle on it, implying that people used to tame them before the Flood.

I think I saw a photo of him on Rational Wiki riding it (it's supposed to be for kids, apparently). Apparently he also verbally took down Thunderf00t for his sexism, which just makes me like him.

Yeah. Thunderf00t was actually briefly featured as a blogger on the same network as PZ Myers (Freethoughtblogs) but he was quickly removed because of his anti-feminist views. Myers is not a central figure in that network's decision-making (as far as I know) but he does openly comment on ongoing developments there, including this one.

I looked for it and saw that picture, as well. If it's for kids I hope he wasn't damaging it or anything. (It doesn't look like it.) As much as I loathe fake museums, it's not OK to damage someone's property for no reason.

On a different note, Sleeping Beauty passes the Bechdel test with flying colors.

Yeah, that Sleeping Beauty.

edited 10th Sep '16 11:54:32 AM by BaconManiac5000

Well the point of the test is in how easy it is to pass but how a very large chunk of popular media doesn't pass it. It's only useful in aggregate.

I know, I just find it funny that the Disney movie with the weakest princess passes the Bechdel test arguably the best.

Getting back to my previous post on "Paducah, Kentucky once had three drive-in theaters right next to each other"...

...So did Monroe, Michigan. And Corpus Christi, Texas once had three at the same intersection: http://historicaerials.com?layer=1960&zoom=15&lat=27.735693328817877&lon=-97.4287748336792

Gnomeo & Juliet has sequel coming out in 2018.