Thursday, October 30, 2008

Richard Dawkins and the Goblet of Idiocy

I've cast a cold eye on much of Dawkins's recent work; while in the abstract it's good to have some militant atheists out there, I'm dubious that his stuff has been helping the cause. I think his fatal flaw is tone-deafness, as exhibited in (e.g.) that "brights" campaign.

Now this story confirms my sense that he's gone off the deep end. He's apparently decided (like the fundamentalists) that the Harry Potter books are evil because they make kids believe in witches. To counteract this,
"The book I write next year will be a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking."

What's a pity about this is that I think one of the few points on which Dawkins was utterly sound -- that it's wrong for parents to have arbitrary rights over the education of their offspring, and that it's wrong for kids to be labeled as Christian or Muslim -- is going to be collaterally discredited by this campaign.

3 comments:

Grobstein said...

This is sad indeed

Anonymous said...

Well, Sam Harris is an Eastern mystic and supports torture.

You're never going to get militant atheists who aren't batshit insane, because most reasonable atheists (like us, I suppose) are not going to turn it into a crusade.

Anonymous said...

And wow, he can't make a distinction between fantasy as fiction and fantasy as belief (religious mythology)? Gah.