 20061026 Dawkins is so hot right now!
Richard Dawkins Tour Journal: Last night in Lynchburg, Virginia, home of the infamous Jerry Falwell, was memorable. The large hall at Randolph Macon Woman’s College was packed. I gave a fairly short program of readings from The God Delusion, and then the bulk of the evening was given over to much more than an hour of Q & A. The first questioner announced himself as coming from Liberty (Falwell’s 'University'), and he began by saying he had never been so insulted, yet simultaneously so amused, by any lecture. Many of the questioners announced themselves as either students or faculty from Liberty, rather than from Randolph Macon which was my host institution. One by one they tried to trip me up, and one by one their failure to do so was applauded by the audience. Finally, I said that my advice to all Liberty students was to resign immediately and apply to a proper university instead. That received thunderous applause, so that I almost began to feel slightly sorry for the Liberty people. Only almost and only slightly, however. 6
Comments:
Wynne Renz said... I love this guy. 3:42 PM Jakob said... He's the ultimate BADASS. I've never seen anyone with a lower tolerance for bullshit. He's a one-man bullshit demolition team. If you've never read anything by him, take 10 minutes and read the last chapter in A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN. It's a letter to his 10-year-old daughter on good and bad reasons for believing things. 5:06 PM said... Word... (in the beginning). Warning: more parentheticals and verbosity. Dawkin's book "Unweaving the Rainbow" is also an excellent, and the first book of his I read. Ditto the Selfish Gene, which made him. Another good book that destroys "magical thinking" (as I have dubbed it) is Carl Sagan's superb "Demon Haunted World" from the mid-90s. If everyone in this sad, sad country (when it comes to the understanding of science) would read that book--we would all be much better off, both intellectually and economically. Unfortunately, and ironically, it seems that "faith" and irrational belief are rooted in the H. Sapien brain (or as the very late HL Mencken would have it, “boobus americanus”—but maybe we should alter that to boobus pangeaus). Seeing how the vast majority of humans believe in invisible deity, and then a large portion within that group believe in a quite dreadful and repressive deity, I don't think Dawkins and Co. (his buddies the evolutionary psychologists) will be ever be very successful in "converting the converters" (another stupid term I just invented--see this religion stuff is easy) into admitting their delusion and accepting Occam’s Razor, ie, natural selection through genetic mutation over geological time. *Poof* here we are moving little pixels around. Or as Camus said, reading the paper and fornicating. And Jakob, I think Sam Harris may be more of a "one-man bullshit demolition team" than Dawkins, at least with respect to utterly leveling the idea that religion is a good thing in our age of rapid scientific and technological development. Harris' "Letter to a Christian Nation" has a far better chance of actually affecting the religious, as opposed to Dawkins who mainly is just preaching to the choir (hey--I enjoy it, go Dawkman go!) For now, this is anonymous atheist signing off. 8:37 PM Jakob said... Well, I was referring to his demolition of other bullshit, not specifically religion. Unweaving The Rainbow is like an instruction manual for your brain. Time will tell which has a bigger effect, Harris or Dawkins. But I'm not sold on the 'preaching to the choir' argument. I know several people who are (attempting to) send copies to family members who otherwise would never pick it up. 10:47 AM said... The corollary of having an individual explain their "faith" to you would have to be talking someone *out* of their faith... That is the main tenet I abide by when it comes to the complete and utter futility of educating large groups of people on matters of scientific importance. There is a reason it took humans 10,000 years, and that’s just since agriculture, to come up the basic laws of physics, which are quite measurable and simple (at least in the older and slightly inaccurate Newtonian exposition). The reason? We did not evolve to “think scientifically”—if anything we evolved to, and have strong genetic inclinations, to be anti-scientific (which makes a lot of sense really, even if it is circular ) I used to be confrontational ASAP in any conversations about religion, but now I see it as illogical and counter productive to attack religion. If someone is polarized, and you try to take the opposite position (or worse, try to annihilate the position at hand--Dawkin's strategy) in the end it does nothing but helps the other side. Sorry if I sound like Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer or John Ashcroft here. I'm not saying it "emboldens the enemy" by any stretch of the imagination. Dawkin’s positions are overwhelmingly impressive from an academic standpoint, many which I already held as a boy when I was being forced to go to Church by my parents in 4th the grade, far before I had ever heard of or read Dawkins. However, my view is that his books will miserably fail (and have failed) when it comes to truly affecting the crowd he’s concerned with, with respect to the “religiously faithful” … mainly crazy evangelical rapturists (close enough to 50% of the population to be truly scary). ) Dubya's war for oil in Iraq is just as unwinnable as Dawkin’s war for reason. Heh, sometimes I amuse myself. Anyways, I really am comparing the case of trying to reform the uber-religious to the “winning of the Iraq war”—it ain’t gonna happen. At least that's how I see it. I generally have packed my luggage on the "god debate", and I have now decided to never rehash the David Cross skit of college kids debating if there is a great old man with a white beard in the sky watching down on us. The vast majority believes it, and no matter how many times you argue with them, their fortress of “faith” is impenetrable. To me the entire thing is linguistic, not theological or scientific. From a linguistic sense, it is utterly absurd—no need to invoke natural selection or anything else, but it doesn’t hurt one’s case. Generative grammar, or universal grammar, explains very succinctly and mathematically what language is, and its infinite nature. The infinite nature, the unrelenting ability to be produce “new” expressions destroys the concept of being able to define an ever lasting prime mover who sets doctrine and influences the universe. In essence, if you can really *honestly* believe in a religious doctrine, then at that point it doesn’t matter what you are told, you’re going to believe it until internal forces compel you to do otherwise. You can see this at high schools where students create committees which in turn attack their own biology course and teachers for teaching SCIENCE!--obviously reason is much weaker than childhood indoctrination. And, sadly, many, if not close to all going by statistics and personal experience are in fact *children*! Yeah, it might help if more people are more vocal about how absurd and unrealistic religion is, or for that matter UFOs, homeopathy, other new age crap, “Intelligent Design”, or spoon bending. Doesn’t for a second change the fact that all it amounts to is pissin’ in the wind. Dawkin’s is optimistic in that he hopes his fire engine hose firing into the tornado of religious ferment will enable the masses of literate, educated (not at Bob Jones or Liberty) people to stand up after the tornado and take hold of things after the fires burn out. I doubt he is right, and I doubt his book or any other can put a dent in thousands of years in formation of the strongest Abrahamic cults in the world. Yeah, sure, I’m sending Harris’ book to a few people I think it may help when it comes down to thinking about these matters… If you weren’t referring to religion in your bullshit demolition team reference than what were you referring to? Religion is clearly near the top of the bullshit-ponzi scheme pyramid. Perhaps the federal government and the corporations that control her are more full of it—but, who elects congress? In the end it is “the people” who bear the guilt, even if the upper percentages in the country managed to zonk them out on cheesy poofs, cheap gas (for now!), ticky-tack houses, and bad TV (a redundancy if I’ve ever written one.) Oops, I forgot religion too… Who elected two terms of the nixonites and reaganites redux extreme edition? Obvious answer: religious zealots, who are *not* the wealthy component of the republican party! The only opiate the ignorant masses know is salvation through unreason, and this is in large and plentiful supply in this green land. End of rambling self-indulgent diatribe (for now). Sorry for clogging up this normally cogent blog with sprawling comments, but, eh, it’s Saturday night and I don’t got shit to do :-D 8:31 PM said... http://richarddawkins.net/article,303,Reading-of-The-God-Delusion-in-Lynchburg-VA,Richard-Dawkins--C-SPAN2 11:10 AM Post a Comment |
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 Hi, I'm Zach. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana and graduated from Wake Forest. After college, I moved to Manhattan to get serious about a company I ran with friends. We sold it to Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp in 2006. I just wrapped up with a project I co-founded called Vimeo and left CV to focus on being a twenty-five year old. I have another blog called Copy and Taste, where I post about learning to cook. I live in Brooklyn now.  Del.icio.us My Flickr Me on Flickr Last.fm Linked in MySpace Netflix History Vimeo  Amir Blumenfeld Chris Bodenner Mareen Fischinger Fort Wayne Observed Nick Gray Hype Machine Jake and Amir Jakob Lodwick Oh My Rockness Jonathan Marcus Youngna Park Megan Scheminske Eliot Shepard Shorpy Signal vs. Noise Alex Soth Stereogum Ricky Van Veen Khoi Vinh Eugene Wyatt   Postal Skype SMS (via AIM) |