Well, after a fairly innocuous first post on the subject, having read The God Delusion, I spent a little time today reading some technorati links regarding Richard Dawkins. This was an eye opener.

Now, historically, I have found Richard Dawkins annoying, irritating and overbearing. I am not a biologist so his remarkable wealth of knowledge on the subject is – largely – irrelevant.

However, reading some of the counter-argument blogs is amazing. The vast majority are blatant Christian / Creationist blogs which are obviously intimidated about the prospect of some one “preaching” (yes, I use this word with a full sense of the irony attached) atheism. Some are just nonsense, and some disguise themselves as being “open minded” blogs – but when you read any of the history they may as well have ©Discovery Institute at the bottom.

Some of the more recently viewed examples are (blatant Christian blog) – http://telicthoughts.com/ which has a YouTube video of Dawkins apparently making a fool of himself. The video is disturbing in many ways, not because of Dawkins error (everyone makes mistakes and it takes a special kind of retentive person to worry about this one unduly), but because of the comments Melvin Konner makes. He is talking about Dawkins (somewhat over the top) claims that Religious Indoctrination is child abuse and he goes on about how it is wrong to tell people how their children should or shouldn’t be indoctrinated (shocking in itself). He brings out the tired old fear that if people are told they cant indoctrinate their children – “Your Children or Mine will be taken away first.”

What madness is this. It is insane. It is pure fear mongering. At 2 mins 15 seconds the camera pans around the audience and you see the suitably concerned woman (with assumptions she is a mother) sitting in the audience looking worried. In the back of my head I can hear the voice from the Simpson’s “Wont anyone think of the children.” It really is shameful that this is presented as a reasoned argument. If you want to see more, but want to avoid the telicthoughts website, then you can watch the video on YouTube. The site appears to have a bit of Richard Dawkin’s fixation which is interesting on many levels. (As examples: http://telicthoughts.com/?p=1141 or more generally http://telicthoughts.com/?cat=35)

On a (much) more entertaining vein, there is a blog called Pavlov’s Cat, which has a post about Dawkins, which I can only assume is meant to be satire. After a long, drawn out introduction we get to the meat of the post:

Voice is also the thing that always alerts me, in the absence of any other obvious sign, to someone’s mental state. When a voice sounds odd to me — a buzz, a drone, a monotone — then what one beloved ex-boss of mine used to call the ‘maddie antenna’ quivers like that retriever’s tail in the Bugs Bunny cartoon. And as soon as Dawkins began to speak I thought Oh my God, he sounds like a Dalek. I mentally plotted him somewhere along the Asperger’s spectrum. The phrase ‘lack of affect’ came to mind.

His voice has a sort of metallic, sawing, plangent edge, its effect reminiscent of paper cuts and fingernails on blackboards. Yet is not in itself an ugly voice, that isn’t what I mean; its timbre, in fact, is rather unusually pure and clear. It’s the voice of a brilliantly played brass instrument. A trumpet, say. A trumpet of an evangelical, military and/or annunciatory kind, of the kind that summons souls on the Day of Judgement, orders Adam and Eve out of Paradise, or announces sternly to the Virgin Mary that she’s pregnant with the son of God and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it.

And it was deeply ironic, I thought, that a man so loudly, insistently and unreservedly determined to pour scorn on any manner of theist, on spirituality of any kind, should adopt so successfully the Biblical modes of denunciation and command: the mode of evangelists and angels, or vengeful gods of any stamp. The mode of a bossy, overbearing, single-minded bully.

Well, it certainly made me laugh.

There were positive examples available though. The “everything is pointless” website had an interesting article about Dawkins, but they may be biased….

Technorati tags: Richard Dawkins, Dawkins, Atheism, Atheist, Evolution, Science, Creationism