Thursday, January 03, 2008

Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists

Cracking article 'Ten propositions on Richard Dawkins and the new atheists' which is well worth 10 minutes of your time. Thanks to Maggi Dawns blog for the link.

Here's an excerpt:

If Professor Dawkins is the “bad cop” of the New Atheists, the Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee is probably the “good cop”, while Christopher Hitchens is undoubtedly the “corrupt cop”. I saw him on the British TV programme Question Time, contemptuously holding court like Jabba the Hutt. And I sat for half-an-hour at Waterstone’s dipping into the over-priced God Is Not Great as if it were dishwater, a highly flattering simile. Hitchens’ penetrating scholarly appraisals include descriptions of Augustine the “ignoramus”, Aquinas the “stupid”, and Calvin the “sadist”; while Niemöller and Bonhoeffer’s resistance to the Nazis was motivated by a “nebulous humanism”, and Martin Luther King’s faith was Christian only in a “nominal sense”. Enough said. It is all rather embarrassing.

4 comments:

  1. hii!
    i did read the blog but i think it was a bit too clever for me!
    nyways i just wanted to say happy new year!=] and maybe il remeber to blog more this year!

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  2. Hi rozi, happy new year to you too! No worries about the blog - maybe God has better things for you to do with your time!

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  3. I don't see PT as a good cop. Here she is on ++Rowan on October 26th:

    "Joining the Catholics and evangelicals, that pathetic weather-vane windbag, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has now dithered his way into the debate. Wobbly Williams is hand-wringing over "too many" abortions and loss of "moral focus" and "weakening of the feeling that abortion is the last resort". His Observer article last Sunday calling for a review of the 24-week limit was an archetypal self-parody, wandering around the moral maze and getting lost. Too many!

    Either abortion is murder - which some think - or it isn't, which 83% think in a new NOP poll. So are a few murders OK with the archbishop, and if so, how many?

    His contribution was yet another intellectual contortion to mollify his church's woman-hating, gay-bashing, Daily Mail wing instead of standing up for whatever it is he thinks."

    Subtle, NOT.

    How do I hate thee, Rowan? Let me count the ways...

    Matt W

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  4. The only 'good cop' who comes to mind for me is John Humphrys, but then he's agnostic rather than atheist and not much of a fan of the militant secularists. I wonder if there are any other candidates?

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