The anti-theist soap opera continues. PZ used to fawn over Dawkins, but no longer. I was surprised Dawkins didn’t even give so much as a tweet for PZ’s book, now it is apparent why — the two don’t seem to be bosom buddies anymore.
PZ writes:
I’ve strained to pardon Richard Dawkins’ many insensitivities — ‘dear muslima’, the missteps on twitter, the petty snits against other people — but his latest is just a disaster.
In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, he said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.
…
other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.
He seems to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children. He was a victim of an inexcusable violation; that he can shrug it off does not mean it was OK, or ‘zero bad’, or something trivial.
Should I have raised my children with such a lack of self-respect that they should have allowed dirty old men to play with their genitals? I would have wanted them to inform me, so that such behavior could be stopped.
Just when did it stop being OK for acquaintances to put their hands inside Richard Dawkins shorts? I presume it would be an utterly intolerable act now, of course — at what age do the contents of childrens’ pants stop being public property?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/09/09/i-beseech-you-in-the-bowels-of-christ-please-stop
Dawkins can’t find it in himself to condemn adultery (in fact he promotes adultery and lying about it) or mild pedophilia. He ignores the terrorism of animal rights activists in his own back yard, but he’ll fume over someone accepting the idea of a Designer.
See: Dawkins Still MIA.
NOTES:
1. HT Mike Gene
2. The anti-theist soap opera doesn’t seem to make the anti-theist movement look especially more rational than any other philosophical group, it only reinforces the perception which even atheists have of anti-theists. Anti-theists are Angry, Narcissistic, Un-agreeable, Anti-Social Dogmatists.
3. Given the empirically established anti-theist psychological profile, it is no surprise we had elevatorgate, Shermer’s cease and desist order against PZ, and Happy Atheist PZ Myers and the Creative Pooper episode.