Over at Telic Thoughts, Techne has waded into the recent revelation that Darwinian atheist Richard Dawkins’ family fortune was built on slave owning in the Caribbean centuries ago. More, a number of family members were active in opposing the abolition of the slave trade.
Predictably, “He is now facing calls to apologise and make reparations for his family’s past.”
Which is ridiculous. Anyone who can trace their family further back than any living person remembers will probably find a villain or two that they had never heard about. One wonders whether the people who make reparation demands could submit to similar scrutiny.
For his part, Dawkins has called the Telegraph story ”surreal“ (in the The Guardian):
… he said the reporter rang back and suggested Dawkins may have inherited a “slave supporting” gene from his distant relative.
As it happens, some of us have considered it surreal to be hearing about an infidelity gene, a gay gene, a religion gene, an obesity gene, a violence gene – all due to the very Darwinism Dawkins espouses. And that is doubtless what the reporter meant.
= People who can’t take it, shouldn’t hand it out.
Anyway, Dawkins wonders why the slavery link story was even published. We wonder whether the Telegraph honchoes are hoping Dawkins’ll just retire, after the recent “Origin of Species” debacle with Giles Fraser. The rise of new atheism means he can flaunt incompetence, as we said earlier. But that doesn’t make his continued incompetence great news copy.
Fresh faces or fishwrap, that’s the news game.
Meanwhile, Techne says Dawkins is better off with zombies than with slaves (who are famously likely to just get themselves free, something zombies don’t tend to do):
Dawkins is quite good at zombie herding. First he writes a few sciency books to give him some street cred as a scientist. Then he writes The God Delusion. By the time some people begin to realize the logical fallacies and bad scholarship in the book it is too late. The gnu zombies are hooked on bad philosophy and metaphysics masqueraded as science and scholarship. If you point out that Dawkins can’t even get Aquinas’ cosmological arguments right, that he can’t even distinguish between the teleological argument and Paley’s watchmaker argument, that Darwin was a teleologist or that Dawkins’ central argument is hopelessly flawed, all you get is the Myers Shuffle and cowardice to engage their critics. Gnu zombies are uneducated when it comes to philosophy, logic and metaphysics. And unlike slaves who are educable, gnu zombies appear to be immune to any form education that is contra their indoctrination.
The zombies were probably educated at Indoctrinate U, where they never presented or noticed any problem.
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