Richard Dawkins posts a letter on his website by an anonymous individual who, supposedly inspired by his viewing of EXPELLED, now holds Dawkins and fellow Darwinists responsible for the Holocaust. Dawkins then shifts the blame to Ben Stein and EXPELLED.
This is the same Dawkins who in books and videos rails against religious people for their credulousness and stresses the need in science and all aspects of life to examine things closely and follow the evidence. So, what is the evidence that this letter is genuine? And who’s benefitting from the letter?
We don’t know who the author is. Moreover, Dawkins is clearly putting it to good use in excoriating Ben Stein and EXPELLED. Until Dawkins provides some compelling evidence that this letter is for real, I would suggest regarding it as the work of a troll seeking to elicit precisely this reaction.
What if I’m wrong? What if the letter was sent to Dawkins by someone who meant what he wrote? It would just mean that someone wrote an intemperate letter and missed the care and nuance with which the producers of EXPELLED traced the intellectual history from Darwin to the Nazis.
Hard as it may be to believe, I get my share of intemperate letters by (ostensibly) rabid Darwinists who listen to people like Dawkins, Shermer, and Dennett, and conclude that I’m trying to destroy science. Do I publicly charge Dawkins et al. with duping them? I suppose I could play Dawkins’s game, but I prefer to hold people accountable for their own indiscretions.