Richard Dawkins was honored in 1996 by the AHA as Humanist of the Year for his significant contributions in this area.
Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values. His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.
Featured, News, “American Humanist Association Board Statement Withdrawing Honor from Richard Dawkins” at American Humanist Association (April 19, 2021)
As reader Ken Francis puts it: From anti-God hero to trans-racist zero…
You blinked, you missed it. That’s Cancel Culture for ya.
Here’s a Twitter thread where he attempts to defend himself: “I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic “Discuss” question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue .”
Discuss? Well, the Woke don’t “do” discussion but they famously devour their own. The victim does get to select slow, medium, or high grill.
What sealed Dawkins’s fate was a reference to Rachel Dolezal, an American woman who is presumably now in Progressive hell for pretending to be a Black American.
As Charles C.W. Cooke puts it at National Review Online:
Dawkins’s crime was to have suggested on Twitter that transgender people are not, in a scientific sense, members of the sex with which they identify. “In 2015,” Dawkins wrote recently, “Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.” In response, the AHA said that Dawkins was “making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalised groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values,” and took away an award that it had given Dawkins in 1996, thereby confirming his initial hypothesis.
Dawkins is not, however, immolating himself. The Times of London reports, “Dawkins, 80, claimed that the loss of the award would have little practical effect on him because he had never used it. ‘Apparently the honour hadn’t meant enough to me to be worth recording in my CV,’ he said.”
Also from The Times: “Voting to withdraw a 1996 “humanist of the year award”, the AHA said that the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion was no longer “an exemplar of humanist values” after his tweets appeared to question whether people can choose their gender.” Guess that’s another of the multitude of things no good Humanist can question.
All this is a step up from the row over the elevator he wasn’t even in. Remember that? It was 2011. And the Woke are much Woker now.
But the thing is, who cares about the American Humanist Association without people like Dawkins?
Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd
The Humanist Association was a slightly big thing in the early ’50s. I hadn’t heard of it again until this little item. Even so, it’s always fun to watch the second wave of revolutionaries guillotine the first wave.
Polistra
I couldn’t of said that better myself
Whatever Richard is he is still delusional to the bone:
Except for the facts that natural selection hasn’t discovered anything and there isn’t any evidence that NS produced vision systems.
“His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity.”
But Atheism entails psychopathic behavior and therefore is incompatible with Sensitivity and Sincerity!
In effect, they are casting Darwkins under the bus simply for acting a little bit like atheists ought to act if atheism were actually true.
It is very obvious that atheists are fact obsessed people, who are clueless about subjectivity. That is why their personal opinions are bad.
And for those who this isn’t obvious, then you are probably clueless about subjectivity just the same.
Bornagain77/4
And theism is used to cloak or justify immoral, delusional and even psychopathic behavior as well.
There is nothing in atheism that warrants animosity towards transgender or transracial people. What is ironic, however, is that there are a lot of theists who will find themselves sympathizing with atheist Richard Dawkins alleged views on these subjects
Seversky claims that, “There is nothing in atheism that warrants animosity towards transgender or transracial people.”
Seversky, please remember, you, as an atheist, live in an amoral world of pitiless indifference, where only the strong are allowed to survive and the weak are destined to perish.
Therefore it is the height of hypocrisy for you to demand equal rights for the weak and persecuted whilst championing a worldview that has no pity whatsoever for the weak and persecuted.
In fact, in order for you to be morally consistent, and in order for you to firmly ground your belief in equal rights for all people, you are forced to reach over into Christian morality and ‘borrow’ the self evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”
Verse:
Is there anything more useless and foolish than atheist humanists honoring other atheist humanists? After all, we’re a bunch of random molecules with no purpose and meaning, so what value is there in creating an award to recognize nothingness?
Actually, I guess there is something even more useless and foolish and that is to castigate another lump of random molecules assembled without meaning and purpose for acting in a way that cannot be objectively qualified as evil.
Bornagain77/7
The godless Universe in which we live is amoral, pitiless and utterly indifferent to us.
That does not mean we should be amoral in our dealings with our fellow creatures, without pity for their sufferings or indifferent to their interests. Remember the is/ought gap?
Incomprehensible though it may be to you, we do not need a god to tell us what is good or bad. We can work it out for ourselves.
Is/ought gap again. It does not follow from our view that the Universe is without pity that we should behave without pity towards our fellows.
You should not read Christians who are so indifferent towards their own Ninth Commandment.
It’s interesting that the Declaration of Independence starts with a lie. The Founding Fathers were amongst the wisest, best-educated and most intelligent men of their day. They would have been well aware that all men are not created equal. They differ widely in their various mental and physical attributes. And even the equality they aspired to for men was not extended to slaves or women. Moreover, it would have been news to the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah or the Amalekites or the Midianites or the Canaanites that they had been endowed with unalienable rights by their Creator since their Creator and His proxies ignored them whenever it suited Him. So don’t talk to me about moral consistency.
Seversky, as an atheist, says, “The godless Universe in which we live is amoral, pitiless and utterly indifferent to us.”
Yet further down Seversky claims that “we do not need a god to tell us what is good or bad. We can work it out for ourselves.”
Yet, how do you intuitively know how to judge what may be good or evil in a world where good and evil simply don’t exist? How in blue blazes will you ‘work it out’ for yourself when there is no objective standard of morality for you to judge by?
As CS Lewis, a former atheist, put your irresolvable moral dilemma, ““My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?,,,”
Bottom line Seversky, you need God far, far, more than you realize just in order to for you make any moral sense of the world whatsoever!
There is only an is / ought gap in creationism.
You require the two fundamental categories of creator and creation, in order to validate both opinion about what ought to be, and facts about what is.
An opinion is formed by choice, and expresses what it is that makes a choice.
Which means all that makes a choice, can only be identified with a chosen opinion. And this is the category where things like “goodness” and “evil” would be at.
1. Creator / chooses / spiritual / subjective / opinion
2. Creation / chosen / material / objective / fact
So to say “X is good”, it means a choice between X and not X, where X is chosen, is made out of goodness. Obviously, it is equally logically valid to choose the opinion that X is not good, but evil.
There is no is / ought gap in materialism.
In materialism good and evil become to be a subcategory of facts, namely facts about brainstates. The goodness is in the brain, and the existence of it a fact forced by the evidence of it.
As like a chesscomputer calculating a move to win the game. The goodness then equates to the algorithm by which it calculates the move.
This is superficially coherent. Ofcourse, if you argue it through, it doesn’t make any sense to name an algorithm goodness, you can just name it, an algorithm.
So materialists exploit the similarity between the concepts of choosing and selection, to co-opt subjective terminology into materialism. While really, subjective terminology is properly exlusively creationist.
They pretend that choosing is like the chesscomputer calculating a move, and then all subjecive terminology applies to what is doing this calculation, the algorithms.
Basically what this comes down to is that the objective word goodness, is what goodness consists of, and the objective word evil, is what evil consists of.
Which is why you have all these phony baloney atheists harping on the word empathy, as if saying the word is what empathy consists of.