Shove it, Dawkins
This post dates back several years, but the current barrage of TV Dorkins has led me to re-post.
Richard Dawkins. What a guy.
You know, I read some of his early works (Blind Watchmaker, for instance) with genuine pleasure and a real sense of awe. He made me think. And mostly, what I thought was, 'Oh, yeah! Of course!'. He even helped me through an ecology course, in a third-hand kind of way.
Ever since then, he's been becoming an angry, unlanceable boil on my bum, to the extent that I think he's now generating real hatred in me. Or maybe just a lot of pus. (Did I ever tell you about my blocked sweat gland? Oh boy.)
Basically, he's turned into anti-spiritual fascist.
He commands us to abandon our foolish ways, and overturns the market stalls of the credulous. He wishes us to turn the other cheek to the matter of the meaning of life, for there is none. There is no God, no spirit, no afterlife. Just us, our genes, and a planet. Believe in me, he says, and you shall believe in science, and if you do that, you shall be happy for all your days in the full and certain knowledge that your life is utterly meaningless outside of what you make of it.
He might be right, but you know what? Try it. I dare you.
Try not believing in anything, deliberately. For evermore.
You know what happens? You go bonkers, that's what. And how do I know? Because I'm a depressive with an ancient history. I've spent some 30 years denying the existence of any God, and I can tell you from the heart that it is a truly painful and nasty experience.
You know why Dawkins isn't hurting? Because he's got religion.
Believe in me, sayeth the Dawkins....
1 comment:
Dawkins is an arrogant ass, this is true for two reasons. One, he is an academic, a breed entirely driven by avaricial ego. Once listened to and exalted, they become unbearable. Of course he is blatantly wrong because he restricts the variable in his experiments to only those that prove his hypothesis.
It never ceased to amaze me how much appallingly bad science was passed of as verbatim truth when I was in the system. Typically issues were addressed along the lines of “what do we want to prove, and how do we do that?”. The idea of having an hypothesis “suppose that this is the case, what would we see?” a null hypothesis “If this isn’t the case the following will be observed”, and then designing a series of experiments in which all the variable are determined or constant, is an anathema to modern science. For example, less than 10% of climate “science” is based upon anything like scientific rigor, and most is based upon prognostications derived from deeply flawed computer models. As a result we are badgered by various sciento-heretics each with their own brand of alarmist BELIEFS, not proper theories or observed truths. The result? We don’t know what to do, and worse have an equal chance of making the wrong decisions as much as the right ones.
You are so right to characterize Dork-in’s dogma as a belief structure and his own form of religion. The worst behavior of mankind has always been exhibited by those who were absolutely certain that they were right in mind and spirit. In the past they may have been heretics or mainstream, but today we call them terrorists, because that is what they are: those who spread terror and despondency to either recruit people to their cause or cast them into the deepest despair. Dork-ins is an evil little shallow minded moron who cannot conceive of any thing beyond his own brilliance and public acclaim, pretty much the same as Osama bin Laden then.
A real physicist (like Einstein) would have humbly admitted that the more we know about the nature of the Universe, the more awesome it is and the greater the room for a God, albeit a somewhat disengaged power. But that would be essential, wouldn’t it, for what would be the point of free-will and good & evil if you are not allowed to experiment in them? Now, that is science. It is called life.
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