So recently someone compared Dawkins to Bill O’Reilly and I literally almost had to kill that person. Bill O’Reilly is someone who, despite that fact that he may not be informed on an issue, asserts his opinion to be true. Like the fact that Christianity is a philosophy, or that atheists are creating a war on religion. Don’t even get me started on his politics.
Anyways, so I have come up with a simple explanation to why Dawkins comes off as a bully. This kind of puts you in Dawkins state of mind. You can agree or disagree.
Here is my comparison. Religious people to Dawkins are all those people that are sitting there saying “The sky is blue because it is reflecting off the oceans.” On the other hand, Dawkins is the person who knows everything there is to know about the sky and is saying “NO, it’s because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light.” Here is why he looks like a bully; Dawkins is the person who blatantly says its not ok to be that person who think the sky is blue because of the oceans, just because it is easier to understand and makes them feel better. To him, and most atheists who have a lot of knowledge like him, thinking something wrong just because it is easier isn’t the answer.
So hopefully that clears up a little bit of why Dawkins comes off so rude at times, but really it is justified. Honestly, I love Dawkins and his book (Such a typical atheist right?).
Once again I will end by saying I am not attempting to bash religion or convert anyone.
A good analogy. Well done!
I should say up front that I’m a Christian, but that is not what colors my distaste for Dawkins. I’ve read The God Delusion, just as I have read God Is Not Great by Hitchens; and Letter To A Christian Nation, Moral Landscape, and End Of Faith by Harris. I respect Harris and Hitchens, just as I respect and admire Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan. Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary biologist, but he is a lousy theologian and scholar. What gets me is not that he “calls it like it is”, but that so much of his information is factually inaccurate or blatantly dishonest.
He grossly oversimplified and misrepresents the historical arguments for God – almost as if I were to explain evolution and abiogenesis by saying “first there was mud and water. Then there were these acids. Then these acids came to life. Then we got humans.” The details may be there, but it is so oversimplified as to border on dishonesty.
Then there is the actual dishonesty. Like in chapter 4, when he quotes Augustine saying that curiosity is bad for the soul. In actuality, he created that quote by stripping three sentences out of some 500 words, creating a meaning completely foreign to Augustine, and forgetting to even mark his edit with ellipsis.
Or the factual inaccuracies from poor scholarship, such as when he describes the transmission of scripture as a millenia of “Chinese whispers” – his version of the telephone game. The fact that our modern translations come from manuscripts dating back to the early second century, or that biblical scholars know what 99.8% of the Bible was in the originals with complete certainty… These are scholarly tidbits that were either overlooked or ignored, in favor of a popular myth about transmission.
But then, to top it all off, he has been called on his poor understanding of theology repeatedly. His response was simply that “I don’t need to study leprechaulogy to reject a belief in leprechauns.” Whole I understand
The problem with Dawkins is not his outspoken stance against religion, I can at least respect that – as I do with Hitchens and Harris. The problem with Dawkins is his slovenly scholarship, misrepresentation, and factual dishonesty. It’s the inaccuracies and dishonesty that gets him in trouble, not his stance on religion.
Apparently not many people like being told that they are wrong. Go figure. I like to inform people that they are wrong because if you do it right, they have to think about why they are wrong and why they had not thought about it before. Dawkins doesn’t have the time to do that with everyone that gets his attention for ten minutes.