1. Are they running for President or Pastor-in-Chief?

Comment #134551 by bash the bish on February 28, 2008 at 1:27 am

Why is 'atheist' so damn hard for some people to spell?

Its funny you should say that nogodserver. I have a mild dislexia and I realy do have a problem with spelling "atheist" its just one of those words that will not go from brain to fingers to pc screen.

edit because I couldnt spell realy !!!

2. Richard Dawkins on The Big Debate

Comment #118238 by bash the bish on January 30, 2008 at 1:57 pm

Philip maybe
HAY, PREACHER, LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE!

3. God's honest truth?

Comment #80811 by bash the bish on October 23, 2007 at 5:13 am

I have now added this to the Guardian thread. It will be fully intelligible only to those who have followed that thread.


To James Plaskett. Thank you for your apology. I hope you will correct the bookshop proprietor who misinformed you. You go on to say: "Now: do YOU accept that you deliberately lobbied the editor of The Times Higher Education supplement to suppress a commissioned piece by Richard Milton against Darwinism in 1995 purely because you disliked the factual content of the piece?"

No I don't accept it. I've looked up the website you mention. It belongs to Richard Milton, who wrote a more than usually ignorant creationist book a few years ago. Milton argued that the world was less than 100,000 years old. Considering that the available evidence puts the true age of Earth at 4.6 billion years, Milton's error is equivalent to believing that the width of North America is less than 100 yards! Milton now accuses me of 'lobbying' an Editor against him. I certainly did not (I don't 'lobby' about anything as trivial as Richard Milton), but it is perfectly possible that an Editor might have followed the standard editorial practice of consulting me as an expert referee. If he did, I of course would not have withheld my opinion, just as I do not withhold it now. I would possibly have pointed the Editor to my review of Milton in New Statesman. Alternatively, the Editor was no doubt capable of discovering that review for himself. If, as a result of reading my review, the Editor rejected an article by Milton, I am delighted. That is what referees are for. My review is still available on the Internet. Google "Milton misunderstands the first thing about natural selection".

Andrew Brown, unlike James Plaskett, has not apologised. He now pleads that he had not read the Observer article by me that his piece, above, quotes in support of his allegation against me. He blames a Sub for inserting the reference to my Observer article, and says that he really meant to refer instead to Chapter 9 of The God Delusion. Brown is right that that chapter comes closer to justifying his allegation about me than the Observer piece that he (as we now know unwittingly) actually cited. Nevertheless, I think most objective readers will agree with several posters to this thread, of whom The Rationalist is representative:-


"I urge other readers to go to the bit of The God Delusion that Mr Brown says demonstrates Dawkins wants to prohibit parents from raising their kids with religious beliefs.

If you don't have access to the book then this section deals with the extent to which society may intervene when parents' actions seem materially to damage their children. Female circumcision and Amish archaism are presented as cases in which religion imposes an outcome on a child that the child would probably not opt for as an adult. (Very few mature women 'opt' for clitorectomies and very few adults 'opt' to live in a time warp.)

Notice the moderate language. Dawkins is not proposing a manifesto here.

Dawkins argues that it is a debate which is open. He questions how far we should go to constrain parents when they behave in a socially unacceptable way. We now accept (in this country) that parents cannot beat their children. But what constitutes psychological torture? Do parents have the right to tell their children that they will burn in hell for masturbating?

Dawkins is, as he says above, raising the issue, raising consciousness. He wants us to consider these questions. He doesn't suggest there are any easy answers nor, for a second, does he state or imply that parents should not be allowed to convey their religion to their children.

He wants people to grow out of their mental prisons. He wants to convince people that religious practice is often harmful: he does it unapologetically and this is why he is so often demonised and misrepresented.

Andrew Brown - you've been made to look a fool. The more people read your citation the worse it will get for your credibility. Do your research properly next time."


Andrew also takes the opportunity to ask me to withdraw the suggestion that Mary Midgley did not read The Selfish Gene before attacking it. When I was first told this by the sociologist Ullica Segerstrale, who interviewed Mrs Midgley, I accepted it as the most charitable explanation of her bizarre attack. Anybody who thinks it is damaging to the thesis of The Selfish Gene to say "Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological" has to be convicted of catastrophic stupidity unless she can plead guilty to the lesser charge of not having read past the title of the book she was attacking. If Mrs Midgley prefers to be convicted of the graver charge of abject stupidity, that is her privilege. I am therefore happy to comply with Brown's request and accept that Mrs Midgley read the book as a professional philosopher and managed the remarkable feat (which somehow eluded millions of non-philosophers) of crassly missing the entire point:-
royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=5



Richard

Is this "the" James Plaskett, Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington spa?