Home » News » Video: Michael Ruse On Why Richard Dawkins Makes Him Embarrassed To Be An Atheist

7 Responses to Video: Michael Ruse On Why Richard Dawkins Makes Him Embarrassed To Be An Atheist

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   Blue_SavannahDecember 19, 2012 at 11:04 pm

   On the flip side, Dawkins make me PROUD to be a CHRISTIAN!
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   Kantian NaturalistDecember 20, 2012 at 1:20 am

   I’m mostly with Ruse on this one, though I thought Terry Eagleton’s review of The God Delusion located the problem with Dawkins quite precisely:

   These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford.

   Dawkins is the kind of elitist who mistakes his elitism for common sense, and thus fails to recognize his own elitism.
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   jstanley01December 20, 2012 at 6:55 am

   Freudian slip @ 5:35-ish?
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   MungDecember 20, 2012 at 9:29 am

   I recognize my elitism!
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   Kantian NaturalistDecember 20, 2012 at 10:35 am

   Same here, Mung. That puts us one up on Dawkins.
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   MungDecember 20, 2012 at 6:42 pm

   but much poorer, i bet.
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   Kantian NaturalistDecember 20, 2012 at 9:23 pm

   Without a doubt!