Atheist Invokes Christian Successes in Effort to Demean Muslims
@RichardDawkins The full name of Trinity College is "The College of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity".
— Mustafa Al-Bassam (@musalbas) August 8, 2013
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5
hmm... well, as a non-journalist but annoying commenter, i'll point out that, after a simple and cursory glance at Nobel Prize recipients from Trinity, there are quite a few atheists in their midst... Amartya Sen and Subramanyan Chandrasekha among the most recent. Plenty others didn't buy into the "undivided trinity" nonsense, I'd wager.
So I'm not really sure I understand Mustafa's point... that non-Muslim institutions accept scholars regardless of religious belief?
17
He's pointing out that that Dawkins lives in a fantasy world, where we're separated into some clean black-and-white of "Bad/Religious" and "Good/Not Religious." He's an idiot and a twat.
Dawkins point is equally obnoxious, so maybe the comments deserve each other?
6
well, the headline read "Christian Successes," which is, at least in part, wrong.
1
Do you seriously not see the irony or are you just being a contrarian?
17
Am I missing some context here? What point was Dawkins trying to make with his tweet? It just makes him seem like kind of a dick.
10
While Dawkins has some insightful work, sometimes I'm pretty sure he just likes being a dick.
3
Maybe it's "even these backward people are doing better than Muslims." Maybe? I don't know.
2
"LOL WOGS ARE STOOPID."
5
If it was anyone but Dawkins, I'd have said "Christians rule, Muslims drool," but I think he was taking his usual "religion is incompatible with science" road trip and got detoured by facts into a tree.
31
Richard Dawkins is officially in his "Fat Elvis" phase: randomly puking out racist bile on twitter while getting high on his own smug cartoon version of other cultures. Someone please stop this guy, the King should have died in 1966 and Dawkins should have retired from public speaking in 2007. It's embarrassing.
22
The siren song of Brittania plays tricks on an aging English intellectual. She's always there, whispering in the night: "somewhere, a brown person does not know you hate them. FIX THIS."
It's a lot easier to explain Hitchens and Dawkins when you understand the terrible weight of bearing even the ghost of empire on your shoulders.
7
Is it now racist to point out that most of the Muslim world is being left behind? It is mainly their own undoing as well.
Perhaps you subscribe to the mindless idea that all cultures and moralities are equal?
13
No, I do not. I'm an atheist and certainly not a radical relativist. I used to like Dawkins (read two of his books, including The God Delusion) and overall I think New Athesism has been a force of good.
But what Dawkins (and to a worse extent, Sam Harris) have degenerated into is a kind of intellectual version of the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution - they've put such a huge premium on being extreme and pure and breaking from the old guard they're now just engaging in random and pointless intellectual bloodshed.
Dawkins Twitter rants about Islam don't have to specifically bash Arabs (the majority of British Muslims) for any thinking person to see that's the subject of his animus. My drunk uncle who goes on rants about "Hip Hop" and how "hip hop culture is ruining this country" and how "Hip Hop fans are lazy punks" never specifically targets blacks, but one doesn't need to be a rabid post-modernist to see the subtext of what he's saying. If Dawkins wants to have a conversation about the toxic effects of superstition and religion on intellectual progress, great. But maybe he can find a better way than dismissing the entirety of 1.3 billion people by holding up a Western award as the end-all-be-all of science and knowledge. It's patronizing, it's myopic, and yes, it's animated by - or at the least playing to - racism.
But that's actually the least of my issues. That he never qualifies or provides historical context is what pisses me off the most- which is why my main charge against Dawkins isn't even that he's racist, or bigoted, its that he's intellectual shallow (a common antecedent to racism). He's a great biologist, but his knowledge of history is superficial and selective and based on serving a narrow agenda, not enlightening anyone or having an honest conversation. This is due largely to what I perceive as a cult of personality he's developed in the Atheist community and a corollary inability to perceive how fucking tedious he is, even to those most secular among us.
2
I've learned that you think that
1. The Nobel prizes are "westernized" and therefore unfair/racist (which is ridiculous).
2. You don't like it when atheists have strong opinions about non-atheists because I guess they aren't allowed.
I mean, you want a deep discussion. Okay. But it's twitter. 140 characters or less.
35
Great example of the logical and intellectual capabilities of the average atheist. Atheists are God's way of trolling us.
3
No
9
Funny how the evangelists come to save us from our unreason, are as unreasonable as the evangelists come to save us from our sins are sinful.
is english your third language?
10
You religious lunatics have trolled the rest of us for 10,000 years so I think we're entitled to a little payback.
