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feen5 Don't tread on any mines Joined: 09 Feb 2004 Total posts: 1581 Age: 40 Gender: Male |
 Posted: 12-09-2013 14:54 Post subject: |
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Fair Enough Pietro, i still think he has a right to say it. He had an experiance, he got over it, and he made a general statement about it.
This is certainly not in the same league as pedophilia, but would you say that i would have no right to make a general statment on being attacked by a couple of drunks on the street because its a personal experiance?
Also if he had discussed this with fellow pupils (and you could probably be safe in the assumption that all the boys in the class would have talked about it), does this also not allow him some excuse in making a general assumption. |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 12-09-2013 14:57 Post subject: |
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Perhaps, you are making too many assumptions?
Personally, I tend to be suspicious of general statements based on personal experiences. |
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| feen5 Don't tread on any mines Joined: 09 Feb 2004 Total posts: 1581 Age: 40 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 12-09-2013 15:19 Post subject: |
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Maybe i am, but i also think that sometimes Dawkins gets a harder time than most because of who he and how he acts rather than the message he's putting across (though he does have himself to blame for that as well  )
If i can just add this though, when i was in primary school (a long time ago now) there was a teacher (A Christian Brother) who was well known amoungst the boys for carrying out various 'minor' acts of pedophilia (rubbing his erect penis on boys backs, hands down the pants etc etc).
He was regular topic of conversation back then and is still mentioned now and then when a few of us are out for pints. While nothing happened to me as i was lucky enough to have a different teacher in that year, a good friend of mine was in his class. It hasn't affected their lives by their own admission.
If they had made this statement to a paper or in a discussion on TV instead of Dawkins would you say that shouldn't be allowed to make a general statement about it? |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
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| Posted: 12-09-2013 15:35 Post subject: |
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You're not the first person to have mentioned the Christian Brothers in connection with allegations of abuse, of one sort, or another. I'd say that such abuse will affect some people quite differently to others. But, what it does indicate, as far as the perpetrator is concerned, is a serious abuse of power and a real betrayal of trust.
However, in Dawkins' case, such generalizations based on personal anecdotal evidence, are both very subjective and basically unscientific. I would hesitate to suggest that Dawkins' possible experiences of abuse in childhood might have had a formative effect on his rather chilly clinical and mechanical views on life and humanity as a grown up scientist. |
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| feen5 Don't tread on any mines Joined: 09 Feb 2004 Total posts: 1581 Age: 40 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 12-09-2013 16:23 Post subject: |
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| I wouldn't disagree with anything you say, i guess i'm just saying that i think Dawkins is perhaps getting hammered a little more about this than if others had brought it up. |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
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| Posted: 12-09-2013 16:35 Post subject: |
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Well, he did put himself out there and he did say it...  |
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| Gwenar Yeti Joined: 14 Nov 2012 Total posts: 49 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 12-09-2013 18:10 Post subject: |
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I think Dawkins is an ass, but I appreciate him being an ass so I don't have to be. It used to be really hard to say that you weren't a Christian because the implication was that you were immoral - afterall, fear of hell is the only thing that keeps us in line, right? 
He's not the best of all atheists, but he's loud and proud.
I feel the same way about Gloria Steinem. I really appreciated her saying outlandish things, along with her truths, so she could be the biggest target in the line of fire. She had to be noticeable to be heard over the "get back in the kitchen" zeitgeist. She drew attention to inequalities that were still commonplace in the 70's and it helped us all move forward. |
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| Pietro_Mercurios Heuristically Challenged
Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 16-09-2013 08:12 Post subject: |
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A useful, Guardian, 'digested read' précis, by John Crace, of the first volume of Richard Dawkins new autobiography, 'An Appetite for Wonder':
| Quote: | http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/16/appetite-wonder-richard-dawkins-digested-read
An Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins – digested read
John Crace reduces the autobiography of the God-fearless evolutionary biologist to a more manageable 600 words
The Guardian, John Crace. 16 September 2013
I was christened Clinton Richard Dawkins. By a strange quirk, Charles Darwin also has the initials CRD. I often think how proud he would have been to share them with me. Although, by reductio ad absurdum, everyone must be related to one another if you go back far enough, I propose to start this memoir with my grandfather, Clinton Evelyn, the first Dawkins to go to Balliol College, Oxford. The eulogy I wrote for his funeral still brings tears to my eyes.
My father also went to Balliol. My mother, being of Cornish origin, didn't, though I have often wondered about the evolution of the Cornish dialect. Her father wrote a book, Short Wave Wireless Communication, which was legendary in our family for its incomprehensibility, but I have just read the first two pages and find myself delighted by its lucidity in comparison to my own.
I was born in Nairobi in 1941, my father having been posted to Kenya by the colonial service. By all accounts, I was a sociable child and I have a clear memory of all the friends I made by pointing out the nature of their second-order meta-pretends while we were playing together. I also had a fondness for poetry and have only recently realised that some of the early, rhythmic verses I invented for myself are highly reminiscent of Ezra Pound.
After several peripatetic years, my family returned to England where I was sent to Chafyn Grove, an unremarkable preparatory school, where I frequently pretended to know less than I actually did. This, I now see, was early evidence of my peculiar empathy towards individuals who are much stupider than me. There was, of course, life beyond Chafyn Grove and I spent many happy holidays sorting out my father's collections of coloured bailer twine and serpentine pebble pendants.
My father had intended me to follow him to Marlborough, but his application on my behalf was too late and I was rejected – a sleight from which he never fully recovered, as I explained so movingly in my speech at his funeral. Instead, I went to Oundle boarding school and I shall never forget the shame I felt on my first day as a fag, after ringing the five-minute bell five minutes too late. For my many thousands of American readers, I should point out that fag in this context does not mean homosexual. Of course, some boys did make advances towards me, but I firmly believe there was nothing sexual about that. Likewise, Mr GF Bankerton-Banks whose preferred method of teaching was with his hands in a boy's pockets. No doubt in these more suspicious times, he would have been dismissed as a paedophile.
Some years ago, I was invited to give the inaugural Oundle lecture, in which I playfully invoked the ghost of a long-dead headmaster. I would like to make clear that this was just creative use of poetic imagery and in no way implies a belief in the supernatural. I may have once, shortly after my confirmation, been foolish enough to believe in the possibility of an intelligent designer, but I have long since exposed the pathetic fallacy of that belief.
Having taken up my anointed position at Balliol, I quickly became one of the most remarkable zoologists of my generation, and it was a surprise to find my work on chickens pecking at eggshells and crickets reacting to light sources didn't receive greater international acclaim. Not that Balliol was all work and no play. I did achieve my first sexual congress with a cellist and it was most gratifying to discover how biomechanically efficient my penis was.
I married my first wife Marian in 1967, though that's the last time I propose to mention her. Far more interesting are the two computer languages I invented to determine hierarchical embedment. Who would have guessed that P=2(P+P-P*P)-1?! In the early 1970s, I started work on The Selfish Gene. I had no idea when I was writing the first chapter just how remarkable the book would be, as it had seemed self-evident for more than a decade to me that panglossian theories were erroneous and that natural selection took place at the genetic level. What I hadn't then realised was my remarkable ability to be right about absolutely everything: the consequences of that realisation will follow in a later volume. Though you may be hoping a process of natural literary selection prevents that.
Digested read, digested: Me me meme. |
In light of recent statements from the great man, worth quoting in full. |
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