I think he hosted Family Feud too. :O)
Posted on 12/09/2006 9:33:18 AM PST by aculeus
In the downstairs loo of Richard Dawkins’s house in Oxford there’s a framed award from the Royal Society; to remind visitors, or maybe Richard himself, that here lives a man of some purpose, some gravitas and intellectual clout. ... he holds the Simonyi chair in the public understanding of science at Oxford University.
... He is probably more famous these days for kicking God around than for the hard science of his earlier work (a fact he accepts, with some misgivings); he is our most belligerent and brilliant atheist. Show him a deity — Jehovah, Allah, Sat Guru, whoever — and he will stand up straight and nut it right between the eyes. ...
His latest book does all this and more. It is the (surprise) publishing success of the year and easily outsells those awful football autobiographies (170,660 so far). It is a book of rhetoric rather than science. The God Delusion is, like all the best books, riven with beguiling contradictions, full of interesting holes into which one can clamber and find oneself instantly transported to an alternative universe. It is Dawkins’s broadside against God and those who are stupid enough to believe in him, or her, or it. A book against belief written with the fervour of one who believes utterly in non-belief. ...
A book that, for a disinterested non-believer, shows a simple and touching faith in the scientific creed of Darwinism — which theory, only 147 years after its inception, is already looking rather flawed and careworn.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.co.uk ...
***some gravitas and intellectual clout***
And like the scarecrow all he needed was a diploma!
And then.....
There's the OBJECT or ENTITY or PHILOSOPHY that is at the center of one's faith...
Either or all of which remain open to scrutiny, examination, critical thinking, and the bringing of independent conclusions that may may or may NOT align with the holder/proclaimer of the faith....
Dawkins is all talk... and angry/militant rhetoric...
He is an atheistic jihadi... all emotion and shrill but faulty arguments...
His buddy Anthony Flew has renounceed militant atheism in favor intellectual honesty -- the pathways of the EVIDENCE... that a Creative Consciousness -- a Designer -- had to be involved... in the complexity of giving life to the elements...
Flew had not made a commitment to believe in (a) God... but he has abandoned Darwinism -- and the mechanics of abiogenesis as satisfactory explanations...
He followed the EVIDENCE -- and was honest enough to say so....
Dawkins.... as a quintessential (Oxford) know-it-all... Methinks is not at all teachable...
Let's wait and see what he believes when he is on his deathbed.
Richard Dawkins was in Hogan's Heroes? I thought he was the basketball player known as Chocolate Thunder.
Not to mention his post-deathbed.
Blessings
Here's your hero.
I think he played football for Army years ago -- or was that his brother Pete?
And is being slamed, even by left-wing liberal atheists.
It is a ridiculously bad book...illogical, and full of strawmen.
NOTE: There are NO dead atheists!
I think he hosted Family Feud too. :O)
The Earth has been around about 4 billion years. In those 4 billion years we've evolved to become human, developed self awareness, rational thought that considers downrange consequences, language, and good grief, the iPod.
In that time we've seen people who purport to be prophets of a deity. Many may have been crazy, but some were almost certainly not. Even from a range of 2,000 or more years, and based on limited, carefully culled data, their ideas are at the very least unversal truths. Which truths may have been revealed by a deity.
*This* universe has been around about 14 billion years. There may have been or be others, we don't (yet) know. If humans can come to be what we are in 4 billion years, what might be out there from 14 billion or more?
So when a Dawkins or a Sagan tells me there is no God, I just think "What an arrogant, know-it-all jerk." Life is more complex than we'll ever know, maybe even after we die. It is the height of conceit to be a militant atheist.
"..Isn’t that the point, I suggest. That with one set of values removed, another will always fill its place? That if you remove religion, there is a gap which will always be filled — and usually by something worse than belief in a deity? Are we ever worse than when we feel ourselves to be unconstrained masters of our domain, answerable to nobody but ourselves?
‘I agree with you that I have not sufficiently explained that. This gap, this absence — it could be a psychological weakness of the human mind. I did have one chapter at the end, but I think I didn’t do it justice, from your point of view. If I were to, then I wouldn’t have any trouble filling it — it might be science, it might be human love. Relationships, something like that.’.."
I do not believe the rule of law or of logic or science would ever be enough to most deeply motivate human behavior or allow us to exist and deal with our own mortality.
"The term "meme" (IPA: /miːm/, not /mɛm/ or /mimi/, to rhyme with "theme"), coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another.
Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion — analogous in many ways to the behavior of the gene (the unit of genetic information). Often memes propagate as more-or-less integrated cooperative sets or groups, referred to as memeplexes or meme-complexes.
The idea of memes has proved a successful meme in its own right, achieving a degree of penetration into popular culture rare for a scientific theory.
Proponents of memes suggest that memes evolve via natural selection — in a way very similar to Charles Darwin's ideas concerning biological evolution — on the premise that variation, mutation, competition, and "inheritance" influence their replicative success. For example, while one idea may become extinct, other ideas will survive, spread and mutate — for better or for worse — through modification.
Meme-theorists contend that memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes which replicate the most effectively spread best; which allows for the possibility that successful memes might prove detrimental to their hosts."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
Also, for additional info on Dawkins, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
Wow! Dawkins a semiologist. He might be the last living specimen.
But at least he found his Mrs. Garrison.
I think that the Hogan's Heros actor was Richard Dawson.
"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools ..."
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