Richard Dawson
Posted on 08/24/2009 1:41:52 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ignorami) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin.
Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it.
If my fantasy of the Latin teacher seems too wayward, here’s a more realistic example. Imagine you are a teacher of more recent history, and your lessons on 20th-century Europe are boycotted, heckled or otherwise disrupted by well-organised, well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers.
(Excerpt) Read more at entertainment.timesonline.co.uk ...
Richard’s arguments grow more hysterical as he gets closer to death.
I loved Richard Dawkins in Hogan’s Heroes. On Family Feud, he mostly just creeped me out.
Dicky’s grasping at straws.
It’s a shame that an otherwise respectable newspaper will print this fanatic’s drivel.
Even if you are an atheist Dawkins regularly goes beyond any discussion of religion and wants to turn it all into a culture war.
Richard Dawson
Andrew Sibley at the website : Uncommon Descent, after reading Dawkin’s article, comments :
“I am sure Richard Dawkins is aware that Holocaust denial is illegal in some countries; perhaps it is his aim to make evolution denial illegal in those countries where there is a resistance to Darwinism. ‘If evolution cannot win in the market place of scientific ideas, then we’ll sure win in the courts once it is a mandated belief’ would appear to be the direction of his rhetoric. What is Dawkins afraid of? Can’t evolution hold its own in the science arena?
Next Dawkins thinks he ought to tell the Vicars and Bishops how to preach. He notes of course that all the leading clerics accept evolution, as if the authority of theologians will establish a truth in science.
But what of Dawkins’ scientific smoke and mirrors?
Nowhere in this article does he seek to qualify what he means by evolution. Evolution is a fact he asserts, a statement that even Henry Morris would have agreed with in part, but what type of evolution is ‘fact’? Natural selection of pre existing genetic information does not explain causally where that genetic information came from. Dawkins peddles the simplification that the process that gave a dalmatian spots is the same process that turns a bacterium into an ostrich, or a fish into a hippo. But Dawkins knows that neo-Darwinism is more complicated than that. The problem for Dawkins is that belief in evolution is dependant upon such over simplifications, because if people really understood the complexity of organic life and what is being claimed then they would not accept unguided molecule to man evolution. In other words evolution is rejected because people understand it too well, not too poorly, and Dawkins has to keep to the simple text to keep the illusion going.
So we may ask – why cannot Dawkins and others conduct the discussion of origins in a more rational manner without the type of smoke and mirrors and fear-mongering rhetoric that is being engaged in with his article? What is at stake really? Is it science or is it his atheism?”
He sounds disgusted with ALL religions (is there any faith that exists with a belief in a God that believes that God had nothing to do with “creation”)? So why does he single out all of his venom over Christianity?
Why does he set up straw man arguments?
Why does his own supremacist theology in the no-god god (he doesn’t just hold this worldview for himself, he wants everyone onboard HIS faith) trump a universal right to religious belief?
bkmk
The ones the Darwinists and evolutionists have not aborted presumably.
Frankly, an atheist Darwinist complaining about people "coming after children"
is ridiculous and absurd in an extreme degree considering their track record here.
“Imagine that...”
Imagine that Dawkins were an ass. Then he would be an ass, QED.
What an ass.
Unlike homosexuals, who just want to be left alone, right? /sarc
Was it an Alinsky ys’’v rule to accuse your political opponents of the sins you commit?
Richard Dawson with his former wife, Diana Dors. Yow!
Dawkins is the ignoramus. Jesus had many Roman followers, and St. Paul was a Roman himself.
This atheist is not very bright.
Are Muslims creationists? Somehow I doubt this will apply to them.
"Who loves you and who do you love?"
For a supposedly intelligent man he really is a wanker!
Mel
Who kept all of that great Latin history around for 2000 years? Oh that’s right, the monastic schools and later the christian Universities.
For every Galileo, there is an Isaac Newton, a Georges Lamaitre, and a Michael Faraday. Christianity has produced giants in the hard sciences. Too bad, just imagine what they could have accomplished if they hadn’t been Christians, right Dawkins?
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