About bloody time too. Anyway, welcome news. Let's hope it starts a trend towards at least a tiny bit of sanity and decency.

Richard

G K Chesterton (a leading Catholic) said "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything." I've always thought it rather a silly remark, sounding very quotable but unsubstantiated. I am rather discouraged by Quetzalcoatlus into thinking perhaps it wasn't all that silly after all. If the evidence is valid, it seems to suggest that people have given up religion for the wrong reasons.If you give up religion for rational reasons, exactly the same reasons should lead you to disbelieve homeopathy etc.

I was once honoured by CSICOP, the 'skeptical' organisations founded by Paul Kurtz, and I was scolded after my acceptance speech for saying that they should go after religion for exactly the same reasons as they go after homeopathy, crystal healing etc. I think the reason for my scolding was that some leading members of the 'skeptical' community, and, perhaps more significantly, donors, were devoted to religion: therefore, in my view, not real sceptics at all.

Richard

I'm quite encouraged by the comments on the original Pakistan site. Lots of sensible comments. And the dopey ones are (rather surprisingly given that the film shown seems to have been Root of All Evil?) almost all about the ubiquitous misunderstanding of evolution as a theory of pure chance.

Richard

Muslim extremists have called for Aan to be beheaded but fellow atheists have rallied round, and urged him to stand by his convictions despite the pressure.

For one sadly short moment I thought the 'but' was going to be followed by 'moderate Muslims have rallied round . . ."

Once again, where are the decent, moderate Muslims? Why do they not stand up in outrage against their co-religionists? Maybe Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right and "moderate Muslim" is something close to an oxymoron.

How can they not see that, if you need to kill to protect your faith, that is a powerful indication that you have lost the argument? It is impossible to exaggerate how deeply I despise them.

Richard

I'd be very interested to know how, for instance, he knows about Mr Gooodwin's character and behaviour.

There's a tiny little clue in my very frequent references to Nick Cohen's book throughout my article, and in the fact that I cited it in that very sentence. Please read it.

Richard

Amphipods (Gammarus and its relatives) and Isopods (woodlice and their relatives) are the twin great groups of small crustaceans. Isopods are mostly flattened dorsoventrally (the same direction as skates and rays). Amphipods are similar but flattened laterally (the same direction as ordinary fish like herrings). I have been fascinated by giant isopods, which look like huge marine woodlice. One might almost have predicted that the deep seas would also yield giant amphipods. So it is very exciting to read of this discovery from the Kermadec trench. Yet another example of the semi-predictable beauties of evolution. Forgive me for remarking that there are better ways of looking at newly discovered animals than gastronomic jokes.

Richard

I don't think this is a matter for levity. Think of it as a foretaste of more serious things to come. They've already hounded Ayaan Hirsi Ali out of Holland and their confidence is growing with their population numbers, encouraged by the craven accommodationist mentality of nice, decent Europeans. This particular move to outlaw dogs will fail, but Muslim numbers will continue to grow unless we can somehow break the memetic link between generations: break the assumption that children automatically adopt the religion of their parents.

The fact that Romney is a member of an organization that was openly racist well into Romney's adult life....oooh it must be so frustrating to not be able mention this when Mitt is going after YOUR character.

Indeed it must. I hope the taboo is broken by the time he comes up against Obama

Richard

I have real problems coming to terms with the strict American taboo against noticing somebody's religion when you consider voting for him. I can readily understand the importance of the separation of church and state as far as government policy is concerned, and I respect J F Kennedy for upholding the founding tradition and drawing that hard and fast line. But when you vote for somebody, how can you not be influenced by what you know of his beliefs?

No matter what a candidate may say in public about contemporary policies, can you really take him seriously if you know that, privately, he is a credulous fool who seriously believes Joseph Smith, a convicted fraud, translated golden tablets and then lost them? Translated them, moreover, into seventeenth century English although he lived in the nineteenth century, writing a narrative that is palpably made up. He believes that the Garden of Even was in Missouri, that Jesus visited America, that Native Americans, contrary to all archeological and scientific evidence, are the lost ten tribes of Israel and that black people are descendants of Ham and therefore cursed.

How can you persuade yourself that a man's palpably idiotic beliefs are 'private' and therefore irrelevant to whether you want to vote for him? Why would you trust a gullible fool to run the most important country on Earth? And why shouldn't you make use of what is publicly known about his private beliefs, in order to decide whether or not he is a gullible fool.

Richard

The Reverend George Pitcher’s article in the infamous Daily Mail is one of the most glaring examples of Lying for Jesus I have ever seen, a contemptible example of taking advantage of a dead man who cannot put the record straight himself.

Just before he died, Christopher Hitchens expressed some generous sympathy for the Christian worldview, much to the evident frustration of his interlocutor Richard Dawkins.

Well, it is true that I was his interlocuter in his very last interview, for the Christmas issue of New Statesman, which I edited, and I can state with total certainty that he expressed no sympathy whatsoever, generous or otherwise, for the Christian worldview. So that is a lie, and so is the “evident frustration of his interlocutor Richard Dawkins.”

Since Pitcher’s article is about my ‘shrill’ atheism, let’s look at what Christopher actually said relating to that subject. Here’s an extract from the transcript as published on the New Statesman website

Never be afraid of stridency

Richard Dawkins One of my main beefs with religion is the way they label children as a "Catholic child" or a "Muslim child". I've become a bit of a bore about it.
Christopher Hitchens You must never be afraid of that charge, any more than stridency.
RD I will remember that.
CH If I was strident, it doesn't matter - I was a jobbing hack, I bang my drum. You have a discipline in which you are very distinguished. You've educated a lot of people; nobody denies that, not even your worst enemies. You see your discipline being attacked and defamed and attempts made to drive it out. Stridency is the least you should muster . . . It's the shame of your colleagues that they don't form ranks and say, "Listen, we're going to defend our colleagues from these appalling and obfuscating elements."

Here’s the most generously sympathetic thing I can find in the transcript of what Hitch said about Christianity:

CH The way I put it is this: if you're writing about the history of the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism, you can take out the word "fascist", if you want, for Italy, Portugal, Spain, Czechoslovakia and Austria and replace it with "extreme-right Catholic party". Almost all of those regimes were in place with the help of the Vatican and with understandings from the Holy See. It's not denied. These understandings quite often persisted after the Second World War was over and extended to comparable regimes in Argentina and elsewhere.

How could Pitcher even begin to think he could get away with such shameless mendacity? Oh, how silly of me, I forgot, he was writing for the Daily Mail. But, having said that, it is encouraging to look at the comments on the Daily Mail website. A clear majority are strongly against Pitcher.

Richard

Brilliantly intelligent and well-informed speech by Sean, delivered with his usual eloquence. Nice slides too.

Richard

I agree with other commenters. Unless I've misunderstood something, this is a preposterous piece of student bossiness. You can't invite a speaker to support abortion unless you invite a dopey Catholic as well? Still, it's amusing that Cristina Odone seems to have overlooked that it cuts both ways: amusing that she leapt to the paranoid conclusion that this is an anti-Catholic measure, when actually it's an anti free speech measure, typical of bossy student politicians. (Again, unless I'm mistaken, this is the same student union that tried to ban a Jesus and Mo cartoon.)

Richard

Comment 6 by Chomolungma :

Is it reasonable to assume that because something shows itself more in older children than younger ones it must be learned and not innate? Perhaps it's an innate tendency that takes time to develop.

True. In any case, the alleged observation is not statistically significant, so we shouldn't be talking about it as though it was something that needs explaining.

Richard

The method is interesting., and it would be good to see a review article gathering together all studies of this kind. However, this particular study seems to me rather too slight and inconclusive, on its own, to be worth singling out for attention. And the alleged age difference is not statistically significant, so let's not get too worked up trying to explain it.

Richard

"Evil little thing" simply because she stood up for the Constitution, and WON HER CASE in the court of a Federal Judge. If she is an evil little thing, isn't the judge then an evil big thing? Instead of bullying her, why don't they bully the judge who upheld her protest and ruled that the prayer was unconstitutional?

Richard

Coincidentally, on the same day Jerry Coyne has this on the poor science coverage of the BBC news departments: Does the BBC have a science problem?

Richard

Very frightening when three people with the potential to be the leader of the United States will use a mythological figure to guide their decisions.

Yes, that is the worst aspect. Closely followed by ignorance of the constitution.

Richard

Contrary to the experience of Jeremy in South Africa, lower court judges in most states are chosen by voters

Well, obviously, if judges are chosen by VOTERS, all bets are off, and you might as well have a jury. I naturally assumed that judges were chosen for their qualifications and suitability for the job.

Comment 5 by SerenaP :

WRT the lady who asked if it was Richard's conscious decision to use simpler and simpler language over the years, and Richard replying that each was addressed to a different audience.

I'd like it if Richard writes books for an audience that has read The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. I consider The God Delusion "light reading"... something to read for a quick laugh, but essentially, I did not come across much that I had not figured out already for myself. (The Smolin bits were entirely new to me.)

I was genuinely surprised by the observation of the woman in the audience, apparenty endorsed by Serena here. I had truly thought that, with the exception of The Extended Phenotype (for professional biologists) and The Magic of Reality (for children), all my books, including The Selfish Gene, were aimed at the same audience as each other: intelligent non-specialist adults.

Shows how much I know!

Richard

I'm intrigued by the beautiful cloud shapes, because they include pretty much the same kinds of shapes as we see with the naked eye, yet the shapes in this photograph are presumably much larger. For instance, some of the clouds over the Gulf of Mexico look pretty much like our familiar, cirrocumulus 'mackerel sky', yet each 'scale' of the 'mackerel' in the picture must be many miles across, surely much larger than the ones we see from the ground? Or look at the long, wispy cloud to the south west of Baja California. It would not be surprising to look up from the ground and see a cloud looking just like that, a cirrus cloud complete with the same kind of wispy side tails. Yet the cloud in the photograph is about as long as the Baja Calfornia peninsula itself, that is more than 700 miles long.

Is this a fractal phenomenon, or am I talking through my hat (which I unfortunately lost in Sri Lanka this week)?

Richard

Comment 1 by Rattlesnake :

Very interesting; having just come out of giving a class to a judge.

I'm curious. What sort of classes do judges take, and how did you come to be giving one?

Richard

Comment 12 by Richard Dawkins :

What really offends me is the position of the apostrophe in the title! I'm hoping a moderator will correct it soon.

Richard

Apostrophe now corrected, thank you Moderator.

I don't know why they call me vociferous. Several Indian writers deserve that credit much more than I do.

Richard.

What really offends me is the position of the apostrophe in the title! I'm hoping a moderator will correct it soon.

Richard

This horrible film deserves to go viral. What a pathetic religion: how ignominious to need such aggressively crazed defenders.

Richard

“We object to the idea that you would sacrifice some members of the human race, even at the earliest stage of development, for the potential treatment of other members of the human race,” said David Prentice, a cell biologist at the Family Research Council.

Here we see the enemy in plain view. The religious mind. Here we have a qualified cell biologist deprived, through religious education, of the capacity to think straight. A warped mind, a mind destroyed by religious indoctrination, a mind rendered idiotic by a religious upbringing. Those 'members of the human race' in question consist of a few CELLS, and are devoid of any semblance of a brain that could suffer pain or feel fear. The people whose sight might be saved are adult, sentient, feeling beings, suffering blindness, blessed by the possibilities of science to lighten their darkness. As Stephen Spender (I think: can't find the poem) put it, "Religion stands, the church blotting out the sun."

Richard

The story that the Rajasthan police made up the whole thing to keep Sir Salman away is, if true, an utter disgrace. What I don't understand is their motive. The original story that Muslim leaders (presumably 'scholars'?) tried to get the Indian government to deny Rushdie a visa probably is true, as is his retort that he doesn't need a visa because he was born in India. What seems to be untrue is the police allegation that hit men were being dispatched from Bombay. I shall be arriving in Jaipur later today, and hope to hear more of the inside story. Rushdie's own tweets (referenced by other commenters above) are worth following. He seems to be suggesting that those Indian writers who have been reading from his works in solidarity are now threatened with arrest, presumably by the same Rajasthan police who invented the lies that successfully led to his visit's being cancelled in the first place.

Richard

Comment 12 by KAhmed :

Oh please. Another cheap publicity stunt by Rushdie to drum-up the haunting spectre of Khomeini's 1989 death edict against him. You sell enough books, Rushdie. You don't have to be a tactless grumpy old man taking a "blast from the past" to boost your sales. No one is going to kill you.

I don't know who you are KAhmed but I don't like you. How dare you make such an accusation? Are you seriously suggesting that this is a publicity stunt, given that Sir Salman has lived much of his life under the looming threat of what actually happened to at least two of his translators, and what actually happened to Theo van Gogh? How dare you?

Richard

Even after attending the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford for a college trip it still didn't shake his belief that Dinosaurs ever existed

So what did he think that they were?

Yes, I'd like to know the answer to that. Leviathan? Dragons?

What this really shows us is the astonishing power of childhood indoctrination. It seems to be possible, even common, for a mind to be so warped by indoctrination that it bets on authority over evidence. This fact is incomprensible to many of us, yet it explains much.

Richard

PS Actually, there aren't any dinosaurs in the Pitt Rivers. The museum you visited was probably the University Museum of Natural History. The Pitt Rivers is an anthropological museum at the back of the University Museum noted for its shrunken heads and unusual layout. Both museums are very nice to visit.

Here is the top comment on the Washington Post version of this article, which says encouraging things about people who post on this site, encouraging some of our regulars to write articles there!

Richard

AllanPratt 3:21 PM GMT+0530

This is a sublime piece written by a correspondent who is building a impressive track record of spinetinglingly lucid atricles. There is not one jot of obsfucation here, merely a clearly argued essay that should confront any believer to respond directly, even if only to themselves, to the concrete points she makes, rather than resort to smoky irrelevancies.

I note that Paula Kirby posts frequently on Richard Dawkins.net too and wonder if it were her efforts there that brought her to the attention of the Post. If so, consider giving some space to two other of Dawkins' correspondents who also regularly produce suberbly written and insightful thoughts: 'Cartomancer' and Steve Zara. I reckon they would be worth a gig in the Big Time.

We are constantly told to respect the individuals while criticising their beliefs.

I find it hard to respect the individual men who treat women like this, both Jewish men and Muslim men. In fact, why dissemble? I don't respect them, I despise them, utterly and completely. The world would be a better place if they were not in it.

Richard