Dawkins has always intensely rubbed me the wrong way — long before the “Claudia” incident, and long before his transphobia came oozing out.
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@inthehands I'm glad the New Atheism bunch doesn't have the same influence as they did. They always were just mean people. Even when they had a good point, it was always done in a way to hurt people for no good reason.
It always felt like their priority was to •win•. Win what? Who knows. But they expected a prize.
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The latest “Claudia” story bears that out in two ways:
(1) Believing that he is in possession of some cosmic absolute truth about the underlying nature of reality, life, and consciousness, a truth it is his duty to tell other people they are wrong about.
(2) Arrogantly believing his own pareidolia to be evidence of a magical intelligence outside himself, one that he can •own• and that exists for his benefit.
(That latter one is especially rich from a person who wrote a book whose title broadly accused multiple billions of people of being delusional.)
2/3
@inthehands Good points. He’s always rubbed me the wrong way as well, but the latest nonsense has forced me to think about why. Your take runs parallel to mine — he lacks self-awareness about the flaws in his thinking and his inherent biases and blind spots. What really galls me is that he has been a biologist all his life and yet fails to understand that humans are material beings enmeshed in the living world, not clockmaker Gods creating new life out of clever software.
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I find the whole theism vs atheism fight somewhere between uninteresting and aggressively uninteresting, and Dawkins has always been like nails on a chalkboard for me. I care less about what people •say• they believe than I do about how people actually •inhabit• this world, how they treat it and themselves and each other. I’m quite comfortable with both theism and atheism, but arrogant certitude really gets my hackles up. There’s just too much we don’t and can’t know for us to let our human heads get that big.
3/3
@inthehands Anyone on a soapbox is not worth a minute of my time. If someone is honest, treats people with dignity and compassion, and makes an effort to improve, they are worth knowing.
I know little of Dawkins other than this recent rise to momentary meme fame. Opportunists riding on the shirttails of truly, inhumanely, evil people are just as bad. He seems to have felt unimportant and this was his last volley to glory.
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@inthehands the "theism v. atheism" fight also typically ends up being ... not at all what that description would imply.
Usually the 'theism' side is just christians, or just the abrahamic religions - which is a rather limited subset of 'theisms',
and the 'atheism' side is almost always ... white men who spend too much time on reddit, and also really hate muslims in particular for clearly-racist reasons they try to deny as rational and logical.
Both making bad arguments at each other.@miss_rodent @inthehands DAMN that is a great summary. No notes.
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The latest “Claudia” story bears that out in two ways:
(1) Believing that he is in possession of some cosmic absolute truth about the underlying nature of reality, life, and consciousness, a truth it is his duty to tell other people they are wrong about.
(2) Arrogantly believing his own pareidolia to be evidence of a magical intelligence outside himself, one that he can •own• and that exists for his benefit.
(That latter one is especially rich from a person who wrote a book whose title broadly accused multiple billions of people of being delusional.)
2/3
@inthehands
Thing is, the “Claudia” conceit could be the basis for a pretty good riff on LLMs. The problem of consciousness, selfhood and all that. -
I find the whole theism vs atheism fight somewhere between uninteresting and aggressively uninteresting, and Dawkins has always been like nails on a chalkboard for me. I care less about what people •say• they believe than I do about how people actually •inhabit• this world, how they treat it and themselves and each other. I’m quite comfortable with both theism and atheism, but arrogant certitude really gets my hackles up. There’s just too much we don’t and can’t know for us to let our human heads get that big.
3/3
@inthehands for me it's like a fight over which is better: bicycles or bread.
guys, those things are not the same, and the fact that you are fighting over them only tells me what sort of cyclist or breadmaker you are. -
I find the whole theism vs atheism fight somewhere between uninteresting and aggressively uninteresting, and Dawkins has always been like nails on a chalkboard for me. I care less about what people •say• they believe than I do about how people actually •inhabit• this world, how they treat it and themselves and each other. I’m quite comfortable with both theism and atheism, but arrogant certitude really gets my hackles up. There’s just too much we don’t and can’t know for us to let our human heads get that big.
3/3
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RE: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116525367498270786
Dawkins has always intensely rubbed me the wrong way — long before the “Claudia” incident, and long before his transphobia came oozing out. I’ve always said of him that he rejected the dogma of right-wing fundamentalist religion but never its broken patterns of thought. I stand by that doubly now.
1/3
@inthehands I didn't know Dawkins had transphobia. I thought atheists didn't usually act that way.
Such a phobia has no positive meaning.
Guess my fellow Christians aren't the only asses when it comes to that kind of thinking.
Hopefully this world changes for the better...
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@inthehands I didn't know Dawkins had transphobia. I thought atheists didn't usually act that way.
Such a phobia has no positive meaning.
Guess my fellow Christians aren't the only asses when it comes to that kind of thinking.
Hopefully this world changes for the better...
@skedarwarrior @inthehands There are lots and lots of self-identified atheists that are assholes, just as there are lots and lots of self-identified Christians that are assholes.
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@inthehands Both categories have a lot more depth than the shallow bad-faith rage-baiting it's been reduced to.
zealotry is the real mind killer, and there are zealots from all sorts of angles
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@inthehands I didn't know Dawkins had transphobia. I thought atheists didn't usually act that way.
Such a phobia has no positive meaning.
Guess my fellow Christians aren't the only asses when it comes to that kind of thinking.
Hopefully this world changes for the better...
@skedarwarrior @inthehands atheism isn't a positive set of things, just an absence of one. So every kind of person falls under that banner.
Including absolute dickbags.Sadly the spread of transphobia in the UK over the past couple of decades has swept up some people who absolutely should know better. But tbh I think Dawkins likes hating people.
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@inthehands
I mean, I went through an 'I am a loud atheist' phase, when I decided I wasn't going to go to seminary and therefore all religious people were rubes....but also I was 20? Now I just vaguely dodge the question, since it... isn't a question I get asked much and I am just certain I don't have a flame of belief.The whole aggressively someone who believes differently than I in unknowable is insufferable from either side, I find
there are good religious people
there are good atheists
and then there's a pit of snarling zealots, religious and atheist
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RE: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116525367498270786
Dawkins has always intensely rubbed me the wrong way — long before the “Claudia” incident, and long before his transphobia came oozing out. I’ve always said of him that he rejected the dogma of right-wing fundamentalist religion but never its broken patterns of thought. I stand by that doubly now.
1/3
@inthehands I blame South Park. Dawkins would have far less eyeballs on him for as long as he's had without Trey Parker's help.
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@passenger @inthehands I knew he was an obviously unmitigated PoS, but I had not the faintest conception he would prove so much of a dupe. I’m still reeling a little.
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@passenger @cwicseolfor
Oh, his turn is definitely coming -
The latest “Claudia” story bears that out in two ways:
(1) Believing that he is in possession of some cosmic absolute truth about the underlying nature of reality, life, and consciousness, a truth it is his duty to tell other people they are wrong about.
(2) Arrogantly believing his own pareidolia to be evidence of a magical intelligence outside himself, one that he can •own• and that exists for his benefit.
(That latter one is especially rich from a person who wrote a book whose title broadly accused multiple billions of people of being delusional.)
2/3
@inthehands
His "Claudia" thing was about the nature of consciousness, rather than a belief that it was sentient. Despite the identical outputs from "Claudia" and humans, we have consciousness, and he was writing about what might make the difference between us and it.Yes, to my dismay he's turned out to be a pompous transphobe, but he's not completely lost the plot.
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It always felt like their priority was to •win•. Win what? Who knows. But they expected a prize.
@inthehands @wwahammy Haha, so this made me think: maybe this is like their pursuit of enlightenment, except rather than looking inward, those chasing intellectual superiority look outward for ‘wins’ over others so they never actually arrive anywhere
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RE: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116525367498270786
Dawkins has always intensely rubbed me the wrong way — long before the “Claudia” incident, and long before his transphobia came oozing out. I’ve always said of him that he rejected the dogma of right-wing fundamentalist religion but never its broken patterns of thought. I stand by that doubly now.
1/3
@inthehands “[Dawkins] rejected the dogma of right-wing fundamentalist religion but never its broken patterns of thought” is an extremely elegant way of framing it, thank you.
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I find the whole theism vs atheism fight somewhere between uninteresting and aggressively uninteresting, and Dawkins has always been like nails on a chalkboard for me. I care less about what people •say• they believe than I do about how people actually •inhabit• this world, how they treat it and themselves and each other. I’m quite comfortable with both theism and atheism, but arrogant certitude really gets my hackles up. There’s just too much we don’t and can’t know for us to let our human heads get that big.
3/3
@inthehands NGL, but "the white, British, Oxford Professor who was born in Kenya and who's best known work is a book finding rationalisations for altruism as a biological trait in Evolution" ending like this is not really so much of a surprise. Pretty stacked there to be a racist, chauvinist, classist motherfucker.
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@AvonVilla @inthehands You can never be 100% certain without proof.
Luckily for the average atheist the standard isn't that high. I don't _have_ to prove a negative, in fact it's impossible.
We've been banging on about this in very specific ways for millennia and so far I'm not seeing any evidence, thus comfortably consider the hypothesis not proven.
The thing with him is that he was loudly and agressively certain, and a dick about it, which made him the annoying kind of religious person.
