So it looks like ‘Professional
Atheist’ Richard Dawkins has reverted to the “open mouth and
insert foot” school of communication recently, after one of his
Tweets asserted “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel
Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the
Middle Ages though.”
There are so many things wrong
with that statement – and that train of thought – that I can’t
even begin to get my head around the utter wrongness of it.
First of all, you aren’t comparing like with like, Richard, and as
any half-decent scientist worth their PhD knows, if you’re doing
that sort of experiment then you have to find comparable groups.
Islam is a religion, millions of people strong, which mostly exists
in the poor and deprived countries of the world (although there are
exceptions, such as the large Muslim population of Britain –
although one could argue Britain is getting more and more deprived,
but that’s another story). Trinity College Cambridge is an
academic institution, less advanced in years and numbers, which
mostly exists among rich and middle-class white males (although there
are exceptions, for surely even in the hallowed halls of Trinity there
must be the odd token woman on a scholarship or ethnic minority
student…) No, no, no; if you’re going to use this type of
argument you need to make more of a comparison. You could use
another religion, for example – try claiming “all the world’s
Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than the Jews”, for example, and
see how long you last on the Twitterverse…
Perhaps religion is too
inflammatory, however. Plus, as a Professional Atheist, it probably
isn’t Dawkins’ strong point…ok, so let’s change it to a group
which bears a relatively similar number of people to Islam:
all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than black
people…Yeah, not quite such comfortable reading, is it? Smacks
ever-so-slightly of racism; inverted racism, maybe, since that does
kind of go against the Daily Mail’s sacred belief that anyone who
isn’t white is barely human and literate, but still – it’s
racism just the same. You wouldn’t come out and say it in public,
after all, would you? (Unless of course you read the Daily Mail, in
which case why are you reading my blog? Go away before I set the
Metaphorical Hounds on you!) Hell, you could use any group of people
you like and this is still a stupidly obvious case of Rampant
Islamophobia Disguised As Scientific Genius. Go on, try it. Take
out the Trinity College part and switch it for any other randomly
selected group which takes your fancy. Cyclists. Left-handed
people. People who’ve had laser eye surgery. Women. Hell, you
could even go the whole Twitterverse winning hog and state “all
the world’s Muslims have fewer Noble Prizes than feminists”.
Except then the Daily Mail will revoke your membership, because
“the Muslims” might be hated and feared, but “the Feminists”
are far, far worse…
Secondly, the overall assertion
of this statement borders on the vile. So because only 10 people who
have won a Nobel Prize of some description have been Muslim (take a
bow Peace Prize-winners Anwar al-Sedat of Egypt, Yasser Arafat of
Palestine, Shirin Ebadi of Iran [a woman too, no less…double
whammy]; Mohamed El Baradei of Egypt; Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh;
and Tawakel Karmen of Yemen [another woman…]; Literature Prize
winners Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt and Orhan Pamuk of Turkey; and
Science Prize winners Abdus Salam of Pakistan (physics) and Ahmed
Zewail of Egypt (chemistry), the entire religion is deemed as having
done nothing of note in the world since the Middle Ages – the
inference being that it’s their gosh-darned slavish adherence to
their silly old religion which has held them back in the first place.
I have a huge problem
with this inference. Not just because it smacks of right-wing,
white-man superiority (oh hello, haven’t we been here before…?)
but because its sheer stupidity discredits someone of Dawkins’
intellect. I wasn’t aware the proportion of Nobel Prizes any
particular sub-section of humanity had won was the thing we were
supposed to value most, for one thing; clearly I missed that
memo…But honestly, the man is just so full of hatred and
intolerance towards anyone of a religious belief – especially
Muslims, it seems, since this isn’t the first time he’s hurled
brick-bats in their general direction – it’s like he can’t even
think straight any more. And I say this as someone without a
religious bone in her body! And that’s even leaving aside the fact
two of the above-mentioned Nobel Laureates actually won awards for –
duh! – science! It’s imperialist, jingoistic trash and it makes
me sick to my stomach.
I understand he is a fervent
atheist. Bloody hell, he goes on about it enough; you’d have had
to be living in a small shack on Mars waiting for the Curiosity rover
to find you not to know that Richard Dawkins Is An Atheist. I’m
starting to think he believes he’s THE Atheist, and some of his
rhetoric draws uncomfortable parallels with some of the most
fundamentalist and evangelical religious speakers (of any religion).
But bloody hell, there’s being an atheist and then there’s being
a hate-filled, bigoted, intolerant twat…
His attack on Harry Potter, for
example, was a master stroke of monumental stupidity and arrogance;
children should not read these stories, he raged, because of the
pernicious and corrosive effect they had on children – they were
unscientific and taught kids to believe in magic, spells and wizards.
To Dawkins, this is A Very Bad Thing. It matters not a jot that
said books are works of children’s fiction (apologies to all my
readers who one day dreamed of getting that elusive Owl Post…); oh
no, for they are Against Science and therefore must be banned at all
costs. There was also the ‘charming’ comment he made in December
2012 about the child abuse scandals rocking the Catholic Church:
whilst the abuse was, he said, “horrible”, it was nowhere near as
damaging to the child victims than being raised in the Catholic faith
in the first place because of its mental torment and the
psychological damage the religion caused people.
I’ll repeat that for those of
you not paying attention at the back of the class. According to
Richard Dawkins, it is worse for you to be raised as a Catholic child
than it is for you to be sexually abused.
Oh, and let’s not forget the
statement he made drawing parallels between the Qu’ran and Mein
Kampf – you don’t have to read the Qu’ran to have an opinion
about Islam, just like you don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an
opinion about the Nazis.
Now I’ve read some of Dawkins’
work and, while some of it makes sense to me, an awful lot of it a)
feels like he’s trying to be wordy and clever just to show how
superior he is (his intellect up until this point has never been in
doubt); b) feels like he’s SHOUTING VERY LOUDLY SO YOU AGREE HE’S
RIGHT!!! and c) has the effect of feeling like you’ve been beaten
over the head with something heavy and blunt. Nuance, it seems, is
lost on him, as is moderation and tact.
I get the atheist stance; really
I do. I even sympathise with it a little; I don’t follow any
religion either, although I suppose I could most truthfully be
described as agnostic rather than atheist because the honest,
hand-on-my-heart truth is I just don’t know if there’s
anything out there, but as a dedicated human-loving individual I like
to advocate tolerance and harmony in the world. You believe in God,
I do not. You believe in Allah, I do not. You believe in the Great
Pink Llama in the Sky, I…am open to convincing on this front. Ok,
seriously. The point is, if we all believed the same thing the world
would be terribly dull and a bit too much like 1984 for my liking.
You can believe in God and be a horrible person (hello Westboro
Baptist Church); you can believe in God and be a nice person (hello
many of the people I work at SHARE with); you can believe in Allah
and be a horrible person (hello all you fundamentalist nutjobs who
blow people up and stone your women to death for wearing a bit of lip
gloss); you can believe in Allah and be a nice person (hello a very
good friend of mine who shall remain nameless). Similarly, you can
believe in nothing at all and be either lovely or horrible. It isn’t
the be-all and end-all of things. I mean, I like to think I’m a
reasonably decent specimen of humanity, even though I don’t believe
in any religious convention of any kind. The fact that two people
recently have been utterly surprised that I’m not a
Christian in spite of all the “good work” and “nice things” I
do bears that out, in a way; it’s great that the tenets of your
religion match up with my own personal world view, but I’d humbly
suggest that that’s a requirement to joining the human race rather
than joining any religious faction.
I feel very disappointed that
Richard Dawkins is slowly revealing himself to be nothing more than
yet another superficial, hate-filled, bigoted individual with
seemingly no capacity to develop a shared understanding or find
mutual ground with the rest of society. There are always going to be
people who use religion to oppress and promote hatred, just like
there are always going to be people like him who use religion to
oppress and promote hatred in a different way. I have no time for
any of them, no matter what their colour, creed, belief or lack
thereof: I subscribe to the Philosophy of Bill S. Preston, Esq. and
Ted Theodore Logan, and I plan to stick to it.
Be excellent to each other.
And party on, dudes.
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