{"id":5990,"date":"2009-10-17T12:16:22","date_gmt":"2009-10-17T16:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anglicansamizdat.wordpress.com\/?p=5990"},"modified":"2009-10-17T12:16:22","modified_gmt":"2009-10-17T16:16:22","slug":"richard-dawkins-and-his-merry-band-of-bigots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/richard-dawkins-and-his-merry-band-of-bigots\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Dawkins and his merry band of bigots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>English eccentricity is a time-honoured and necessary part of what used to make Britain such a likeable culture. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.ca\/search?q=patrick+moore+astronomer&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;aq=t&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&amp;client=firefox-a\" target=\"_blank\">Patrick Moore<\/a>, whose TV programme <em>The Sky at Night <\/em> I enjoyed many years ago, is a typical eccentric: he is an astronomer who was a member of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Flat_Earth_Society\" target=\"_blank\">Flat Earth Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This impulse for self-mocking comes from a gentler time when people who held strong opinions (Patrick Moore doesn\u2019t <em>believe<\/em> the earth is flat) still had a sense of humour. Oh that Dawkins and his ilk were as civilised. Here is a typical Dawkinism:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I\u2019d rather not consider that).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Now the assertions of young-earth Creationism may have the appearance of being scientifically untenable \u2013 and I don\u2019t subscribe to them \u2013 but Dawkins consistently lumps anyone who questions evolution\u2019s dogma into one category, that of mindless folly.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/anglicansamizdat.wordpress.com\/2009\/10\/16\/dawkins-insulting-creationists\/#comments\" target=\"_blank\">Dawkins enthusiasts<\/a> take their cue from their master:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>By the way, the reason biologists ridicule and insult creationists is because they are too lazy to learn anything, and too bloody stupid to understand anything.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s funny that a believer in magical creation would call the basic facts of evolution \u201cpseudo-scientific nonsense\u201d. You obviously don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Humourless, arrogant, unreasonable, tedious and bigoted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>English eccentricity is a time-honoured and necessary part of what used to make Britain such a likeable culture. Patrick Moore, whose TV programme The Sky at Night I enjoyed many years ago, is a typical eccentric: he is an astronomer &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/richard-dawkins-and-his-merry-band-of-bigots\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[274],"tags":[2136,2238],"class_list":["post-5990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-richard-dawkins","tag-evolution","tag-richard-dawkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}