Dawkins Needs to Shut Up Sometimes

Recently criticizing the shallow critiques allotted to religion in the works of Harris and Dawkins, I felt a bit of catharsis. I aired my major grievance against Dawkins. I have always respected his philosophy towards science, and the care with which he probes evolution. I own many of the man's books. But now, he has said something just plain stupid and awful to Emily Hourican in The Dubliner:

The Catholic Church also has an extraordinarily retrogressive stance on everything to do with reproduction. Any sort of new technology which makes life easier for women without causing any suffering is likely to be opposed by the Catholic Church. Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place. I had a letter from a woman in America in her forties, who said that when she was a child of about seven, brought up a Catholic, two things happened to her: one was that she was sexually abused by her parish priest. The second thing was that a great friend of hers at school died, and she had nightmares because she thought her friend was going to hell because she wasn't Catholic. For her there was no question that the greatest child abuse of those two was the abuse of being taught about hell. Being fondled by the priest was negligible in comparison. And I think that's a fairly common experience. I can't speak about the really grave sexual abuse that obviously happens sometimes, which actually causes violent physical pain to the altar boy or whoever it is, but I suspect that most of the sexual abuse priests are accused of is comparatively mild - a little bit of fondling perhaps, and a young child might scarcely notice that. The damage, if there is damage, is going to be mental damage anyway, not physical damage. Being taught about hell - being taught that if you sin you will go to everlasting damnation, and really believing that - is going to be a harder piece of child abuse than the comparatively mild sexual abuse. [emphasis mine]

Wrong, Richard. So wrong. So stupid. Just keep your mouth shut sometimes, when you feel it meandering towards an area so outside your experience and expertise.

You're no longer making an intelligent critique of religion. You're ranting. You're preaching. You're baldly asserting things without any scientific backing whatsoever. You're acting like something I detest -- someone who rails against an ideology (usually atheism), without evidential support, by drawing huge non sequiturs. [HT: Hallq]
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