Richard Dawkins proves his scientific approach...

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Atheists Shocked to Find Some Orthodox Muslims Voluntarily Segregate by Sex
Mooneye
March 17, 2013
loonwatch.com

It seems to me that this tempest in a teapot began with a misunderstanding, Lawrence Krauss was under the impression that attendees of the debate were being forced to sit in segregated seating when clearly the troubles began when a few atheist men demanded to sit in-between Muslim women who had voluntarily chose to sit apart from men. I’m not sure if Krauss is a fan of violin music but would he likewise make a big stink out of Orthodox Jews who were allowed their own space for segregated seating between men and women at a recent concert by Itzhak Perlman at the Barclays Center?

This whole episode had the trappings of atheists making a big ado about nothing.

Last Saturday the Islamic Education and Research Academy organised a debate at University College London between iERA’s Hamza Tzortzis and atheist scientist Lawrence Krauss on the topic “Islam or atheism. Which makes more sense?” Krauss was unhappy about the organisation of the event, claiming that the audience was separated on the basis of gender, and hetweeted the following comment, which was widely publicised: “Almost walked out of debate as it ended up segregated + saw 3 kids being ejected for sitting in wrong place. I packed up and they caved in.” Krauss’s complaint was seized on by fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, who informed his Twitter followers: “At UC London debate between a Muslim and Lawrence Krauss, males & females had to sit separately. Krauss threatened to leave.” He addedsarcastically: “I don’t think Muslims should segregate sexes at University College London events. Oh NO, how very ISLAMOPHOBIC of me. How RACIST of me.”

Well, in addition to a couple of other tweets that suggested perhaps just a hint of hostility towards Islam and its adherents (“Who the hell do these Muslims think they are?”, Dawkins demanded,followed by “How has UCL come to this: cowardly capitulation to Muslims? Tried to segregate sexes in debate between @LKrauss1 and some Muslim or other”) what is Islamophobic – and, yes, not a little racist – about Dawkins’ response is that he should publish damaging accusations against a Muslim organisation without bothering to establish the facts of the case.

He wasn’t the only one. On Monday UCL issued a statement declaring that, although they were “still investigating what actually happened at the meeting”, they nevertheless accepted the charge that “despite our clear instructions, attempts were made to enforce segregation at the meeting”, and on that basis they announced that iERA was banned from holding any further meetings at UCL.

For their part, iERA responded with a press release expressing their “surprise with the decision by University College London to not allow us to hold any further events on UCL premises” and stating that they would be meeting with UCL to clarify the situation. Interviewed by the Huffington Post, Zayd Tutton of iERA gave their version of what happened at the meeting: “There were three sections as agreed with UCL prior to the debate. This was agreed clearly with UCL representatives. Muslim women choosing to adhere to orthodox Islamic principles in sitting in their own area had their own section. As for those who wanted to sit together, male or female, they had their own section where they freely mixed and sat together from the beginning.”

Tutton added the “3 kids”, in defence of whom Krauss had threatened to withdraw from the debate, were in fact two men who forcibly tried to sit in the female section. He said: “When arguing it was about sitting in any area in the auditorium, they were offered an entirely free aisle in the aforementioned Muslim female section, but insisted that they wanted to sit in between the Muslim females, with a view to offending their religious beliefs.”

This account is confirmed by a Muslim woman who attended the debate. She has written: “As a woman, I should have the choice who I choose to mix with. The organisers were accommodating to all – for those who wanted to sit separately, and for those who wanted to sit together. During the event, 2 men demanded to sit in the women’s section in between the women, after much discussion, the organisers cleared space for them to sit – (there were so many rows), while still trying to respect the position of the women who had requested to be seated separately. A man in particular demanded to sit in between the women in order to ‘challenge their beliefs’. How is this being tolerant? The men were intimidating and the organisers spoke in length to the individuals before asking them to leave as they showed complete disrespect.”

In further tweets Krauss reported that he had held a subsequent meeting with iERA, as a result of which he appears to have accepted their assurance that they had no intention of forcing men and women to sit separately at the debate. But that still wasn’t good enough for Krauss. “I was told there would be no gender segregation,” he complained, “whereas their intent was voluntary gender segregation.” In other words, what he is objecting to now is not that gender separation was imposed on those attending the debate; rather, his argument is that Muslim women who wanted to sit in their own section apart from male members of the audience should have been prevented from doing so.

Atheists like Krauss and Dawkins like to portray themselves as promoters of Enlightenment values and women’s rights. But when it comes to Islam, they ignore empirical evidence and abandon rational thought in favour of blind adherence to dogmatic anti-Muslim prejudice. As for supporting feminist principles, this evidently doesn’t extend to respecting the right of Muslim women to follow their faith – or indeed to defending them against harassment by fellow male atheists.

read comments on the article here

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I'm (was) surprised to see that Dawkins would post such shite, based on rumour as it was, but I can just imagine those two guys trying to sit amongst the women - pair o' bawbags.

[Brown Sauce]

The guy's a dickhead. Always has been.

[MegaChairmanMao]

Atheists annoy me more than religious people now. I've suddenly become supportive of sharia courts and tax-exempt status for churches.

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Richard Dawkins And The Brave New Science Of Evilogy
2nd April 2013
karlremarks.com

Richard Dawkins is undoubtedly the greatest scientist of his generation, despite the Nobel Prize committee ignoring his work because of its notoriously old-fashioned view of science. Traditional institutions don’t understand Dawkins’ brand of daring and ambitious scientific speculation that is inherently true because it is conducted by a famous scientist. This hasn’t diminished the value of Professor Dawkins to his millions of fans around the world, who hang onto his every word like it was gospel. Well, maybe not gospel, but a gospel-ish atheist book.

The professor recently caused a massive controversy by saying that Islam is the ‘greatest force for evil today’ while admitting that he hasn’t read the Koran. Curious to get to the bottom of this affair, we dispatched our science editor to interview the famous atheist. Professor Dawkins kindly agreed to do the interview because he’s keen to spread his message in the Middle East. Which is ironically how a few religions got started, but we refrained from pointing that out to him.


We met the professor at his house which doubles up as his laboratory, and turned out to be a buzzing hive of scientific experiments. Dawkins, it transpired, is a firm believer in the empirical method, and he backs up all his public statements with rigorous testing and experiments. The place was filled with cages and glass boxes filled with various types of laboratory animals, but there were no signs of cruelty. The animals looked quite content if slightly bored.

When we entered, his assistant Igor, a slightly hunchbacked balding man, was feeding kebabs to a clowder of cats. We inquired whether this was their usual diet, but the professor explained that it’s part of an experiment to understand the link between diet and religious beliefs. Dawkins is going to leave no stone unturned in his effort to understand what causes religious beliefs. This experiment was designed to find out if there’s a link between Middle Eastern food and religion. The results were inconclusive, although the cats had shown a tendency to become aggressive and rowdy on Saturday nights.

We began the interview by asking the professor about his statements about Islam and evil. Wasn’t that quite an assertion to make without any evidence? And how do you quantify evil?

“I am glad you asked me that question. Unlike George Bush, the Christian wingnut, I am taking a scientific approach to evil. It so happens that we came up with same conclusion, that Islam is evil, but this is merely a coincidence. I have created a new branch of science called Evilogy, which will transform how we understand this phenomenon. It’s based on scientific principles, and we are now carrying out extensive experiments to understand it fully.”

This was quite a revelation. Evilogy sounded like a serious scientific field, with numbers and charts. We wanted to find out more and we asked the professor to show us some of the Evilogy experiments. He took us to a corner where there were three separate boxes with rabbits inside. The professor explained that each group of rabbits was exposed to only one of the three monotheistic religions and their behaviour was monitored to find which group would become more aggressive in behaviour and show ill-will towards the other rabbits.

The experiment was quite detailed, the ‘Christian’ rabbits were given a day off on Sundays for example and they were given a large family dinner for Christmas. The rabbits normally became quite agitated after a few hours, especially after they had a few thimbles of carrot juice. They were also disappointed with the ‘presents’ they received, which Dawkins and his assistant bought from a nearby petrol a station. To Dawkins this was clear evidence of a link between Christianity and aggression.

“We are now in the process of quantifying those levels of aggression to see which rabbits are more evil. This is a major scientific step.”

There were some other interesting results. The ‘Jewish’ rabbits displayed typical symptoms of hypochondriac behaviour and both they and ‘Muslim’ rabbits were particularly fussy about how their was food was prepared. To anyone on the outside, those experiments might look deranged and detached from reality, but in fact they were entirely consistent with Dawkins’ way of reasoning and argument.

The professor has been recently riling against what he calls ‘sexual apartheid’, the religious practice of separating genders in public. He devised an experiment to challenge this practice and was able to prove that non-gender separated rabbits were able to procreate at a much higher rate than male and female rabbits that were separated. In fact, the gender-separated rabbits didn’t procreate at all which he sees as a proof of how unnatural gender segregation is. It’s this kind of science that has been missing from the debates about religion, but Dawkins is on a mission to rectify that.

Some of the critique of Dawkins has focused on how bland and entirely uncharismatic he is, but that’s like complaining that your German-made sewing machine isn’t sexy enough. Underneath that carefully-cultivated bland façade, his mind is working like a machine to challenge religious beliefs. The professor is aware of those critiques, and has countered that by tweeting incessantly about how much fun he is. Watching him cracking jokes with the rabbits and rats in the lab really shows that fun side the public doesn’t get to see.

We move to a more serious topic and ask the professor if it’s right for him to make generalisations about Islam having not read the Koran. But Dawkins proves to be too intelligent for us and replies with the line he’s been repeating frequently: ‘You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism.’ This smart variation on the old university rule ‘if you can’t defeat your opponent’s argument, call him a Fascist’, proves what a genius Dawkins is. Few people would dare wield an old cliché against criticism, but this is what distinguishes the professor from the rest of us.

As we are about to leave, we see Dawkins and Igor busy trying to put tiny yarmulkes and veils on the rabbits, but the rabbits seem unhappy and continue to evade them. We watch in silent admiration. It is a mark of the genius and dedication of Richard Dawkins that he would apply himself so whole-heartedly to this task, despite the protests of the ungrateful rabbits. Evilogy is cutting edge science at its best.


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[faceless]

An interesting article called "The Weaponization of Atheism"

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/09/the-weaponization-of-atheism

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2013/may/03/atheism-dawkins/print

[SquareEyes]

By the way, I'm with Richard Dawkins on how anyone can be "born" anything religious :p

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/ebay-heaven-auction-ari-mandel_n_3365547.html

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I really can't stand typical online atheists. Seriously, I've never met such a bunch of arrogant, evangelical, wankers in my life. And Dawkins is just a cheap bigoted arsehole when it comes down to it.

[SpursFan1902]

So, for those who believe in such things, I guess the whole "good works" theory of getting into heaven has been kicked to the curb, having lost favor to the much simpler, "If you believe that one, I have a corner of heaven I can let you have for cheap. Just see my offer on EBay."

[faceless]

But if a person doesn't have the faith then it's meaningless.

In true atheist fashion, the seller should sue for defamation or something.

[faceless]

*this was a link to 'heresyclub.com' but they've folded.

Anyone who recommends Pat Condell as a reasonable voice has crossed the border into Loonieland.

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http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/08/richard-dawkins-twitter-row-muslims-cambridge/print

"Anything you can convert to, or convert from, is NOT a race." Apparently he doesn't know about the process of becoming a naturalised citizen of another country. Is that not a conversion to another race, considering that it is racism to judge a person by their nationality?

Dawkins can piss right off.

[MegaChairmanMao]

You may already know about this but I've just came across it:

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Richard Dawkins claims fairy tales are harmful to children
The evolutionary biologist was speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival
Ian Johnston
5 June 2014
independent.co.uk
Fairy tales are harmful to children because they “inculcate a view of the world which includes supernaturalism”, according to Professor Richard Dawkins. The evolutionary biologist, a leading atheist and author of books including The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, told an audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival that he stopped believing in religion when he was about eight after having seen through Santa Claus when he was just 21 months old. He suggested children should be taught scientific rigour from an early age.

“Is it a good thing to go along with the fantasies of childhood, magical as they are? Or should we be fostering a spirit of scepticism?” he said. “I think it's rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway. Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it's statistically too improbable.”

Professor Dawkins said his mother had written down an early encounter with Santa. “There was a man called Sam who came as Father Christmas, all 'ho ho ho'. All the children were enthralled by this. Then he left, I piped up much to the consternation of the adults, 'Sam's gone,’” he said. His religious belief lasted a bit longer. “I think I did believe it up to the age of eight or nine, when preachers said if you really, really pray for something it can happen. Even moving mountains, I believed it could really happen,” he said. “I grew up. I put away childish things.”

He said it would be “a bit strong” to say parents who raised their children to believe in God were guilty of child abuse. But he added: “When you tell a child to mind their Ps and Qs otherwise they'll roast in hell, then that is tantamount to child abuse.”

Professor Dawkins also talked about being sexually abused at his prep school in Salisbury. He has previously played down an incident in which a teacher “put his hand inside my shorts”. “I got quite a bit of stick for saying that it did not have a big impact but to say that it did would be an indecency to those people whose lives have been ruined by experiences that have been much worse,” he said.

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Dawkins Dawkins Dawkins - is this because he doesn't want children to have what he didn't?

[MegaChairmanMao]

Beat me to it.

Huffington Post has a good parody: