Richard Dawkins Rallies for Reason in Washington DC

in Current Affairs, Religion, Science | March 27th, 2012 6 Comments

This week­end, an esti­mat­ed 20,000 agnos­tics, athe­ists and ardent sec­u­lar­ists gath­ered on the Nation­al Mall in rainy Wash­ing­ton DC. They were attend­ing the first Rea­son Ral­ly, an event intend­ed to “uni­fy, ener­gize, and embold­en sec­u­lar peo­ple nation­wide, while dis­pelling the neg­a­tive opin­ions held by so much of Amer­i­can soci­ety… and hav­ing a damn good time doing it!” Lawrence Krauss, Michael Sher­mer, Eddie Izzard — they all spoke to the crowd. And then came Richard Dawkins, the high priest of rea­son, the author of The Self­ish Gene, who spent decades teach­ing evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy at Oxford. In the mid­dle of his 16 minute talk, he tells the audi­ence, “We’re here to stand up for rea­son, to stand up for sci­ence, to stand up for log­ic, to stand up for the beau­ty of real­i­ty, and the beau­ty of the fact that we can under­stand real­i­ty.” I’m with you Richard on that. But then comes the scorn we’re now so accus­tomed to (“I don’t despise reli­gious peo­ple; I despise what they stand for.”), and my guess is that chang­ing per­cep­tions of agnos­tics, athe­ists and sec­u­lar­ists will need to wait for anoth­er day.


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  • Corn Walker says:
    March 27, 2012 at 2:40 pm

    “I don’t despise reli­gious peo­ple; I despise what they stand for.”

    How is that any dif­fer­ent than the “hate the sin, love the sin­ner” cliché we hear so often?

    Reply
  • Karajaru says:
    March 27, 2012 at 3:21 pm

    Dawkins isn’t afraid to offend. That’s pre­cise­ly why so many peo­ple like him. It’s true that offence is not usu­al­ly a good way of mak­ing friends and influ­enc­ing peo­ple, but damn it: he has a right to crit­i­cize irra­tional super­sti­tious beliefs, he’s coura­geous to do so, and we should be behind him on prin­ci­ple.

    Reply
  • JG says:
    March 28, 2012 at 1:19 pm

    I’m with you Richard on that. But then comes the scorn we’re now so accus­tomed to (“I don’t despise reli­gious peo­ple; I despise what they stand for.”), and my guess is that chang­ing per­cep­tions of agnos­tics, athe­ists and sec­u­lar­ists will need to wait for anoth­er day.

    Where­as, if a Chris­t­ian had made the anal­o­gous com­ment about athe­ists you would­n’t even have noticed it go by.

    Reply
  • Ap says:
    March 28, 2012 at 4:57 pm

    Corn Walk­er says …

    “I don’t despise reli­gious peo­ple; I despise what they stand for.”
    How is that any dif­fer­ent than the “hate the sin, love the sin­ner” cliché we hear so often?

    ‘I don’t despise’ is cer­tain­ly dif­fer­ent than love. We all fall short of lov­ing those we dis­agree with. The dif­fer­ence with Dawkins is that he does­n’t even set it up as a goal. He feels it’s suf­fi­cient to mere­ly ‘not despise.’

    Reply
  • mortimerzilch says:
    March 29, 2012 at 10:08 am

    The Catholic Church has been deal­ing with Athe­ist objec­tions for a long time, and R.Dawkins’s objec­tions are VERY VERY weak. In fact, they are so weak as to indi­cate that the whole point of it all is the FACT THAT he CAN object with­out suf­fer­ing any neg­a­tive effects. He should go to the Mid­dle East and voice his objec­tions. Beyond that, there real­ly is no con­flict what­so­ev­er between Rea­son and Faith, if BOTH are under­stood prop­er­ly. Dawkins is like a nud­ist who takes his clothes off and yells: “Look I am naked!” and no one does any­thing about it. eh. that’s the whole point I sup­pose.…

    Reply
  • CD says:
    March 29, 2012 at 9:04 pm

    I agree with AP. And Dawkins does­n’t real­ize that the very sec­u­lar insti­tu­tions he only rec­og­nizes are also built on the val­ues from reli­gion.

    Just take a look at moral­ly-chal­lenged ancient Rome before Chris­tian­i­ty took over. It was a mess, even with the polit­i­cal struc­tures already estab­lished.

    Reply

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