If God did not exist

[Mr. H.]

Maybe he's a Radio Controlled Christian.

 

[pacer]

Ah, Richard Dawkins:
A great person to model yourself after. And thank you for continuing to use the forum to bash Christians, using the very best perverts around!

Perhaps you can point out where he defends mild pedophilia.

***

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”

He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

 

[koshergrl]

You're not helping yourself, zealot.

 

[koshergrl]

From your own quote:

"I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it.."

 

[pacer]

From your own quote:

"I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it.."

You cannot isolate one sentence and try to suggest he defends mild pedophilia. You have to take it in its entire context. The next thing he says: He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.” You need to read it carefully.

 

[koshergrl]

He said he is okay with mild pedophilia, you moron. You really are too stupid to breathe. Your own example and your continued spasmings do nothing except prove that you lack basic reasoning skills.

 

[koshergrl]

"
Dawkin's comments have been strongly criticised by the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) an organisation that works with survivors of abuse.
"Mr. Dawkins seems to think that because a crime was committed a long time ago we should judge it in a different way," NSPCC child protection director David Watt told RNS. "But
we know that the victims of sexual abuse suffer the same effects whether it was 50 years ago or yesterday."
Founder of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, Peter Saunders has also spoken out against Dawkin's remarks.
"Abuse in all its forms has always been wrong. Evil is evil and we have to challenge it whenever and wherever it occurs," Sanders told reporters.

Read more: He was a victim of child sexual abuse but Richard Dawkins refuses to condemn the behaviour | News.com.au
​

 

[pacer]

Gee...you showed your true Christian colours. Don't ever point the finger at others with your ballyhooing about Christians being jeered and insulted. Read what Dawkins had to say carefully.

 

[pacer]

"
Dawkin's comments have been strongly criticised by the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) an organisation that works with survivors of abuse.
"Mr. Dawkins seems to think that because a crime was committed a long time ago we should judge it in a different way," NSPCC child protection director David Watt told RNS. "But
we know that the victims of sexual abuse suffer the same effects whether it was 50 years ago or yesterday."
Founder of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, Peter Saunders has also spoken out against Dawkin's remarks.
"Abuse in all its forms has always been wrong. Evil is evil and we have to challenge it whenever and wherever it occurs," Sanders told reporters.

Read more: He was a victim of child sexual abuse but Richard Dawkins refuses to condemn the behaviour | News.com.au
​

The comments were taken out of context and of course keep getting perpetuated.

 

[koshergrl]

I doubt you have any clearer understanding of what I've shown than you have of the words you actually put on the page yourself. Overall, your understanding is deplorable, and your method is a joke.

 

[koshergrl]

"
Dawkin's comments have been strongly criticised by the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) an organisation that works with survivors of abuse.
"Mr. Dawkins seems to think that because a crime was committed a long time ago we should judge it in a different way," NSPCC child protection director David Watt told RNS. "But
we know that the victims of sexual abuse suffer the same effects whether it was 50 years ago or yesterday."
Founder of the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, Peter Saunders has also spoken out against Dawkin's remarks.
"Abuse in all its forms has always been wrong. Evil is evil and we have to challenge it whenever and wherever it occurs," Sanders told reporters.

Read more: He was a victim of child sexual abuse but Richard Dawkins refuses to condemn the behaviour | News.com.au
​

The comments were taken out of context and of course keep getting perpetuated.

Yeah, by those horrible anti-child abuse loons.

Are you a fan of Peter Singer, too?

 

[pacer]

Don't change the subject. READ what Dawkins said in its entirety. Don't take it out of context.

 

[pacer]

Check this out for your reading pleasure. There is a ton of material.

God is Imaginary - 50 simple proofs

 

[hjmick]

Who cares if GOD is imaginary or not?


People of faith will not likely change there opinion on the matter, and the same can be said of atheists.

 

[pacer]

Child Abuse: a misunderstanding.

by Richard Dawkins posted on September 12, 2013 02:40PM GMT

A is bad. B is worse.” How dare you defend A?

In my memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, I wrote the following, about an incident at boarding school.

I would watch games of squash from the gallery, waiting for the game to end so I could slip down and practise by myself. One day – I must have been about eleven – there was a master in the gallery with me. He pulled me onto his knee and put his hand inside my shorts. He did no more than have a little feel, but it was extremely disagreeable (the cremasteric reflex is not painful, but in a skin-crawling, creepy way it is almost worse than painful) as well as embarrassing. As soon as I could wriggle off his lap, I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him. I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself.

This paragraph, together with a subsequent statement to the Times that I would not judge that teacher by the standards of today, has been heavily criticised. These criticisms represent a misunderstanding, which I would like to clear up.

The standards of today are conditioned by our increasing familiarity with the traumatising effect that pedophile abuse can have on children, sometimes scarring them psychologically for life. Today we read, almost daily, of adults whose childhood was blighted by an uncle perhaps, or even a parent, who would day after day, week after week, year after year, sexually abuse a vulnerable child. The child would often have no escape, would not be believed if he/she told the other parent, or told a teacher. In many cases it is only now, when the abused children have reached adulthood, that these stories are coming out. To make light of their stories, even after all these years, might in some cases re-awaken the trauma of not being believed at the time when it was all happening, and when being believed would have meant so much to the child.

Only slightly less culpable than the abusers themselves are the institutions that protected them, of which the most prominent examples are to be found in the senior hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. This is why I personally donated £10,000 of my own money towards a fund, instigated by Christopher Hitchens and me, to build the legal case for prosecuting Pope Benedict XVI for his part (when Cardinal Ratzinger) in covering up sexual abuse of children by priests. Our initiative, for which I paid 50%, the rest being raised by Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, resulted in the book The Case of the Pope: Vatican accountability for human rights abuse, in which the distinguished barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC laid out the case for the prosecution should any jurisdiction in the world choose to take it up in the future.

Now, given the terrible, persistent and recurrent traumas suffered by other people when abused as children, week after week, year after year, what should I have said about my own thirty seconds of nastiness back in the 1950s? Should I have lied and said it was the worst thing that ever happened to me? Should I have mendaciously sought the sympathy due to a victim who had truly been damaged for the rest of his life? Should I have named the offending teacher and called down posthumous disgrace upon his head?

No, no and no. To have done so would have been to belittle and insult those many people whose lives really were blighted and cursed, perhaps by year-upon-year of abuse by a father or other person who was deeply important in their life. To have done so would have invited the justifiably indignant response: “How dare you make a fuss about the mere half minute of gagging unpleasantness that happened to you only once, and where the perpetrator was not your own father but a teacher who meant nothing special to you in your life. Stop playing the victim. Stop trying to upstage those who really were tragic victims in their own situations. Don’t cry wolf about your own bad experience, because it undermines those whose experience was – and remains – so much worse.”

That is why I made light of my own bad experience. To excuse pedophiliac assaults in general, or to make light of the horrific experiences of others, was a thousand miles from my intention.

I should have hoped that much was obvious. But I was perhaps presumptuous in the last sentence of the paragraph quoted above. I cannot know for certain that my companions’ experiences with the same teacher were are brief as mine, and theirs may have been recurrent where mine was not. That’s why I said only “I don’t think he did any of us lasting damage”. We discussed it among ourselves on many occasions, especially after his suicide, and there was indeed general agreement that his gassing himself was far more upsetting than his sexual depredations had been. If I am wrong about any particular individual; if any of my companions really was traumatised by the abuse long after it happened; if, perhaps it happened many times and amounted to more than the single disagreeable but brief fondling that I endured, I apologise.

RDFRS: Child Abuse: a misunderstanding.

 

[koshergrl]

Thank you. Now we understand that you agree with him. Some sexual abuse is okay.

 

[pacer]

He is clarifying exactly what I had pointed out to you. READ.

 

[koshergrl]

Yes, he is dismissing *mild* pedophilia, based on his understanding that there are worse crimes out there. Using his rating system, *mild* murder would be murder committed sans torture...*mild* rape would be rape by a guy with a tiny dick.

 

[Sunni Man]

I never could figure out why atheists are always so hell bent on convincing other people there is no God?? ..

 

[pacer]

He did not say he could not condemn but rather he could not condemn it (mild touching) by the same standards as he would today. Read it closely.

"...I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”