Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Richard Dawkins is just trolling us now


Are we supposed to take this seriously? 

“There is a balancing act and you have to balance the rights of parents and the rights of children and I think the balance has swung too far towards parents,” [Richard Dawkins] said. “Children do need to be protected so that they can have a proper education and not be indoctrinated in whatever religion their parents happen to have been brought up in.” 
I gotta think even the Anglo-American philosophers at Oxford are embarrassed this guy is on their faculty.  Although Lawrence Krauss is sillier:

“Parents, of course, have concerns and ‘say’ but they don’t have the right to shield their children from knowledge. That is not a right, any more than they have the right to shield their children from healthcare or medicine.”

There is, of course quite a bit of knowledge I prefer to shield my child from, especially when she was young.  That may not be the knowledge Mr. Krauss has in mind, but neither am I going to set him over my child as the arbiter of what she knows or should know.

A few years ago we'd have called this "performance art," just as an attempt to explain it.  I don't know why these guys think they sound rational, or why anyone treats them as if they were.

Indeed, if anything bothers me about what they say, it's that the answer to my question is "Some do."

2 comments:

  1. They got people to shell out 50 Euros to hear those two say the same crap you can hear them saying on countless Youtubes for the price of the electricity? And their audience is supposed to be smart?

    As both Dawkins and Krauss push ideas in science that have every liklihood of being shunted to the bone yard of discontinued science in embarrassed silence, perhaps children should be shielded from their work. Especially Dawkins which includes a call for the return of eugenics, infanticide, and, I'm not making this up, the idea that low-level pedophile abuse isn't harmful and no fuss should be made about it.

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