Skeptics I no longer have any respect for.

[Sciwoman]

Dawkins was almost certainly aware of this, and the reason it caused such a fuss is that it did a damn good job of covering almost every angle.

That is where I disagree, it did not. It had some serious flaws in it and like with the bible, if you can't rely on the data given in the book to be accurate, what is preventing us from dismissing the book in its entirety?

In regards to the forum shutdown, it was a mess. Absolutely. But, he realised it was wrong, handled badly, he reacted poorly and he said so explicitly, and apologised publically.

He apologized for the shutdown yes, not for what he pulled 2 years prior to that by dumping the vets forum. He never apologized to the people warning him about Josh, he never aplogized to people like LP who got cold shouldered because she asked too many embarrising questions about the foundation.

It is not the lack of respect for him I find puzzling, its rather that I still have any respect for him at all.

Same here leo. I suppose my respect for him as a human being has been greatly diminished, but I still have some regard for him as a writer, a scientist, and a spokesperson for atheism. Dawkins may be good at explaining science and talking about atheism, but he's rather lacking in the ability to connect with others.

I was an admin at the RDF forum at the time of the shut down. The forum staff tried to talk to RD, but all he could hear was Josh's voice, despite emails, phone calls, and other attempts the staff made to communicate with him. Also, none of the staff were given access to tinker with the nuts and bolts of the forum - only Josh (who was the site admin at the time) had that access, and he had a long running dislike of the forum and a large bias towards the front page. Josh didn't give a damn what happened to the forum even though it had many times the traffic of the front page. He lied to the staff about what he had planned for the forum and to Dawkins about what happened when he announced the plans for the new 'discussion area' to the forum membership at large. In fact, by the time the forum was shut down, the staff was so distrustful of what Josh would do with any information found in the mods' and admins' forums (both personal and about forum members), that we deleted both forums outright - this from a staff who had never deleted a post, even spam. Of course, we had further proof of Josh's duplicity when we found he had deleted the admin logs showing where he had disabled PM's and such.