Atheism Ireland denounces hateful bigot PZ Myers

[Cephus]

What I am saying is that all figures end up saying very dumb things - PZ Myers never interested me but figures make mistakes - Like I pointed out earlier Harris defended racially profiling brown skinned people because of Muslim terrorists - That seems a little like racial prejudice to me and it's not any better than hating Christians.

That's not prejudiced, that's reality.  Whether we like it or not, the majority of modern terrorists happen to be brown skinned people from the Middle East who cling to the Muslim faith. It only makes sense to take a closer look at such people, the same way you'd look more closely at men than women if you're seeking a serial killer.  Most serial killers are men.  So long as these facts remain true, we need to focus our limited resources to looking at more likely suspects than less likely suspects.  It is truly idiotic to spend as much time looking at an 80-year old white grandmother from Des Moines as a terrorist suspect, just in the name of political correctness.  That's exactly what Harris has said (the few times I've paid attention).  It's nothing personal, it's entirely rational though.

By the same token, if we're trying to solve an abortion clinic bombing, the most rational place to start is looking at fundamentalist Christian men.  That's not racist, that's not sexist, that's not anti-religion, that's identifying the demographic which has been most often associated with the crime and giving them some well-deserved extra scrutiny.

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Dawkins pedophilia comments need context. His argument was that 'mild' pedophilia, of the 1950s was actually common. However, his argument is that he struggles to condemn people of that era who would have behaved in that way in contrast to someone of modern times. This is what he said:

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,”

The problem is, Dawkins is entirely right about that, you simply cannot declare modern thinking to be magically true across all times and in all places, there are far too many modern atheists who do exactly that.  They think that our modern view of morality is perfect and everyone else's has always been wrong.  They ignore the simple fact that people who had slaves thought that owning slaves was correct and people in the past had simply done things wrong.  In another 100 years, our ancestors are going to look back and be shocked at how wrong we have it, from their perspective.  This idea of "I'm right and everyone else is wrong because they don't agree with me" is really very shallow.

I also find that criticism of Dawkins is often simply ripped out of context.  Many of the people who do it are just mad at him because he's a rich white man.  They're not secretive about it either, they come right out and say it.  The same people who accuse Dawkins and others of being sexist and racist are doing it out of sexism and racism.  It's really quite bizarre.