Do Christian Parents Abuse their Children?

[Edwardo Piet]

Is this a category error? William Lane Craig is universally recognised as being one of the biggest liars for Jebus that walks this earth. Dawkins on the other hand is a highly respected biologist. I would be most interested in CL's views on Dawkins; 'Unweaving the Rainbow'.

It certainly would be if I were trying to compare the two men.  Please, don't misunderstand; I have the utmost respect and admiration for Dawkins.  I'm just saying it's not unreasonable to think that a Theist may have a personal distaste for an outspoken anti-theist.  It's personal for her.  It doesn't mean she is trying to start trouble on the forums.  That's all I'm saying.

In my experience many theists and also "I'm an atheist but..." type atheists are very anti-Dawkins.

I often hear he's an asshole from a lot of atheists actually, just because he speaks his mind very brutally and has a fetish for the truth (and if you have a fetish for anything surely the truth is the best thing to have a fetish for?). And I also hear that he's "Islamophobic" from a lot from those who can't tell the difference between being anti-Islam and anti-Muslim.

He's very brutal. But he's mild compared to people like Hitchens who defended the war on Iraq and he's also anti-abortion and a self-described anti-theist. I always feel like Hitchens was grotesquely overrated. Like in the God Delusion Dawkins explains how and why God is man-made nonsense but in his own book Hitchens just asserts that God is clearly man-made and man made God and not the other way around. Now to us atheists that is obviously true but it is rather question begging and his task was to explain to theists why their beliefs are nonsense not to just assert that they clearly are.

I'd still pick Hitchens over Dan Dennett though as Dennett's digressions are not only frequent but they take up about nine tenths of his books.

I mostly agree with Sam Harris but I was rather disgusted with his ignorance with his defense of Douglas Murray. Although after getting over my initial disgust I have since been able to compartmentalize that very easily as compartmentalization is my specialty (although unfortunately it is now my opinion that my compartmentalization is why I lose a lot of my friends. I say stuff that I expect others to compartmentalize but they can't and we end up falling out over irrelevant shit. So any friend who is very good at compartmentalizing is probably a keeper for me).

Dennett does make some great points and he's also, nice, decent and polite but he's so unnecessarily verbose and his common approach to say something isn't an illusion or a delusion it's just not what we think it is is so annoying. It makes me wonder why he doesn't take the same approach to God and say "God does exist it's just not what we think it is. See, God is the universe." My guess is that he's much more of a pragmatist than he admits he is and he doesn't find the belief in God useful but he does find belief in consciousness and free will useful. Although it just demonstrates to me that he's lost the debate when he says stuff like "Free will is real like money. It's a social construct." And he has verbatim said "Free will is a real social construction." He's basically admitting that it's not real but it's useful to pretend like it's real.

Dennett is a lovely guy, the nicest of the four horsemen I reckon, but he's also annoying as hell and looking for his good points (and he does make good points) is like looking for a a needle in a haystack.... the haystack being his mounds upon mounds of irrelevant and unnecessarily verbose - it often seems as though he's trying too hard to come off as an intellectual and to seem like the professor that he is - digressions.