Quote:
Originally Posted by gargamel
The thing about guys like Dawkins is that they cannot comprehend how an intelligent person could possibly believe that there is a god. Therefore, in their minds, Obama, Clinton, Kennedy, Lincoln and all other intelligent people must be atheists whether they admit it or not.
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This has always frustrated me about Dawkins. For all his strengths, he still presents himself as incredibly—almost unreasonably—narrow minded with regards to his rather general understanding of "religion". He is a terrible philosopher and a dreadful theologian, and yet he likes to pretend that he knows what he is doing when discussing such matters.
A little off topic, but I found this episode of BBC's "The Big Questions" from 8 May 2011 only recently. It features Dawkins, biblical scholar Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, and Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner in a discussion about the modern function of the Bible. The exchange is pretty engaging (for the record: Stavrakopoulou is exaggerating some of the scholarly skepticism, and Bishop Nazir-Ali is equally guilty of exaggerating her position as "sensationalistic" and "extreme"), and it demonstrates pretty clearly what I am talking about
: In it, Dawkins can't seem to overcome his own very obvious biases to even grasp the literary importance or function of the Bible that extends beyond religion.