Founds this on Michael Prescott's blog regarding Dawkins's recent comments on pedophilia:
From the comments:
_http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2013/09/some-questions-and-no-clear-answers.html#comments
While he doesn't say it, I think the best explanation is that materialism is a psychopathic ideology.
Prescott links here:
_http://www.dailygrail.com/Skepticism/2013/8/Is-the-Week-Organized-Skepticism-Imploded (follow the link for embedded hyperlinks)
The Intertubes are abuzz with comments regarding the latest utterance from famed atheist Richard Dawkins. In this Salon article he is quoted as saying that "mild pedophilia" should not be cause for concern.
In a recent interview with the Times magazine, Richard Dawkins attempted to defend what he called “mild pedophilia,” which, he says, he personally experienced as a young child and does not believe causes “lasting harm.”
Dawkins went on to say that one of his former school masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts,” and that to condemn this “mild touching up” as sexual abuse today would somehow be unfair.
“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,” he said.
Plus, he added, though his other classmates also experienced abuse at the hands of this teacher, “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”
This is not the first time Dawkins has, at least by implication, downplayed the importance of pedophilia and child abuse generally. Notoriously he once said that raising a child as a Christian could be more damaging than subjecting the child to sexual abuse: "Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place."
His latest statement seems to be in line with his previous comments on the subject. He obviously thinks that raising a child in a religious belief system is an act of intolerable cruelty, but he exhibits no comparable outrage about physical molestation.
This rather peculiar stance could be taken as merely a personal quirk on Dawkins' part. My impression of Dawkins is that, like many highly educated and intelligent people, he is remarkably unskilled at introspection and self-criticism, and also has an exceedingly shallow understanding of viewpoints with which he disagrees. He is, in other words, altogether too sure of himself when he deigns to weigh in on subjects outside the narrow scope of his expertise.
What makes his most recent comment a little more interesting is that it follows in the wake of numerous allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of leading advocates of the "skeptical"-humanist-atheist-materialist position.
A rundown of these allegations, or most of them, can be found here.
Now, it can always be said that these allegations are unproven – which they are – and that even if there is something to them, it has nothing to do with the underlying intellectual positions taken by these individuals. In fact, I've said something similar myself. But I'm starting to wonder if maybe there is some connection between sexual misconduct (or the downplaying or tacit endorsement of such) and the materialist ethos.
Is it possible that the view of human beings as "meat puppets," "biological robots," and carrying systems for "selfish genes" – humans as mechanistic entities without free will, whose sense of self is an illusion and whose consciousness is only an epiphenomenon, a meaningless side effect – encourages a dehumanizing approach toward physical and emotional intimacy?
Alternatively ... are people who are predisposed, by temperament or upbringing, to treat their fellow humans as objects more likely, on average, to embrace a worldview that explicitly and unapologetically reduces people to objects?
Or ... could the high degree of left-brain dominance associated with militant skepticism, atheism, and materialism give rise to a dismissive or domineering attitude toward women (and perhaps children)? The "men's club" atmosphere of skeptical organizations and get-togethers is pretty well known.
Or ... could the belief that there is no afterlife, no "life review," and no possibility of being called to account for one's misconduct serve as a rationalization for indulging in misconduct? Was Dostoyevsky right when he had one of his characters say that without God, everything is permitted?
I know these questions can easily be seen as unfair. Perhaps they are. Sexual misbehavior is hardly limited to the skeptical-atheist camp. There are "spiritual" figures (like Sai Baba, or like any number of adulterous ministers and pedophile priests) who can be tarred with the same brush.
Still, when we consider the number of leading figures on the skeptic-materialist side – not bystanders or backbenchers, but people at the forefront of the movement – who have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct or who seem to endorse (or at least not condemn) such misconduct, it becomes increasingly hard to dismiss the possibility that their basic intellectual premises may contribute to these problems.
I could be wrong. I really don't know.
From the comments:
"Rumor has it this guy ..."
LOL, No One. But on a slightly more serious note, one of the things that prompted me to write this post was that in the course of doing some Internet research, I read about a certain person (not famous) who had boasted in a chat room that he enjoyed having sex with children and that, for a fee, he could procure children for other people's use. The authorities, once alerted, found "thousands" of photos of children on his computer, but weren't able to prove any criminal acts. The kicker? This same guy has written erudite-sounding online articles arguing that belief in God is irrational.
I had no idea, when I started looking into this case, that this guy had any viewpoint on religion - yet it turns out he's a militant atheist. Coincidence, possibly. But you may remember Auric Goldfinger's dictum:
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action."
Posted by: Michael Prescott | September 14, 2013 at 10:10 AM
It occurred to me that there is another atheistic movement that was shocked by a prominent sex scandal – namely Ayn Rand's Objectivism. In the late 1960s Rand's followers were stunned to learn that she and her protégé Nathaniel Branden had been carrying on an affair for more than a decade. Both Rand and Branden were married to other people. Their spouses had known about the affair all along, but it had been kept secret from everyone else.
When the affair began, Rand justified it to the reluctant spouses by saying that while such behavior would be inadvisable for the average person, it would work out in this case, because she and Nathaniel were "giants" who were not bound by social conventions. Their superiority placed them above all normal considerations of propriety. She turned out to be quite wrong – the affair fizzled out amid recrimination and guilt and shame, just as it would for any ordinary adulterers.
But maybe there's a clue here to the psychology behind these various instances of sexual misbehavior – a common denominator. Whether it's a celebrity atheist who feels he is intellectually superior to the common herd of gullible fools, or a celebrity New Age figure who sees himself as specially enlightened and spiritually superior to the mass of humanity, a grandiose sense of personal superiority may be what gives some people the rationale to manipulate and dominate and abuse others.
This does not necessarily apply to pedophile priests, who may be in a special category for the reasons Matt indicated (i.e., the fact that the church's prohibition of marriage for the clergy has made the priesthood a kind of sanctuary for a closeted gays). But it may apply in other cases.
When people start thinking of themselves as "giants" who are immune to the foibles of ordinary humanity and who stand above run-of-the-mill moral considerations, bad things tend to happen.
If this is true, then it may not be atheism as such - even militant atheism - that gives rise to these scandals, but the hubris that, in some cases, seems to accompany it.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | September 15, 2013 at 07:03 AM
_http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2013/09/some-questions-and-no-clear-answers.html#comments
While he doesn't say it, I think the best explanation is that materialism is a psychopathic ideology.
Prescott links here:
_http://www.dailygrail.com/Skepticism/2013/8/Is-the-Week-Organized-Skepticism-Imploded (follow the link for embedded hyperlinks)
For many years on this site I've critiqued the demagogic tendencies of a number of the 'leaders' of the modern skeptical movement (see the bottom of this post for some links). I've often faced resistance (and sometimes hostility) from card-carrying skeptics for pointing out the foibles of these so-called champions of science, and the dangers of having such people as figureheads of a movement dedicated to truth and reason - but I had no inkling that in the space of just a few short years the reputations of a number of them would begin coming undone at their own hands.
The first tremors began, perhaps, two years ago with the 'Elevatorgate' scandal within skepticism, in which Richard Dawkins outed his 'drunk uncle' persona to those within skepticism by entering a controversial argument he didn't need to engage in, and making comments that were always going to set off a firestorm.
Just a few months later, the previously Teflon-coated James 'The Amazing' Randi was caught at the center of his own scandal when his partner of more than two decades, Jose Alvarez, was caught and pleaded guilty to identity theft, after overstaying his visa in the 1980s. Though many felt sympathy for both Randi and his partner's dilemma, there were also questions over how much Randi knew or was involved in the crime - a not-particularly-good look for the much celebrated champion of truth and honesty.
Randi's credibility devolved further earlier this year when Will Storr's book The Heretics brought Randi's Social Darwinist-like philosophies into the spotlight, as well as Randi's own confession that he sometimes lies to win his arguments.
A few months later, prominent skeptical voice Brian Dunning (of the popular Skeptoid podcast) pleaded guilty to one charge of wire fraud for his part in a scheme to 'hack' eBay's affiliate marketing porgram which netted millions of dollars for the group.
This week, Richard Dawkins once again put his foot it with a provocative tweet about the lack of Nobel Prizes in the Islamic world (if you want to understand why it was a stupid tweet, swap 'Islam' for 'women' in the tweet and his later 'reflections' on the matter). This time, it seems that Dawkins may have put the final straw on the camel's back: Owen Jones wrote that Dawkins could no longer "be left to represent atheists"; Martin Robbins wrote that atheism "will leave Dawkins behind"; Tom Chivers asked him "to please be quiet"; and Nesrine Malik said Dawkins himself was as irrational "as an Islamic extremist".
There's a fair feeling of chickens coming home to roost in these incidents, but this week flocks of previously hidden fowl seem to have emerged from every dark shadow in the world of skepticism. Some two years on from the 'Elevatorgate' incident, skeptical speaker and writer Karen Stolznow used her blog at Scientific American to note that she herself was a victim of sexual harassment by "a predator" within the skeptical movement. This individual, a well-known media commentator and editor of one of skepticism's flagship publications was subsequently named by P.Z. Myers on his blog (after what Myers said was a flood of corroborating emails). A former JREF employee then spoke out about continuous unethical behaviour at Randi's foundation. Then another blogger named yet another high-end skeptic/atheist and well-credentialed scientist of acting improperly, before withdrawing his name (though again that hasn't stopped P.Z. Myers). And if all that wasn't enough, at the end of the week P.Z. Myers followed up with testimony from someone he knows regarding what the victim describes as her 'rape' by one of the most prominent of all skeptics during a skeptical conference (a blog post that has generated some 2000 3000 comments now).
Whether each of the accusations is valid or not, and whether the naming of certain individuals is proper, is not part of my argument here. But what has become clear is that the former figureheads of the skeptical movement finally now have a (long-awaited) skepticism being applied to their own actions and pronouncements, and a number of them are being revealed for the pretenders they are. I'd like to think that this is the end of skeptical demagoguery, and the beginning of a new, more intelligent, self-critiquing skeptical movement - though perhaps it's more just a fragmentation, as Myers and Randi and others now just seem to have their own righteous armies fighting somewhat of an internal civil war in skepticism. I'm still hoping for the former though, as intelligent skepticism is a much-needed element of modern discourse, but something that has been very rare indeed to this point.
He was also describing the deviance of the elite in the most natural, amused and unemotional manner. He then went on to describe how he, as a child, had been abused by a 'loving and caring' neighbour and how this experience had brought him joy and love :O 
