Richard Dawkins, the only man with the balls to say what nobody else is thinking.
Cringe as usual, I never liked the guy. A pretentious old windbag imo.
Well, I guess the trash took itself out.
Whenever I see some educated individual trying to make some sort of ‘credible’ stance against trans rights I just see an overgrown child.
These are grown adults who are angry that the simplistic worldview that they were taught as children doesn’t hold up to reality.
It was challenged by the mere existence of people who are different than themselves and they don’t want to confront the possibility that they were wrong(the people they care about were also wrong), so they the blame trans people for evoking those emotions instead of doing some introspection.
I first wanted to ask why the atheism foundation supports any religion at all… then I read the article, then I saw the ’ '… what an asshat.
Do you really think that’s all there is to it? Don’t you think your worldview is a bit too simplistic? The one that gets the last word isn’t always that one who is right you know.
Richard “Culturally Christian” Dawkins can go meme himself out of the meme pool.
I get, given how right wing, nasty, anti women and anti LGBTQ+ the American church is, why you would want to put Richard Dawkins, who is so nasty and anti trans (probably among other things) into the same bucket, but he’s British, not American, and famously very firmly anti-religion.
He has always been a dick, whatever he was trying to convince people of, and it’s no surprise he continues to be a dick in his old age. It doesn’t mean he’s a Christian. He’s really, really, really not.
Some context for you: https://skepchick.org/2024/04/richard-dawkins-cultural-christian-or-supremacist-bigot/
Surplus extra-topical context: https://religiondispatches.org/norway-massacre-suspect-anders-behring-breivik-hitler-the-jerusalem-post-editorial/ (you can find his manifesto online)
OK, the first article points out that he has a lot in common with the American right wing churches in that they don’t actually believe a word of it and just use it as a cultural sheild for their hatred, which is a fair point.
The second one doesn’t seem as related.
The second one is about how far [right] “Culturally Christian” can go.
“Culturally Christian” is not the same as “Christian“. The man clearly holds on to many of the perspectives he picked up being raised Anglican.
I’m one of those too, not all that voluntarily. I carry a lot of unconscious baggage left over from being raised Catholic. Not all of it is bad: there’s a tradition of critical thinking and cultural engagement that is positive. But I occasionally still get twinges of guilt about things that are not in my control, or that are not things to be guilty about in the first place.
Can we have a transgender religion though? Not to encompass the trans rights movement but to support it. Make memes religious art and Blåhaj a figure of worship. Girls’/boys’ nights, enby sleepovers etc. could be classified as gender-affirming rituals. Use constitutional protection of religious expression to support free gender expression. Medication and procedures would of course be sacred too. Members would be required to maintain a support network for all trans folk (including non-members).
the last thing we need is another religion. All that’s required in this case is basic human decency, which religions have been appallingly bad at delivering.
It would not be a religion in a traditional sense, just a way to wrap existing ideas to exploit the legal protection of religion. The “rituals” are whatever members would be inclined to do anyway and fits the spirit.
Anyway, you’re probably right that it would be a bad idea in the long term. Every major religion has been abused by people from within or outside and I can’t think of effective safeguards for this one.
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“Boo! Hiss! Protect the citadel!”
-United Atheist Alliance
(I’m mocking dogmatic pop sci types, not attempting to denigrate trans rights or identities)
Since some people are getting a paywall I’ll post the article text here:
Richard Dawkins has resigned from an atheism foundation over its “imposition” of a “new religion” of transgenderism.
Prof Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and atheist, stepped down from the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) on Saturday after it censored an article supporting the belief that gender is biological.
Prof Dawkins accused the group of caving to the “hysterical squeals” of cancel culture after it deleted the article from its website, saying it was a “mistake” to have published it.
His resignation followed that of two other scientists, Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker, who accused the foundation of imposing an ideology with the “dogma, blasphemy, and heretics” of a religion.
The scientists’ resignations come after FFRF’s Freethought Now! website published a piece last month by Kat Grant, entitled “What is a Woman?”, which argued that “any attempt to define womanhood on biological terms is inadequate” and that “a woman is whoever she says she is”.
In response to the piece, Prof Coyne, a fellow board member and biologist, wrote an article last week called “Biology is not Bigotry”, in which he defended “the biological definition of ‘woman’ based on gamete type” – or reproductive cells.
However, FFRF later pulled the article after a backlash and released a lengthy statement apologising for the “distress” it had caused.
“Despite our best efforts to champion reason and equality, mistakes can happen, and this incident is a reminder of the importance of constant reflection and growth,” co-presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor wrote.
“Publishing this post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values and principles. We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.”
‘Quasi-religious’ ideology
Following the atheist foundation’s decision to unpublish his article, Prof Coyne accused the group of peddling a “quasi-religious” ideology.
“That is a censorious behavior I cannot abide,” he wrote in an email. “I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that ‘distressing’ and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.”
“The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (‘a woman is whoever she says she is’), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.”
Prof Pinker, the US-Canadian psychologist, announced his resignation from the board by lamenting that the FFRF was “no longer a defender of freedom from religion but the imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics”.
Prof Dawkins described publishing Grant’s “silly and unscientific” article as a “minor error of judgment”, but that the decision to remove Prof Coyne’s rebuttal was “an act of unseemly panic”.
He continued: “Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own advisory board. A board which I now leave with regret.”
Grant is a non-binary author and fellow at the FFRF, focusing on state versus Church issues that specifically impact the LGBTQ-plus community.
In their November article, Grant argued a woman cannot be defined as someone with a vagina, uterus or the ability to conceive, as this would exclude intersex people, women who have hysterectomies and those who have gone through menopause.
Grant claimed using biology to define female identity is “inadequate” and alleged that the views of groups who have fought against gender ideology “disregard both medical science and lived experience”.
‘New definition of woman’
In his response to Grant’s article, Prof Coyne accused the author of attempting “to force ideology onto nature” in order to “concoct a new definition of ‘woman’”.
“Why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality,” he wrote. “Instead, in biology ‘sex’ is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells.
“It is not ‘transphobic’ to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights.”
Founded in 1976, the FFRF is a US non-profit that promotes the separation of church and state.
Ms Laurie Gaylor, the FFRF president, said: “We have had the greatest respect for Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, and are grateful that they sat on our honorary board for so many years.
“We do not feel that support for LGBTQ rights against the religious backlash in the United States is mission creep. This growing difference of opinion probably made such a parting inevitable.”
He’s right, but religion is pretty natural for humans. Any kind of divorce between religion and core ideals of the society lasts only as long as the cultural movement behind that divorce doesn’t create its own religion. Because the majority of humans are not independent thinking and not rational, even if they are part of a crowd united by stated belief in independent thinking and rationalism.
That’s why ideologies can be divided into “creating a resilient structure of society, because apes will be apes” and “fixing the apes to be better humans”, and the latter kind always fails. Interestingly enough, this division is orthogonal both to right\left and to libertarian\authoritarian categories.
My point was - a person may identify as whatever they want, but they were, in the vast majority of cases, born clearly a man or clearly a woman.
I don’t think he’s against that identity. But to reject reality of nature because of self-identification and to try to impose that upon popular scientific discourses is a religion indeed, just sort of a protest against religious mainstream, not much different from East Roman iconoclasm or Jewish hassidic movements.
Or Christianity itself the way it conquered the old religions in the east Mediterranean, especially Egypt. Egyptian ancient religion from that age was very complex and well-canonized, and with apparently most people just as full of it as today of Christianity. While early Christianity in Egypt was a compact, simple and beautiful set of abstract beliefs ; in some sense Christianity of that time was less magical and allegorical than old religions, but at the same time claimed that its smaller miracles were true.
So he is complaining about the quasi religious zealotry that permeates the ideology as, he himself is anti religion, and resigned of the place because it is now peddling to what is basically a new religion
Makes total sense actually
I agree. And censorship is not the way. I’d only criticize that it goes both ways, as he seems to disregard the hypotheses that support transgender views with equal dogmatism or lack of rigor.
But there’s nothing religious or dogmatic about what the FFRF did. Dawkins is just framing it that way because it’s how he became popular.
He’s just an asshole who constantly acts like an asshole, and people are done with his shit, so he’s having a little fit on his way out the door.
If anyone is acting “religiously” here, it’s Dawkins, who constantly lies and misrepresents medical science because it doesn’t match up the beliefs he grew up with.
Rejecting science (biology in this case) is one major component of religion. Others are dogma (a set of principles that are taken as axioms and never contested, eg gender can be whatever you want it to be), heresy (eg offering a scientific view that differs from dogma, like the fact that biology presents two genders), censorship and apostasy (removing such an article for disagreeing with the dogma, regardless of scientific facts).
Seems to me like Dawkins slightly overreacted, but it’s understandable because he did so based on the religious-like fervor exhibited by those who would remove an article published by a biologist, debating biological classification, because they disagree with its implications.
For all the talk about the unscientific right, it seems to me like the left ignores science just as much when it’s not what they want to hear - what their group has already agreed to be true. This video comes to mind: https://youtu.be/zB_OApdxcno
heresy (eg offering a scientific view that differs from dogma, like the fact that biology presents two genders)
I often find – and such appears to be the case here – that when people make these arguments that they either do not know the difference between sex and gender, or are feigning ignorance.
Sex is not binary, and the “anti-trans” folks pretend that it is. Intersex people exist.
Gender is not solely biological.
Who is rejecting biology?
Other than Dawkins I mean?
It seems like you’re confused between sex and gender?
Gender is a synonim for sex. It is also used when speaking about words - in some languages, words have a gender.
That’s stupid.
Gender and sex are not exactly the same thing, and you have to be purposefully obtuse to ignore the entire context of the conversation. I won’t entertain your faux ignorance. You’ve had multiple people correct you on this, and you haven’t responded to any of them, because you know you’re not up to the task.
If you say sex=gender, you are factually incorrect. Try again. If they were exactly synonymous, then words would also have a sex. Tell me where “telephone’s” genitalia are.
I know gender and sex aren’t the same thing. You could tell that because I provided two meanings for gender, only one of which was sex. Your problem seems to be I don’t accept your definition of gender.
But this isn’t really your problem, because it’s not your definition. Instead, it’s a newer definition that’s been tacked onto the word, that you have accepted and propagated, and now are jumping on others for not doing the same. I ‘d be lying if I said I don’t understand why you’d want to change the meaning, to make it something else. It’s a good word for you. It’s a word that is already known, so it’s in the collective mindset. A new word would be harder to get ‘out there’, while another (weaker - lesser used) word wouldn’t generate as much buzz and discussion when you misuse it. It’s a cunning thing to do. It’s also unacceptable and vile. If we’re changing words’ meanings, then you’re welcome to find out
That’s stupid.
Has in the meanwhile been changed to mean “I concede that I am in the wrong regarding this matter and will take myself out of the conversation for future replies”.
To reinforce this change in meaning, I’ll be blocking you now. Have a good rest of the day.
I’m old and trying to keep up with the times, remind me; what is the difference between transsexual and transgender? It seems like the word, transsexual, I haven’t heard in a longass time.
“Transsexual” is kind of being phased out in favor of “Transgender,” I believe.
All your premises are wrong. The existence of trans people doesn’t reject biology, quite the contrary, advanced biology supports the notion that sex can vary beyond a binary and is quite distinct from gender and sexual identity (which are psychosocial phenomena). There is no organized dogma on the LGBTQ+ support community. If anything, in fighting, disagreement and diversity is what defines it, not homogeneity or conformity. Our understanding of sexual identities, gender and transexuality is the result of scientific discourse, through and through. From phenomenological descriptions, to anthropological, sociological, psychological and biological study. Our theories and understanding of transexual individuals has changed radically as new evidence has come forth and discoveries and theories evolve around it. It is quite the opposite of dogma. On heresy, there’s only one thing that is considered universally bad, and is the idea that a group of people has to die due to something they can’t control and aren’t at fault for. Like declaring murder against trans people for being born transgender, yes, that’s a definitive faux pas and you will be ostracized for wanting minorities dead. This is a moral stance, but that’s it, it doesn’t imply adhesion to any organized enforcement of belief. There’s also no censorship or apostasy in here. The concept of censorship doesn’t apply as the FFRF is not a government. Coyne is perfectly allowed to publish his ideas somewhere else, just not there. Finally, apostasy doesn’t apply because this is not an organized religion.
The thing here is that Coyne and Dawkins want to declare themselves apostles of their anti-religion movement. Because that’s how they were raised and they lack the critical thinking skills to realize the irony of the situation they’re in. They are uncritically defending Anglican religious values and objectively acting against the anti-religion they claimed to champion. They’re exactly the kind of asshats they would’ve debated against 10 or 20 years ago.
Like declaring murder against trans people for being born transgender
was dawkins suggesting this in his opinion piece and if not then why remove it
censorship does not require a government and it does apply
People giving a biological stance against transgender women don’t even make sense because there are many supporting pieces of biological evidence which show that gender exists on a spectrum.
Indeed, a woman is whoever says they’re a woman, and it’s very likely that their choice is biologically driven. I know some people might not like a comment like this because it’s “trans med”, and I get the impulse to shoot down comments like this out of fear of being exclusionary, but if you really think about it this doesn’t exclude any known or unknown gender or identity.
Dawkin’s quote:
Prof Dawkins described publishing Grant’s “silly and unscientific” article as a “minor error of judgment”, but that the decision to remove Prof Coyne’s rebuttal was “an act of unseemly panic”.
He continued: “Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own advisory board. A board which I now leave with regret.”
He was/is upset about pulling an article and that’s why he resigned.
And the person whose article was pulled also has a point:
That is a censorious behavior I cannot abide,” he wrote in an email. “I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that ‘distressing’ and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.”
“The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (‘a woman is whoever she says she is’), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.”
Both of their issues was the article elaborating Coyne’s position was yanked.
This is a pedantic miscommunication issue, which is pretty much their point.
Instead of discussing the issue and coming to an understanding, discussion is immediately shut down.
That’s why they’re resigning and it’s valid.
It’s valid to get mad at the article being removed and not discussed. But I have to say, that argument calling “gender ideology” a religion and its justification reads exactly as a right-wing anti-woke argument calling science a religion. Or the way I like to translate it, “everything I don’t like is X” syndrome. Be it woke, religion, or anything else. It’s a blatant display of rigid thinking. Just because someone didn’t intent to hurt doesn’t mean their actions can’t hurt, and that’s a big part of critical feminist theory (of which they might not entirely understand much about). Our actions and words have material and social consequences that extend beyond our intentions. Maybe try to understand why they were injurious instead of throwing a performative tantrum.
The problem here i think is “we remove this article because people got upset” this behaviour is basically the same as “we remove this article because (religious) people got upset”
People in the comment seems to have issue with the person or the article, but that not the problem. The person can be the worst, and the article could be written by chatgpt, but at the end should not be taken down unless it violate the website or publishing terms and condition if any.
I would buy that if Dawkins didn’t have a history of making bigoted statements about trans people.
He literally lost a Humanist of the Year award because of it a few years ago
He may have other motives and may be a total dirt hat, but I’m the spirit of pedantic disagreement, the argument given still holds water.
Dawkins is a zionist
Dawkins schtick was pretending he was not racist but hated Islam. Turns out the man is simply racist.
Same with Sam Harris.
Something about doors and arses.
He lost all credibility and relevance when he piled into the bigotry clown car. Atheism doesn’t have saints.
Yeah turns out Dick is true to his name and just goes with whatever philosophy lets him argue with people more. Pretty standard for a lot of r/atheism types.
“Why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality,” he wrote. “Instead, in biology ‘sex’ is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells. “It is not ‘transphobic’ to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights.”
As a fellow psychologist, I must regretfully state that this is the stupidest thing ever written by a psychologist. Our entire science is built upon the notion that feelings indeed create and modify (social) reality*. Sex is not gender, and he fumbled the most basic differentiation of concepts.
Heteronormative gender roles, on the other hand, are categorically a form of ideology and to defend them in place of basic human decency is a disgrace, good riddance to both asshats, I say. Specially with such a tenous biological argument that any good biologist can tell you is patently false. Gametes are not binary, there are hundred of thousands of intersex individuals for which this narrow definition doesn’t apply.
Grant is absolutely right, but I don’t expect the mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme” to ever understand social sciences. His book is a pathetic pseudo scientific intrusion in a field he doesn’t understand in the slightest.
*: some philosophers would even argue that there’s no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.
This conflates material reality and ideology, though. Not to say a cultural or social reality isn’t real in its own way, just that it is preceded by objective, material reality. I think the arguments tend to boil down to people prioritising one or the other and then refusing to budge.
I’m pretty laid back about it but draw the line at people attempting to assert there is no such thing as material conditions. I’m not explicitly “Marxist” but definitely Marxian in the sense that I think all theories need to be anchored in material reality in the first instance. So gender categories exist, but are part of the superstructure.
The moment humans had enough brain power to form and ideologies, they stated influencing material reality. Ideology as a concept therefore also precedes part of material reality.
In other words: The idea of gender expression has influenced human selection, therefore it’s part of our current gene pool, just like sexuality. (Because gender is what sexual attraction can have preference for, not karyotype)
That’s why we say the base precedes the superstructure “in the first instance”.
This is where I’m at. Got banned over on r/atheism for presenting a similar sentiment.
Fuck r/atheism. It’s a cesspool of circlejerkers not ready to engage with crtitical thinking.
Eternal September is a bitch.
Dawkins isn’t a psychologist afaict. I had to check.
He isn’t which is why I called him intrusist there at the end for writing a book about psychology and neurology which he doesn’t understand. But the quote is from Coyne, another biologist who wrote the reply and was supported by Pinker, who is a psychologist and should’ve known better. None of these people know what they’re talking about and are acting in this whole thing from passion instead of reason and evidence. Which is ironic, I believe.
mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme”
He coined the word to mean a thought or idea that spreads through a population. Internet memes are completely unrelated to his usage. It’s not like he created the first insanity wolf meme or something.
Yes, and it is the most useless concept ever committed to text. It’s ironic it was coopted by internet culture and then ridiculed and reduced to absurdity.
He just tried to poorly rebrand the concepts of cultural imagery, and social constructs but with less evidence. It’s akin to me going “I propose the term garggle, it is water that flows down by gravity following the contours of the solid ground”. It’s like, yeah, we call it water and when it does that we call it a river, you would know if you opened a book about it anytime in the past century. You could summarize that book as “better read a book on sociology, it’s more useful”.
Nah, this is a bad take. Memes are a sociological analog to genetic genes. They’re units of cultural information that mutate, recombine, and evolve in the cultural space the same way genes mutate, recombine, and evolve in the gene pool. It’s a poignant observation about the behavior of viral cultural concepts that transcends merely describing their existence. The parallel to genetic behavior is a useful observation that, to my knowledge, was not really acknowledged before he coined the term.
It was acknowledged before he coined it. He just summed it up better than people had previously. From Wikipedia:
The idea of language as a virus had already been introduced by William S. Burroughs as early as 1962 in his novel The Ticket That Exploded, and continued in The Electronic Revolution, published in 1970 in The Job.
The foundation of memetics in its full modern incarnation was launched by Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture in 1995,[15] and was accelerated with the publication in 1996 of two more books by authors outside the academic mainstream: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by former Microsoft executive turned motivational speaker and professional poker-player Richard Brodie, and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab. Lynch claimed to have conceived his theory totally independently of any contact with academics in the cultural evolutionary sphere, and apparently was not aware of The Selfish Gene until his book was very close to publication.
What Dawkins did was make the concept more analogous to a gene than a virus, but it’s basically the same idea.
The difference between a gene and a virus is method of reproduction. The genetic model, I think, is considerably more apt than the viral. Memes combine with other memes, they have memetically distinct “offspring”. I think even that distinction is useful.
It is useful, I agree. I’m just saying the idea was already around. He definitely refined it and improved upon it though.
Memetics in action.
I can accept there’s people who like the concept but there’s a reason it didn’t take hold anywhere except pop science and is a theoretical dead end. It has a ton of epistemological flaws that make it useless as a scientific construct. It is unfalsifiable and it provides no venues for theoretical or experimental developments. As I stated, there are far more useful constructs in sociology and social psychology that allows the analysis of social constructs, cultural imagery, beliefs, values, worldviews, etc. With over a century of epistemological, theoretical and methodological traditions that have provided useful advancements to our scientific understanding, and provided tools for further development. Memes are barely a fun simile with genes that was cool to make YouTube videos about ten years ago, but that’s about it.
Hard disagree. I don’t think you actually understand the premise.
I don’t think you have ever read the premise beyond the cliffsnotes. But it is not my job to educate strangers on the internet.
I read Selfish Gene, like, a few months ago.
Take the L buddy💀🙏
some philosophers would even argue that there’s no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.
Some politicians would argue that social reality is oppressive and must be replaced with social unreality - http://soulism.net/
My opinion of anti-theists in general is that they’re like “fat hate”, just basic bigots who think they found a loophole. In anti-theist spaces for example, Islamophobia isn’t tolerated, it’s enforced.
Dawkins was always a public bigot. It’s no wonder he talks just like American conservative Christian, he’s been in bed with them for years.
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It’s valid to get mad at the article being removed and not discussed. But I have to say, that argument calling “gender ideology” a religion and its justification reads exactly as a right-wing anti-woke argument calling science a religion. Or the way I like to translate it, “everything I don’t like is X” syndrome. Be it woke, religion, or anything else. It’s a blatant display of rigid thinking. Just because someone didn’t intent to hurt doesn’t mean their actions can’t hurt, and that’s a big part of critical feminist theory (of which they might not entirely understand much about). Our actions and words have material and social consequences that extend beyond our intentions. Maybe try to understand why they were injurious instead of throwing a performative tantrum.
Edit: this comment is a reply to another comment and somehow got duplicated by lemmy as both a reply to OP and the comment. My apologies.
He’s 83 and can’t handle the changing world, he can go spend his last years alone like every old asshole does.
