Still digging that hole
Andrew Brown is still at it – still being shameless. It’s been pretty thoroughly shown by now that he misrepresented what Dawkins said on the infamous page 326. So what is his response? A frank apology at last? No.
Richard Dawkins himself has been in this thread a few times. If he had wanted to, he could have stated quite clearly that he does not believe the state should have the right to intervene to remove children from their parents simply because of their theological beliefs.
Interesting. Brown misrepresents what Dawkins wrote. Several commenters point that out, and at least one pastes in the whole passage by way of evidence. Brown simply reiterates his misrepresentation. Commenters go on pointing out that the misrepresentation is a misrepresentation. Brown says it’s up to Dawkins to set the record straight.
The guy is a journalist. Journalists are expected to get their facts right in the first place, and to correct them if they make a mistake. The guy is also a member of society and an adult. Adult members of society are expected not to misrepresent people and to apologize and clear things up if they make a mistake. Brown is making a complete horse’s ass of himself on both counts.
This guy is a journalist! Really?! It’s quite clear that Daniel Dennett, whatever insulting things he said, must have got something right. Imagine writing a followup titled ‘Why I left the philosophers out’, and doing it again! He still leaves them out. He mentions Dennett. Harris is a philosopher – I suppose – though he’s doing more in cognitive science now. It’s one of those bridge disciplines. But nothing about Grayling – who writes all the time for the Guardian. Nothing about people like Michael Martin (who edits the Cambridge Companion), or Michel Onfray. So he’s still leaving the philosophers out. Just because of Dennett?! And he thinks that makes an article. Wow! Dennett really got under Andrew’s skin!
Ophelia,
I hope your readers will see for themselves whether or not commenters at CiF have “pretty well shown” that Brown misrepresented Dawkins. I hope they will notice how you seemed to disappear from the conversation entirely when asked to provide any plausible mechanism Humphrey might have had in mind to protect children from having their minds addled by religious parents that does not involve compelling those parents not to transmit their doctrines.
You seem much more invested in painting Andrew Brown as craven and dishonest, and Dawkins and Humphrey as noble defenders of truth and justice, than in actually confronting these ideas critically.
The next note up – Fun and games at the madrassa – clearly shows that transmitting doctrines can have pretty lethal effect on young people. This shouldn’t be in question. As a society we may determine limits to the kind of thing parents may freely transmit to their children without concern being expressed by those concerned for child welfare.
These are things that develop with time. At one time very few adults believed women who said they had been abused as children, and very few acknowledged that children were being abused. Sometimes, efforts to protect children from abuse have been themselves abusive, as some cases have shown.
That doesn’t mean that abuse doesn’t happen. It does indicate that, given the privacy that families and other situations in which children find themselves provide for abuse (clergy vestries and confessionals, for example, private schools where supervising adults are sometimes alone with children, etc.), detecting abuse is not a straightforward ‘here’s the plausible mechanism’. Detecting abuse is still a very hit and miss affair, even with sexual, physical and psychological abuse, of which latter, I suggest, religious abuse may be a part. The demands that you are making on Ophelia here are uncalled for in this context, and indeed have no definitive answer, even for types of abuse generally recognised. Child welfare authorities are not entirely unfamiliar with the use of religious doctrine to abuse children.
I think Andrew Brown, by the way, is craven and dishonest, and was rightly characterised by Dennett as being so (some combination of ‘slum’ and ‘journalism’ comes to mind). He is clearly not as careful as he might be, and his implausible reason for excluding philosophers from consideration is contemptible, given the large number of philosophers who write about atheism.
Chris Schoen,
I beg your pardon? Who the hell are you, the Comment is Free police? I didn’t see any request to provide any plausible mechanism etc etc, I don’t read every word of every comment, and nor am I required to. If I “seemed to disappear from the conversation entirely” it could be because I was, you know, not on the computer; we’re not required to spend all day and all night at CiF merely because we commented, you know.
I’m not interested in ‘painting’ Brown as anything, I’m interested in what he has (of his own free will) been doing. I’m not invested in defending Dawkins or Humphrey – as I said here and I think at CiF, Brown could perfectly well have made reasonable criticisms of Dawkins’s book, and it’s puzzling that he chose to flail wildly and miss the mark instead.
Yeah I’m pretty sure ‘my’ readers will manage to see for themselves how accurately Brown quoted Dawkins – if they bother to look – but they’re not required to, you know.
FWIW, googling on “Chris Schoen” produces six million, four hundred and eighty thousand hits. Our correspondent may have adopted the handle in an attempt to disappear into the crowd.
FWIW, ‘Necromongers, are a race of pilgrims who travel across the universe in search of the U n d e r v e r s e.
Their leader, the “holy half-dead, systematically commands his Necromonger Legion Vast to overrun worlds and convert its inhabitants into Necromongers; those that oppose conversion die.’
Well, as long as one of these, not so ‘nice’ pilgrims does not try coercion or conversion tactics by riding roughshod over the B&W blogosphere, in the guise of throwing mental and emotional testosterone all over the site, all will be in ordnung.
Ophelia,
I retract my insinuation that you dropped out of comments on CiF to evade the question. That was smeary of me.
Nevertheless, since we’re talking about it now, I’d be curious to know your answer.
Elliot and Lord Marshall,
I’m afraid “Chris Schoen” is my given name, for all its blandness. This commenting tool doesn’t seem to have a field for website metadata, but if it did, it would direct you to:
underverse.blogspot.com
Nothing to do with Necromancy I assure you.
Cheers,
Chris
Chris,
Thanks for the retraction.
Oh, I see – underverse. Right, I did answer you at CiF.
I answered the question in the earlier thread, and just now in a reply to someone else at CiF, and I think I’ll write a post about it here. The short version is that seeing a problem is one thing and thinking there is a solution is another. It’s not an evasion or a waffle: I just really don’t think there is any good (much less easy) solution to the problem of religious indoctrination of children – but that doesn’t mean I have to give up thinking it is a problem.
I think Dawkins is much closer to that version of things than he is to the ‘bust the parents’ version – but that is largely interpretation, and I could be wrong.
Now I see why you are so (yes, I think this is the right word) biased in your approach to Dawkins. Clearly, like Andrew Brown, Dawkins presents something of a problem to you. Indeed, I think it could argued, based on the bit of reading that I’ve done at underverse.blogspot.com (which I find a bit underwhelming), that your misunderstanding of Dawkins is almost total. So, it stands to reason that Andrew Brown just must make more sense.
I also think (by the way) that you, not unlike Brown, cannot understand Dennett’s Consciousness Explained either. Now, take Dawkins and Dennett, and then read Flanagan on the soul. It may make more sense. Flanagan’s The really hard problem is a nice introduction to finding sense in the relation between “what Sellars calls ‘the manifest image of man-in-the-world’ and ‘the scientific image of-man-in-the-world’.” (p.5)
Just in case you thought that Dawkins or Dennett are really denying that you see a red thing when you see one. But you do need to come at them with a whole lot more background.
It’s always nice to have new readers, Eric, but next time you visit I hope you’ll have some substantive criticisms rather than just pronouncements on how I don’t “get it.” No one’s understanding is improved by that.
There comes a point of diminishing marginal returns. I thought I had reached it. Your readings are so far off the mark that I really can’t say that responding would be useful for you, or reading further would be useful for me. The web is a vast and uneven space.
Oh dear. Chris wrote a really rather chilling comment on Brown’s post. Pain and suffering is inevitable in a child –
“But not all pain is harmful–in fact most pain is not harmful if the child is given an adequate foundation of safety, trust and worth…I myself think the doctrine of eternal torment is abhorrent…But we have no good evidence that this doctrine reliably causes lasting psychological damage, and we should not pretend that we do.”
So apparently causing emotional pain is all right because we have no evidence that it reliably causes lasting psychological damage.
I’m sorry, Chris (if you read this) but I think that’s appalling.
(I said so in more detail over there.)
I notice, Chris, that over on the CiF blog you wrote:
Of course, you can quote chapter and verse of evidence for that claim? You want others to observe the empirical niceties, perhaps, but are exempt from them yourself?