Dawkins said something and Somebody on Salon is making it into something it isn't.

[Warren Stupidity]

Here: http://www.salon.com/2014/10/14/richard_dawkins_religion_isnt_the_problem_in_the_middle_east_partner/

Pretty sure somebody here on DU will attempt to regurgitate the deliberate misunderstanding expressed in the link.

[skepticscott]

1. What, someone lied about what Richard Dawkins said?

Someone falsely attributed a statement to him? The author must be reading the Religion Group for tips on how to make shit up.

[AlbertCat]

2. I'm shocked....shocked I tell you....

Dawkins: " but I do think that a dominant part of the motivation for these young men has to be religion.”

Salon: "Dawkins’ statement is a huge divergence from the opinions of atheists like Sam Harris and Bill Maher, who continue to claim that religion is the primary motivator for radical terrorist groups like ISIS."


Yes shocked that Salon apparently doesn't know what "dominant part" means.... or "huge" for that matter.

[bvf]

3. Bookmarked.

Did a quick scan but need to revisit with more time. First impression is of a hit piece with a lot of journalistic opinion thrown in.

Thanks.

[trotsky]

6. "a hit piece with a lot of journalistic opinion thrown in"

You've just described every article about the "New Atheists" published in Salon over the past 10 years.

[arcane1]

4. And coming up next, water is wet and what goes up comes down.

He has to be the most picked-apart and scrutinized human being, when it comes to his statements and the desire to make scandals out of them. I'd be afraid to say anything!

[Warren Stupidity]

5. Plus Dawkins wrote a popularization of evolutionary biology in 1976

and it isn't being used as a textbook! So there AHTESITIS!

The comments are amusing. Seems like the same discussion we are having "over there".

[trotsky]

7. Why oh why is the straw man position assumed to be held by every vocal atheist?

Namely, that "religion is 100% to blame for every negative thing in the world."

Has ANYONE actually said that? FFS, even Sam Harris said that his recent beef was with particular forms of Islam, not all of it. Why are atheists' actual words and positions ignored?

Dawkins himself said that he's a 6 on the scale of 1 being certain a god exists and 7 being certain it doesn't. Does that stop him from being portrayed as a man "just as bad" as the worst religious extremist? Someone who needs to "go the way of the dinosaurs"??

Jeebus fuck.

[LostOne4Ever]

8. Cause that would go against their preconceived notions

about us.

They think we are complete bigots and are incapable of having nuanced opinions on a subject unless we are faithiests obsequiously fawning over religion ala S. E. Cupp.

Thus any time we say something like certain forms of Islam it is because we are covering our asses and we really mean (in their rankled minds) "ALL."

[bvf]

11. Because their critics find that much easier to do

than to grasp nuance?

Something more than a straw man argument seems to be going on here. It's almost as if some critics need to believe they're under constant attack for being responsible for all the world's ills. Perhaps it jibes better with what their lore tells them.

Us vs. them. On or off. Black and white. Repeat as necessary. No introspection required.

[onager]

9. Now here's a shock...

Dawkins’ remarks don’t even jibe with earlier comments he made in a piece he wrote for the Guardian back in 2001 ...

Holy shit! Stop the cyber-presses! Richard Dawkins isn't saying the same thing he said THIRTEEN YEARS AGO!1!

What a hypocritical asshat! Obviously can't be trusted.

The careful reader - or even the nearly illiterate reader - will also note that while the article purports to be about The Dawk, his name was used (again) to launch another sneering attack on the real Witch-of-the-Week: Sam Harris.

And Arel seems to conclude that Dawkins is morphing into a good guy, allowing that religion is only part of the problem. Something Dawkins has always said IIRC, but whatever.

Then there's the segue to U.S. foreign policy.

(I'm going to segue off on a rant here myself, which I know will surprise all of you...)

I'm getting tired of the idea that all problems in the Middle East are the responsibility of the Big Bad USA. OK, most of them for the past couple of decades.

But not always. Consider what happened in 1956, when Britain cooked up a scheme for "regime change" in Egypt. With France and Israel, British PM Anthony Eden came up with an invasion idea so klutzy and outrageous that no potboiler novelist would dare use it as a plot device. At the height of the Cold War, the US joined Russia in condemning that invasion in the UN and getting it stopped.

Zoom to the present - ISIS didn't come out of nowhere, and Middle Eastern leaders themselves have a LONG history of sucking up to fanatics for short-term gain. It always bites them in the ass:

1928, Arabia - King Abdul-Aziz bin Saud mostly unifies the Arabian Peninsula. He does so with the help of the deadly and extremely fanatical Ikhwan Army - a group so fanatical, they believe Saud's Wahhabism is too moderate. Think about that for a minute.

The Ikhwan demand that Saud immediately establish a "true" Islamic state, mostly by killing anybody who disagrees with them. But King Saud has a problem - the British still control parts of the Arabian Peninsula, and King Saud has been accepting aid from those heathen infidel devils. He knows exactly what will happen if he turns against the British.

Conclusion - the Ikhwan Army declares war on Saud The Infidel and launches the last mass camel attack known in world history. They are slaughtered by the Vickers machine guns helpfully provided by the heathen infidel devils, and become a footnote in history. Which could have just as easily happened to the Saud family.

1952 - Egypt gets its first Egyptian ruler in 2500 years, Gamel Abdel Nasser. Nasser gets into power by accepting lots of help from Hassan el-Banna and his fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood soon makes it clear that Egypt really needs...guess what? Yep, a "true, pure" Islamic government. This is in direct conflict with Nasser's vision of a progressive, secular Arab state, one he hopes will spread throughout the Middle East (with him ruling it all, but that's another rant.)

Soon the Brotherhood turns to direct action and tries to overthrow the govt. Nasser cracks down, Hassan el-Banna is captured and executed. The same eventually happens to the intellectual leader of the fundamentalists, Sayyid Qutb - but only after Nasser desperately tries to broker peace with the MB, and offers Qutb any job he wants in the Egyptian govt. The Muslim Brotherhood remains a thorn in the side of Egyptian govts. to this day. Thanks to a never-ending cycle of cracking down, followed by attempts to co-operate with them.

And anyone who believes Muslims can't be racist should read some of Sayyid Qutb's stuff. Easily found online.

/rant

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. Worth linking to the original interview, so you get what was replaced by the ellipsis

and the question:

OB: Well, I know that you have been a critic of organised religion for quite some time, and you spoke about religion and evil. But I wonder if the pictures, the footage that we see coming out of Syria, of Iraq – you know, with the Islamic State executions, crucifixions, decapitations – if they leave you shocked? If somebody told you five years ago that we would be dealing with a phenomenon of such proportions, do you think you would be surprised?

RD: Of course I would, I'm totally shocked. I think it's absolutely horrible. You're presumably raising the question, “Is religion responsible?” Religion itself is not responsible for this. These are savage people. You could ask whether religion is responsible for the support that they're getting. And there I think it probably is. I mean, they are getting support from people in Britain, people in Europe, and young men are going out to Syria and Iraq to join IS. And the motivation for that is in some sense religion. It's also this feeling of political involvement. It's a feeling that it's “us against them.” And I think that quite a large number of young Muslims feel kind of beleaguered against the rest of the world. And so religion in some sense might be just an excuse, but I do think that a dominant part of the motivation for these young men has to be religion.

OB: Well, I would like to explore that a little bit later, but before we go there, if we could look at the biological aspect of it. And I think it, you are an evolutionary biologist, and probably you would agree that as species, we develop some adaptations to prevent us from excessive gore. I mean, killing itself is not easy. And you can argue that perhaps they're savage people and just a bunch of psychopaths, but there are a lot of them. Their number is too high to believe that there is something that is psychologically wrong with all of them. So, I wonder if this type of violence itself is not natural? Because, I mean, some people have, for example, a fainting reflex at the sight of blood. You know, it's difficult to kill people with your bare hands, and they do it very, very easily.

RD: Well, a small number of them do. I mean, the ones who actually wield the knife are presumably psychopaths, and you probably could find them in any society. But perhaps you need to make a distinction between them and the people who support them. I am worried by the fact that so many people know about these awful decapitations and so on, and yet still join up. That, I think, you're perfectly right, that is a worrying thing. As for the biology of it, there's a tussle in evolutionary biology between a tendency to selfish violence and a tendency to altruistic cooperation. My book, The Selfish Gene, my first book, is sort of about that tussle. It's somehow, sometimes being misinterpreted as an advocacy of selfishness or a statement that we're all selfish. It's not that at all, of course. It's mostly about altruism. But there is a kind of tension between selfishness and altruism, both of which are favoured by natural selection, Darwinian natural selection, in different circumstances.

http://rt.com/shows/worlds-apart-oksana-boyko/190352-religion-isis-violencia-politics/

So he's saying that the people directly doing the killing are the psychopaths you'd find in any population, but the support they're getting is mainly for religious reasons. I think that the 'support', in that case, is not just the way some Muslims are going out to support them now, but that a significant group of people, for religious reasons, has given those psychopaths support and power for a number of years, so that some of them are the leaders of ISIS, giving the orders for massacres, slavery and so on. In normal societies we do the best to render violent psychopaths powerless. Those who have given money to ISIS and the groups that it grew from, over the years, seem to have a religious motivation for it.

[Promethean]

12. Reminds me the Muslim response to Sept 11.

It was a horrible thing and I wouldn't condone it but...you kind of deserved it.