{"id":27,"date":"2012-09-17T15:53:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T15:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2012\/09\/17\/dawkins-anti-semitic-says-chief-rabbi\/"},"modified":"2013-01-09T13:53:24","modified_gmt":"2013-01-09T13:53:24","slug":"dawkins-anti-semitic-says-chief-rabbi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2012\/09\/17\/dawkins-anti-semitic-says-chief-rabbi\/","title":{"rendered":"Dawkins (book) Anti-Semitic, says Chief Rabbi"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has accused Richard Dawkins of being anti-semitic (POST SCRIPT – sachs subsequently explains it’s Dawkins’s work he is calling profoundly antisemitic, not Dawkins the man). That’s a pretty serious charge (even qualified by my PS).<\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/span><\/div>\n
In a BBC TV exchange (which you can view here<\/a>), Sacks says that a passage in Dawkins\u2019s book The God Delusion<\/em> – in which Dawkins says that “the God of the Old Testament” is a “vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser” as well as “misogynist”, “homophobic”, “racist”, “pestilential” and “infanticidal” – is \u201cprofoundly anti-semitic\u201d. According to Sacks, the passage reflects a centuries-old anti-Jewish attitude.<\/span><\/div>\n


\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course there are centuries-old anti-Jewish attitudes, but this is not an example.<\/span><\/div>\n


\n<\/span>According to Sacks, Dawkins has misunderstood those sections of the Hebrew Bible because he is a “Christian atheist” rather than a “Jewish atheist”.<\/span>
\n
\n<\/span>\"\"<\/a><\/span>
\nDawkins, says Sacks, reads the Old Testament in an “adversarial way,” and that is “Christian” because Christianity\u2019s New Testament is supposed to have “gone one better” than the Old Testament.<\/span>
\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The truth, of course, is that Dawkins read the Old Testament in the way almost anyone one would coming to it for the first time, be they Christian or not. <\/span><\/div>\n


\n<\/span>Alexander Waugh has a nice illustration of this in his book God – The Biography<\/span>:
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/span><\/div>\n
Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, had been annoying his friends by talking too much. They wagered he could not keep quiet for a week. Churchill, a keen gambler, thought he could win the bet by reading the Bible. But he didn’t last long. After a few pages, he was heard to exclaim, “God! God’s a shit!”<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n


\n<\/span>Randolph didn’t come to the shocking conclusion that God’s a shit because he was already committed to reading the Old Testament in an anti-semitic way, but because that’s the conclusion that any<\/em> sensible person would draw after reading it at first blush.\u00a0<\/span>
\n
\n<\/span>In fact, Dawkins’s point is hardly new. As the Christian Paul Copan points out<\/a>, Enlightenment thinkers like Robert Ingersoll were arguing back in the 19th Century that the God of the Old Testament was a cruel and unjust person, and that no one in their right mind could be a Christian as a result.<\/span>
\n
\n<\/span>As Sacks must surely be aware, Christians, just as much as Jews, have strived to show that the Old Testament God is not the monster he might seem to be.<\/span> They’re still at it. Here, for example, is a Christian Apologist<\/a> attacking Dawkins et al<\/em> for concluding that the Old Testament God is a moral monster. Here’s<\/a> another. Here<\/a>‘s another. Here<\/a>‘s another. Here<\/a>‘s another.<\/span>
\n
\n<\/span>Clearly, it’s not<\/em> pro-Christian prejudice that leads people to conclude the God of the Old Testament is a moral monster. Rightly or wrongly, it’s the Old Testament itself <\/em>that leads them to draw that conclusion.<\/span>
\n
\n<\/span>Argue, if you wish (and as the above linked posts do), that those atheists who draw the conclusion that the God of the Old Testament is a monster are reading the OT texts in too literal a manner, or are at least unwarranted in drawing that conclusion based on the texts. But the atheist’s mistake, if there is one, is clearly not<\/em> a product of some sort of deeply-ingrained, anti-semitic culture.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has accused Richard Dawkins of being anti-semitic (POST SCRIPT – sachs subsequently explains it’s Dawkins’s work he is calling profoundly antisemitic, not Dawkins the man). That’s a pretty serious charge (even qualified by my PS). In a BBC TV exchange (which you can view here), Sacks says that a passage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,6,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antisemitism","category-book-club-the-god-delusion","category-chief-rabbi","category-dawkins","category-outrageous-tales-from-the-old-testament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}