As some will be aware, Objectivists are not conservatives, but radicals. And part of the reason I’m glad I’m not not is that conservatives write stuff like the following for the Daily Telegraph. Time for a good, old-fashioned fisking:
His latest sortie into the realm of religious controversy concerns the followers of Islam. “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge,” he tweeted this week, in what seemed an unorthodox welcome to the festival of Eid. “They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” He might have added the phrase du jour employed by those who, after throwing a hand grenade into social media, feebly try to distance themselves from the collateral damage. But presumably he had exhausted his 140 characters, and had none left for the faux naif “Just sayin’…” His claim is technically true, the scoreline being Trinity 32: Muslims 10. But as others, including our own Tom Chivers, have pointed out with far more elegance than you would expect from this column, his real point was crystal clear. The lobotomising strictures of Koranic teaching and extremist dogma, goes the subtext, has atrophied the Muslim mind so completely over the centuries that these robotic drones have produced far fewer Nobel laureates than a single weeny college.
Okay, and the problem with this is…? Where’s your freaking data to the contrary? I have a suggestion for this chap in terms of reading material.
Our conservative pooh-bah, Matthew Norman by name, doesn’t answer, just says the following:
The observation is too plain dumb to detain us for long.
Translation: I don’t have any arguments, so I’m just going to skip over it, and reach for the standard accusation whenever people say something like this:
Whether he was being casually racist is another question, and not a particularly relevant or intriguing one.
This is pathetic, even by the standards of accusation. “I’m not saying he’s a racist, I’m just asking questions…” Man up or stand down, you ridiculous hot-house plant. What race is Islam again?
Question: when the Nazis were burning entire libraries, was it “racist” to point out that this retarded German science for decades? I mean, it’s not like Muslim fanatics have not been doing that…
But since it is always me me me me me me me with Dawkins, as he reminds us that he is soooooo much cleverer than all the thickies who ever believed in any god
What is this? Kindergarten? I will bet this chap a months salary – mine versus his – that he cannot find a Dawkins quote to substantiate this.
And yet whenever I hear Dawkins on the car radio, spluttering lividly at the stupidity of those who cannot see the truth as clearly as he does, the instinct is to do a handbrake turn and drive like a maniac to the nearest church, synagogue, temple or mosque
If you want “spluttering lividly”, you will find it in the churches and the Mosques – particularly the latter.
Not that this guy seems too bothered:
While the new Pope seems a genuinely holy kinda guy, and the new Archbishop of Canterbury an absolute sweetheart, Dawkins is more repressively dogmatic than the Ayatollahs.
I will bet this guy 10 years salary – mine versus his, that he cannot back this up.
But this is the real key. I’m reminded of something that Bill Maher said:
Religious people aren’t afraid of other religious people. Oh sure, sometimes they kill and hate them. But they don’t fear them. They only fear the atheists, because we’re the only ones not clapping during Peter Pan […] Because religion is kinda like a conga line. If one person doesn’t join in, you see yourself through their eyes, and you realise you look like a schmuck.
