Richard Dawkins is discussing his new memoir and his own experience of child abuse – and we finally know why he used the term “mild child abuse”. It’s a very interesting and moving discussing.
In the book, Dawkins mentions one occasion when a teacher put a hand down his trousers at a prep school in Salisbury, and four others at Oundle, when he “had to fend off nocturnal visits to my bed from senior boys much larger and stronger than I was”. The Oundle incidents don’t seem to have bothered him. The prep school one did, but he still can’t bring himself to condemn it, partly because the kind of comparison his adult mind deploys is with the mass murders carried out by Genghis Khan in the 12th century. “Without condoning what was done, at least try to put on the goggles of the period and see it through those eyes,” he says. “I find it much harder to put on those goggles where we’re talking about the monstrous cruelty that went on in past times. It’s hard to think of that and to forgive using modern standards in the same way as it might be for the schoolmaster who touched me up but didn’t actually do me any physical violence.”
Notice that this also puts into perspective his “Dear Muslima” comment.
I remember reading something that backs up what his line has always been – that the abuse of children’s minds is far worse than that of their bodies. It was about the worst sort of abuse – a girl who was systematically raped for years by her own father. What came out in her therapy was that the real horror wasn’t anything physical – it was the sense of unreality. The sense of being thrown into a world that couldn’t possibly be real. The sense that her own mind was being destroyed.
I’ve heard similar things from people who have survived the death camps. What ultimately destroyed so many that they were willing to just walk off and be shot was that they literally could not longer believe that the world they were in was real.
Think about this very carefully: the worst horrors we are capable of imagining – rape, torture, seeing your family massacred: all that is still not as bad as having your sense of reality violated.
This is why to be anti-mind is to be anti-life. We cannot live, except by our minds.
Naturally, having explained this, he is getting attacked by you know who. Courtesy of the bullshit detectives club:
PZ Myers, describing Dawkins (note, not his abuser, but Dawkins himself)
“Christ, that sounds like something out of NAMBLA.”
Yes, PZ Myers just said that someone who has been abused and talking about his abuse sounds like something out of NAMBLA.
But that’s not all:
“And it appalls me to think that the world will see this as representative of the atheist community.”
Yes, Greta Christina said that she can’t handle someone who was sexually abused as a child being representative of the atheist community.
But that’s not all:
” I have no explanation for why he can’t see that he’s harming not just his own reputation, but the entire secular movement that, for better or for worse, he’s widely assumed to speak on behalf of.”
Yes, Adam Lee said that Richard Dawkins talking about his own sexual abuse would ruin the community.
Oh, and don’t forget Rebecca Watson, who already hates Richard Dawkins but tweeted this about his abuse when someone asked her if she was romantically interested in him:
“Unfortunately “mild pedophilia” is a dealbreaker for me.”
Yes, Rebecca Watson isn’t romantically interested in Richard Dawkins because he was a victim of pedophilia.
I wonder whether Watson – whose only claim to fame is yelling loudly that Richard Dawkins excuses sexual assault – feels now that she knows she’s been attacking a real victim of sexual assault. I wonder if there is any shame left to her.
Anyway. I hope everyone will go out and grab their copies of Dawkins’ book.
