Dawkins is obviously in the right on this, at least as regards that idiotic article, but this is a very sloppy line of reasoning.You don't really understand what was said. The farther back in time you go, the closer we're all related, to a pretty crazy extent. We all, almost certainly, have both slaveowners and slaves in our ancestry, although which one is the most recent will vary between people.
What do you mean "we", kemosabe?By "we" he means "all humans." In this he is correct. If you go back 10,000 years, it's almost certain that you have both slaves and slaveowners in your ancestry. In fact it could occasionally even be the same person, if someone was born a slave and was later manumitted and became prosperous enough to buy their own slaves. And of course the human race has been around for what, a couple hundred thousand years? All 8-billion or so of us are descended from a population that dipped as low as like 10 or 20,000 people at one point, IIRC. We're all pretty closely related.
"The idea that virtually anyone with a European ancestor descends from English royalty seems bizarre, but it accords perfectly with some recent research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University. The mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly complex, because the number of our ancestors increases exponentially, not linearly. These numbers are manageable in the first few generations—two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents—but they quickly spiral out of control. Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived."Justice for the victims of the conquest of Lombardy!
"To many it appears clear hypocrisy that Professor Dawkins – who has spent much of his career talking up the benefits of being a multi-cellular organism – is directly related to a single-cell organism."posted by Richard Holden at 3:48 AM on February 20, 2012 [1 favorite]
You'll agree that, if it were female circumcision we were talking about, we could build a moral case against it based just on considering whether it is something a woman would choose for herself. Given the fact—I assume it is a fact—that most of those women who were circumcised as children would, if they only knew what they were missing, have preferred to remain intact. Given that almost no woman who was not circumcised as a child volunteers to undergo the operation later in life. Given in short that it seems not to be what free women want to have done to their bodies. Then it seems clear that whoever takes advantage of their temporary power over a child's body to perform the operation must be abusing this power and acting wrongly.posted by empath at 12:19 PM on February 27, 2012
Well then, if this is so for bodies, the same for minds. Given, let's say, that most people who have been brought up as members of a sect would, if they only knew what they are being denied, have preferred to remain outside it. Given that almost no one who was not brought up this way volunteers to adopt the faith later in life. Given in short that it is not a faith that a free-thinker would adopt. Then, likewise, it seems clear that whoever takes advantage of their temporary power over a child's mind to impose this faith, is equally abusing this power and acting wrongly.
IN DEFENCE OF CHILDREN
My colleague the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey used the 'sticks and stones' proverb in introducing his Amnesty Lecture in Oxford in 1997. [141] Humphrey began his lecture by arguing that the proverb is not always true, citing the case of Haitian Voodoo believers who die, apparently from some psychosomatic effect of terror, within days of having a malign 'spell' cast upon them. He then asked whether Amnesty International, the beneficiary of the lecture series to which he was contributing, should campaign against hurtful or damaging speeches or publications. His answer was a resounding no to such censorship in general: 'Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to be meddled with.' But he then went on to shock his liberal self by advocating one important exception: to argue in favour of censorship for the special case of children ...... moral and religious education, and especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed -- even expected -- to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas -- no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.
In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the· planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.
Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas -- no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.Exposure ≠ indoctrination. Also, note the "or" at the end there.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins argues that by teaching children to believe in religion, "superstition," i.e., things which do not exist, theists are harming them and impairing their ability to perceive the universe rationally.So um... yes I would think that.
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posted by infini at 9:01 AM on February 19, 2012