Richard Dawkins on militant atheism. Feb. 2002

Richard Dawkins urges all atheists to openly state their position — and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science. A fiery, funny, powerful talk.

High-res tamburina: This book is the biggest turn on ever. You get me this book, I will want to have sex with you. I see you reading this book, I will want to have sex with you. You are wearing pages of this book and using the cover as a fancy hat, I will want to have sex with you. listened to the audio ver. I can basically listen to Dawkins read the phone book. Lalla Ward narrates with him and does an excellent job.

tamburina:

This book is the biggest turn on ever.

You get me this book, I will want to have sex with you.

I see you reading this book, I will want to have sex with you.

You are wearing pages of this book and using the cover as a fancy hat, I will want to have sex with you.

listened to the audio ver. I can basically listen to Dawkins read the phone book. Lalla Ward narrates with him and does an excellent job.

The Great Tim Tebow Fallacy - by Richard Dawkins

I gather that Tim Tebow is extremely good at football. That’s just as well, for he certainly isn’t very good at thinking. Perhaps the fact that he was home schooled by missionary parents is to blame. 

The following is what passes for logic in the Tebow mind. His mother was advised by doctors to abort him, but she refused, which is why Tim is here. So abortion is a bad thing. Masterful conclusion. 

It is a version of what, following the great Nobel-Prizewinning biologist Peter Medawar, I have called the Great Beethoven Fallacy. 

Versions of the Great Beethoven Fallacy are attributed to various Christian apologists, and the details vary. The following is the version favoured by Norman St John Stevas, a British Conservative Member of Parliament. One doctor to another:

“About the terminating of pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was syphilitic. The mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, the fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?” 

“I would have terminated the pregnancy.” 

“Then you would have murdered Beethoven.”

It is amazing how many people are bamboozled by this spectacularly stupid argument. Setting aside the simple falsehood that Ludwig van Beethoven was the fifth child in his family (he was actually the eldest), the falsehood that any of his siblings was born blind, deaf or dumb, and the falsehood that his father was syphilitic, we are left with the ‘logic’. As Peter Medawar, writing with his wife, Jean Medawar, said,

“The reasoning behind this odious little argument is breathtakingly fallacious … the world is no more likely to be deprived of a Beethoven by abortion than by chaste absence from intercourse.”

via richarddawkins.net

continue reading… wapo