Comments

1
proving that atheists are just as fucked up as fundamentalists.
2
At first, I thought maybe the phrase "mild pedophilia" could be referring to hugging or comforting a student - something that could be interpreted as inappropriate, or not.

"he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”"

I fail to see how that is "mild" in any definition. Its entirely possible he doesn't want to or is unable to accept or acknowledge the fact that he was a victim of sexual abuse/assault, but that's what he's describing. And by saying something like that is "mild", he's minimizing abuse of children.

3
Well, to be more precise, proving that humans of all stripes and creeds can be pretty screwed up in certain areas. What is crazy weird to me about this is that I feel I've read the exact same thing from a Catholic cardinal a few months back. Now I'm wracking my brain to find the article, because how weird would it be if *this* is what R.Dawkins has in common with the Catholic Hierarchy?
4
He's right about god, but otherwise, he's a dick.
5
@1

Nah dude, atheists aren't anything.

This dude and his pack of one-true-path dogmatic atheist defenders are as bad as fundamentalists.
6
@1 - Take a look at @3. You're painting with such broad strokes here in a way that is pretty fucking offensive. Richard Dawkins is fucked up and wrong here (and in a number of other ways, particularly when it doesn't pertain to his expertise as a biologist), and he does not speak as king of the atheists or even as our director of PR.
7
So one person's statement "proves" that anyone who shares a particular belief is "fucked up." Wow, Scary Tyler Moore is not at all shy about demonstrating her bigotry, eh?
8
Ah, the English public schoolboy. Molested as a child, molesting the rest of the world as an adult.
9
If you think that humans haven't always engaged in child molestation, it's because only the Greeks talked about it. But mankind is in a conundrum of his own making and that's one thing a civilized society can't indulge for many reasons
10
Dawkin's perspective is probably clouded by the systematic cruelty endemic to British boarding schools - a "mild touching up" was probably a relief compared to what else was going on.
11
What is being molested here is precise language: "Pedophilia" either is, or isn't... this is like saying "blue pedophilia" or "wavy pedophilia". The act is in the nature of the term.
12
@1 - The fundies will most certainly use this to attack and discredit atheism, though it has nothing to do with it.

I don't know what age Dawkins was when this incident took place, but I have to say: I have some problem with the fact that our current society and absolutist thinking dictates that inappropriately touching a 17 year old is the same as touching a three year old. The age of puberty does make a difference.

I am another who, well before the age of consent, quite happily sought out and had sexual contact with people over the age of majority - I don't feel I was scarred or abused in the slightest.
13

If you don't eat yer meat, how can you have any pudding!

How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat!!

14
"Mild" pedophilia= "mild" pregnancy. And what @4 said.
15
@1--how about amending that statement to
"proving that atheists can be just as fucked up as anybody else"
16
Great, now all the religious nuts get to say all of us Atheists are pedophiles. I'm not sure why this is on Slog, it seems more like a half-baked piece that belongs on Jezebel or Gawker.
17
Remember "The History Boys"? Was anyone else bothered by the "mild pedophilia" aspect of it? The teacher who was groping the boys was put up with in a joking, accepting way. I never did get how that wasn't pointed to as an absolute indictment.
18
If you read the article, Dawkins sounds like the reasonable one, compared with those insisting that he must believe he was victimized, and he must believe the teacher was evil. He's entitled to feel however he feels about what happened.

At no point does he say that it's okay to molest a child; he just distinguishes between touching and raping and says that raping is worse. Is it inappropriate to make that distinction?

19
What he seems to be saying is that having a teacher reach into his trousers didn't do him any harm, and didn't traumatize him in any way, so he can't see why there should be such a fuss about it when the child involved thinks it was a trivial event.

This is such a hot-button issue that we can't have a calm discussion about it. I have friends who, as teenagers, had affairs with adult men, and to this day say that those relationships were wonderful, and only made their lives better. Some people can't hear that without getting hysterical and claiming that these men were "abused" and have some kind of horrible repressed trauma - in spite of all the evidence supporting the men's contention that these were only positive experiences.

So - yes, there will be a hysterical backlash to Dawkins' statement. But please notice, he's not saying that he SHOULD have been felt up, he's just saying that it was not a big deal, and had no bad effects. And fortunately, no therapist in his adulthood tried to convince him that he'd been abused and should feel great trauma.

Some people will now accuse me of defending child abuse. That's inevitable if you actually look at behavior and effects. No, no adult should ever fondle kids like that for sexual kicks. That should just not ever be done. But that doesn't change the fact that, in the real world, when it happens, stuff like Dawkins experienced is very different in it's effects from forced penetration or coerced sexual conduct. It is, as he says, "mild" compared to the much more terrible things that can happen.
20
@18 dead on-

And it was likely a pretty traumatic incident for him, and maybe he has needed to frame it in such a way to allow himself to heal.

Honestly, CM, I almost always agree with the general concept of your posts- but it is like you're an aggressive 4th grader trying to grab attention . There is no nuance, no systems-thinking perspective, no true understanding of the world around you. You draw some arbitrary bright line defined by whatever pop-science/anthropology/history book you just read, then pull hair, shout and throw things to get people to react to the idea you just found.
21
@ KatTheCanuckistan -

Hugging or comforting a child can be interpreted as pedophilia? Really? To me, a child who is never hugged or comforted is most definitely being abused. I would have been traumatized indeed if I had never been hugged or comforted because adults had been afraid to touch me.

The pedophilia hysteria goes way too far when it makes adults afraid to touch children at all. Most children are naturally very physical, and feel rejected and unhappy when adults push them away and keep them at a distance.

Shame on anyone who assumes that all physical contact is sexual - that is your own problem, and something to take to your own therapist. It is NOT a reflection of the real world.
22
Yikes on bikes. I figured he was going to go the 14-16 fooling around with a college kid route, what is a "schoolboy" average age? Google math says he was 9 when that happened. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. You was molested dude.
23
why the fucking christ does anybody care what richard dawkins thinks about molestation
24
EricaP @18:

"At no point does he say that it's okay to molest a child; he just distinguishes between touching and raping and says that raping is worse. Is it inappropriate to make that distinction?"

Of course not. Being raped is demonstrably worse than being touched. Here's where Dawkins loses me:

"[Dawkins] said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: 'I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.'"

One cannot possibly conclude that "no lasting harm" was done to those children. No, they were not raped, but they were molested. The psychological damage done by that molestation cannot be objectively measured by an outside party. Maybe it didn't do Dawkins any lasting harm- and I firmly believe that is possible- but he has no right to speak for the other victims.
25
Dawkins said he can't condemn the acts committed against him when he was a child. What's wrong with that? If he doesn't want to condemn them, that's his choice.
26
Very Bad Homo @4 has it right. Dawkins is right about god, but he can be a dick otherwise. He's gotten himself in trouble with some pretty rampant misogyny before too. He makes a pretty shitty spokesman for atheism.
27
Wait so we can paint all religious people with one brush but not all atheists, seems like a double standard.

@ 4 Sure, sure he is
28
I love how the militant hardcore atheists know they are right for sure, no different then fundies I guess.
29
I just realized you are all talking about Richard Dawkins and not what I thought -- Richard Dawson (who is dead). But somehow, the latter making these revelations made more sense! Never mind.
30
I knew he was a Roman Catholic all along. What a douche. For the record, unlike the religious, we atheist have no official spokesperson.
31
@17: I was going to bring up History Boys! I think there's a different barometer in the UK for this type of thing that we Americans just do not get.
32
@18, @24

With regard to being raped vs. just being "touched," I think you're asking the wrong question, and by making the comparison the way @18 framed it, I think there's a risk of diminishing the seriousness of being molested without being penetrated.

I once read a Joyce Carol Oates novel in which the female protagonist was sexually assaulted as a young girl by her teenage cousin. As I recall the scene, the cousin probably didn't quite know what he was doing, so he stripped the protagonist, got between her legs without penetrating, and then ejaculated. I remember reading this with a sense of fear and foreboding, and then when it was over, the first thing I thought was, oh, thank goodness, he didn't rape her. Then a few seconds later, I realized that that was beside the point--the law might make the distinction between actual sexual contact and what happened in the scene, but for the protagonist, the experience was entirely fucked up either way.
33
Ugh. I didn't need a reason to dislike him any more than I do already.

And I don't think he speaks for all or even most atheists but he is a fantastic and frequently emulated example of the one type of atheist I tend not to like. The evangelical atheist. I don't like being preached at no matter what the gospel is. If I wanted that I would have stayed in Alabama.
34
@32: That was my point. Touching/groping and rape are two sides of the same fucked-up coin. Simply because he was touched and does not feel permanently damaged, Dawkins cannot say that being touched does not cause lasting damage. Nor can he explain his lack of damage on NOT having been raped. A person's reaction to either form of assault is entirely subjective, and therefore no one person's experience should be allowed to define the nature of either form of assault.
35
I'm an atheist but I think molesting children is wrong. I hope that's okay.
36
There is a fair amount of Stockholm Syndrome and economic self-interest in what Dawkins says here compared to what he's said about the Catholic "Abuse Scandal." More analysis here:

http://cosmostheinlost.com/2013/09/10/ri…
37
One of the cool things about Atheism is that agreeing with Dawkins about theology doesn't require me to agree with him about anything else.
38
@34

Thanks, got it. I was focusing at first on the first part of your comment about one being demonstrably worse, and I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. It depends on how we look at it. In terms of physical hygiene and health, as well as legalistically, sure, acts involving penetration are probably usually "worse" (if we're thinking in terms of body fluids, penetration with an object instead of a penis might be less "unhygienic"). But if two people assaulted someone's kids, the parents aren't going to be more forgiving of the one who just groped their kid instead of having intercourse with the kid, while at the same time people would generally see the groping as the lesser of the two evils.
39
@28- Dawkins (and the vast majority of atheists) are actually asserting that they're almost certainly right but are willing to accept evidence to the contrary.

There just isn't any evidence to the contrary.
40
@39

That depends. In general, that is true. However, I've noticed that they get real unaccepting when you point out that we not only don't have anything resembling proof that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain* but can't get proof with the capacity we currently have(if you took the proof we currently have as valid you would have to accept that Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert live in your television as you use the exact same form of proof for both arguments). They remain quite unaccepting even if you are willing to stipulate that it is possible that such proof could come as we develop better tests and methods. Of course, that's because they are not only atheists but also scientific materialists.

*That means that there is no afterlife.
42
Richard Dawkins: Atheist youth pastor.
43
I am PROUD to be anti-religion. Dawkins isn't our god - we don't believe in one! If you want to bash atheists then apply that logic to the faithful.
Who were Christian? Let's see:
Hitler
Timothy McVeigh
Son of Sam
Manson
Jeffrey Dahmer
Don't want to own those freaks? Then don't just atheists by one guy's opinion. Especially since he was defending yet another disgusting and perverted Christian leader.
Dawkins is dead wrong. The priest was a repulsive pig using children for his shameful pleasure. The Catholic Church has laid out nearly $2.4 BILLION to settle child abuse claims. Dawkins doesn't need the money but that pastor should've be held accountable.
And maybe parents need to stop thinking the church is a good place to leave their children. Actually, everyone should start viewing the church for what it is: a home for the guilty, sick and fearful where they are fed fairy tales to make them believe they have some minute control over their world. A made up book, no proof and the cause of a couple of centuries of death, famine, rates, tortures, sickness and war fought in god's name which were never won. Shocking, really. *yawn*
44
Can't say I've ever read anything by Dawkins. But he doesn't seem to stretch very far from his own skin. If he hasn't observed/experienced it, then it doesn't exist. Sexual harassment? Nope. Never seen it. Besides, there are women in parts of the world who have it worse. Sexual molestation? Well, I was touched inappropriately when I was a child, but I'm none the worse for wear, so I suppose it's all okay.

Serious lack of empathy in that dude. (But too large a microphone.)
45
@18: "If you read the article, Dawkins sounds like the reasonable one"

That's just a sign of this shitty world.
46
Dawkins shouldn't speak for all people who have been molested as children, but it doesn't sound like he was significantly traumatized by what happened to him, and he's entitled to his feelings about his own experience.

I doubt those feelings would extend to women being sexually abused today, as Charles suggests, since that isn't what's being discussed in the context of the interview at all.
47
Dawkins: good on God and his books on evolution are quite good. But this? He's seriously fucked up on....

And he better not be laying his hands on Romana!!!
48
@46: "he's entitled to his feelings about his own experience. "

That'd be great if he didn't feel himself entitled to speak on behalf of all women because of it, as in the Skepchick incident.
49
His statement is considerably more nuanced than the reporting suggests.

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He's saying that he feels mild pedophilia, like corporal punishment, was judged by a different standard then so he doesn't condemn it the same way he would that behavior now. It is somewhat moot since for the most part those crimes are long past being prosecutable.
50
The hysteria around "pedophilia" is half the problem. It is wrong and terrible to molest a child. But, we have to admit the the neurotic phobia around the subject, and the way we vilify pedophiles as not just sick and weak people but downright inhuman devils, does no one any service and makes the abuse even more scarring for the victim. I think Dawkins is just pointing out that we need to have a little perspective about hot-button subjects like this before we all grab pitchforks and torches. Plus, there is an English "tradition" of this kind of behavior; a similar scenario to that portrayed in the play "the History Boys." And no, I am not defending pedophiles or pedophilia.
51
@48 -- The first part of my comment about how he shouldn't speak on behalf of others? Same principle applies to trying to speak on behalf of women. Don't.
52
@40- No one has to prove there is consciousness inside the body. You need to prove there is consciousness outside the body. You can't.
53
@52

If I was trying to say one side was right and the other side was wrong, you would be correct.

That isn't what I'm saying.

What I am saying is that we don't have a way to even define consciousness, much less measure it, much less explain where it comes from or how. I am saying that those people who have a belief, either on the pro or anti side, are premature in the extreme.

It would be like saying that we totally understood the plague before we understood the concept of bacteria.
54
@53- I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the mainstream Atheist position if you think that is a relevant. You have a poor understanding of science if you think that a materialistic perspective isn't definitive. We actually do know where consciousness comes from (the electrochemical interaction of nerve tissue). We can measure all sorts of aspects of it. There are facts on one side, and beliefs on another. There's no rational debate about this. The only reason to say that the issue is unsettled is because humans are afraid of admitting we're base material just like everything else.
55
@50: "Plus, there is an English "tradition" of this kind of behavior"

Good fucking god. Why would you even say this.
56
When are Richard Dawkins and Fred Phelps going to admit that they are the same person?
57
When will Richard Dawkins and Fred Phelps admit that they are the same person?
58
They're both assholes, but it's a matter of degrees. Dawkins is at least qualified to speak about one of the subjects he's proficient in. Phelps is a domestic abusing horrorshow.
59
I agree with a lot of posters, including #4, #26, #33 and #44. And of course, lolorhone.

Huh, lolorhone, with ideas like #14, you wouldn't have agreed with ankylosaur - so have no regrets about not having known him.
60
What 49 said (and 46 too).
I disagree with Dawkins on occasion, but Mudede is being dishonestly selective here.
61
@60: If you agree with 46 you would appear to have no clue what he's said within the last few years about women worried about their own safety and security in the skeptic community.

There was nothing nuanced about "Dear Muslima".
62
Even a stopped clock, undead ayn rand.

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