“[N]ext time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.”
- Richard Dawkins
Show Us The Money
This is an open letter regarding the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s ‘Non-believers Giving Aid’ (NBGA) initiative. I am writing this open letter due to having spotted one small vexing discrepancy in RDF’s records, which has now escalated into situation where a handful of people have been querying RDF for over 12 weeks to date, and have failed to receive a satisfactory response.
The discrepancy itself is that there are apparently no ‘Non-believers Giving Aid’ donations declared on RDF’s 2011 annual return - despite the fact that RDF ran two separate appeals for donations through NBGA, in 2011.
Either their 2011 return is
incorrect, and they need to address the error - or it is
correct, and there is the very strong suggestion that a significant amount of donations made to RDF in the name of NBGA, have not gone to where they were supposed to go - and that they have been misappropriated, perhaps knowingly, and deliberately...
Given 12 weeks so far to have responded, nobody at RDF has offered a satisfactory explanation.
Senior staff at RDF (including Richard Dawkins himself) have not only failed to address the issue properly - but the organisation has come across as seriously disingenuous and incompetent in what little communication has been offered. Indeed, it’s possible that the frankly terrible responses from RDF could be the worst aspect of this situation, if it turns out that they have a perfectly reasonable explanation for the subject of the original query, and have just been keeping it close to their chests.
The repeated broaching of the issue with RDF staff also appears to have resulted in RDF’s
dedicated NBGA site going offline. I am sure that this is simply an unfortunate coincidence, and that RDF will have the NBGA site back up and running if you contact them and let them know about this… but in the meantime, for the purposes of this letter, we will have to rely on the
Wayback Machine’s archive of the NBGA site, for meaningful information.
A full explanation of the situation as it currently stands is detailed in the body of the letter below, and contact details for senior individuals within RDF (including Richard Dawkins) are included at the foot of this letter.
...