The Times wrote:Richard Dawkins offended by.... atheists!!
By Ruth Gledhill
Richard_dawkins_3 'Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website. Suppose you found yourself described as an “utter twat” a “suppurating rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum inside a dead skunk that’s been shoved up a week-old dead rhino’s twat.” Or suppose that somebody on the same website expressed a “sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails” down your throat. Also to “trip you up and kick you in the guts.” And imagine seeing your face described, again by an anonymous poster, as “a slack jawed turd in the mouth mug if ever I saw one.”
'What do you have to do to earn vitriol like that? Eat a baby? Gas a trainload of harmless and defenceless people? Rape an altar boy? Tip an old lady out of her wheel chair and kick her in the teeth before running off with her handbag?....Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, over-reacting so spectacularly to something so trivial. Even some of those with more temperate language are responding to the proposed changes in a way that is little short of hysterical. Was there ever such conservatism, such reactionary aversion to change, such vicious language in defence of a comfortable status quo? What is the underlying agenda of these people? How can anybody feel that strongly about something so small? Have we stumbled on some dark, territorial atavism? Have private fiefdoms been unwittingly trampled?'
Who has written the above? None other than the author of The God Delusion, the great Richard Dawkins himself. What has led to this Shakespearean 'something rotten in the state of the internet' crisis? Read on to find out, and also for my own interview with Professor Dawkins today where I managed to ascertain a little of why he is just so upset. (Original drawing by Paul Winner.)
A little while ago, over at RichardDawkins.net, Russell Blackford composed this little limerick about me, in response to my Times interview with the great man.
There's a very nice journo called Ruth,
With theories of Ultimate Truth.
She tested them on
A scientific don
Whom she's always admired, since youth.
There used to be a lot of extremely rude things about me on the forum. I would go there and read them from time to time when I needed to reassure myself of the truth about the respective natures of our mutual communities, his the Godless, mine the Godly.
Mine can be pretty bad, but goodness his is worse. For some reason, I always drew heart from the particularly vituperative nature of the comments on the forum at RichardDawkins.net. They convinced me there was indeed a God, but also perhaps a definite entity on the opposing side, even if that entity were to be known purely as the 'absence of God', as a Church of England report dared to define hell many years ago.
Is the ultimate victory of the One I follow evinced by the fact that the most unpleasant attacks on me seem to have disappeared?
Appropriately, in view of the fact that it is the atheist lobby that is most ardent in campaigning for assisted suicide, Dawkins' forum appears to be in the throes of an assisted suicide all of its own.
See Ship-of-Fools discussing why, along with a former moderator. Times science correspondent Hannah Devlin has also blogged it.
I was a little amused at first, and called Dr Dawkins to chat to him about it. My levity was quickly damped down. He told me first it is nothing more than a 'storm in a teacup' not worthy of the attention of Times readers but it emerged then that he is genuinely distressed, and here he explains why.
'Part of RichardDawkins.net is the forum which is just a place where people go to sound off. It is not disappearing. It is being revamped.' The revamping, he explained, is along the lines spelled out by Josh Timonen in the letter which caused all the fuss. The suppurating rat's rectum comment was aimed at Josh, not Dawkins, he clarified. 'Extremely unpleasant remarks were directed at Josh. It is a nasty world out there. I prefer not to fan flames.'
I resisted the temptation to ask him why, if he prefers not to fan flames, he even wrote The God Delusion, or lent his name to RichardDawkins.net. His distress at what has been going on in his forum suggests he has never really understood why so many people of faith found The God Delusion offensive. The strong language he himself uses to describe religious belief has a lot to do with it. Church Mouse recently blogged about how Dawkins upset a lot of Christians with a strongly critical article in The Times where he fastened on the utterances of US preacher Pat Robertson on Haiti to condemn an entire religion, describing Robertson as standing 'squarely in the Christian tradition.'
Do Dawkins' own followers, suppurating their rats' rectums all over his long-suffering staff, stand squarely in his atheist tradition?
Today, though, we moved quickly on from that and he went on to make serious points about anonymity in the blogosphere that does indeed permit astonishing levels of abuse. Of course we know all about that, here on Articles of Faith. But let's not go all motes-and-beamsy and instead get back to Dawkins:
'I do think that the cloak of anonymity under which so many posters on the internet hide does encourage a culture of rudeness and extreme language which people would never indulge in if they were writing under their own name. I think anonymity does have bad consequences and we see them all the time. On the other hand, there are times when people genuinely need to be confidential. So I can see why, for example, people in America who lost their faith and do not want their families to know, or perhaps more seriously, people of an Islamic background who have lost their faith or become Christian, have every reason to be anonymous. But the culture of anonymity whereby the default expectation is anonymity does encourage rudeness.'
He denied that the forum was dead. It will rise again, he promised, but different in form and substance.
'This most definitely is not a closing down. It is a revamping. In any case it only affects the forum. The forum is going to be more tightly controlled and will be under more central control. So it won't be available for anyone who wants to, to sound off freely. '
Up until now, he explained, it has been moderated by a team of self-selected moderators.
'In many ways they have done a good job under difficult circumstances. But we are revamping the whole site. It is going to be very wonderful when it is done. Part of that is going to consist of taking more control of the forum which will be called the discussion section. We cannot stop anonymous comments.'
He hopes to ameliorate 'the culture of anonymity which leads to vitriolic comments of the sort people would not dare to make if they were writing under their own name.'
He said the assumption on the internet seemed to be that websites 'belonged' to those who posted on them. 'You would never expect that in a letter to The Times. You do not cry censorship if you write a letter to The Times and it is not published.'
He added: 'The positive thing is that we are going to try and improve the quality of the articles and comments. Josh Timonen is brilliant and is a real star and it is extremely unfortunate that he should have been vilified.'
Andrew Brown over at CiF sums it up really. Requesting prayers for Dawkins, he notes:
'To anyone who has been on the receiving end of this kind of abuse, which is sometimes directed at people who do not work for Richard Dawkins, this conversion of the professor's comes as wonderful news. Hallelujah, brother. You have seen the light!'
Josh, if you are out there somewhere, I would love a chat....
), RDF had the most "Victorian" manners of conversation.
