Richard Dawkins Reads His Hate Mail

[cloudy]

Richard Dawkins, outspoken atheist and evolutionary biologist, reads his hate mail aloud.

(There is nothing quite as funny as a highly educated person reading horribly written insults in that uppercrust accent )

 

[scriptordelecto]

Quite entertaining!

 

[wet_special]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxdxZ47JouU

I rather pity these people too..

 

[rgraham666]

Those people should thank him for giving them purpose in life.

 

[Bebeslut]

This made me realize: I must regret from my fucking behavior!

 

[Boota]

That was great! I love his delivery. Especially his emoting in "HAHA! You dumb ass! I hope you get hit by a church van. Tonight. And you die slowly."

Don't you love how they say, "I hope you burn in Hell" and then in the next sentence, "I hope for your sake you see your grave mistake and repent"? Which is it? Do they want him to repent or burn in Hell?

 

[Guest]

. . . .

 

[cloudy]

It is totally sucks ass.

Bullshit retard atheist dogma.

Three words from God to you: "You are a fool."

There is a great god, and he will forgive you if you regret from your fucking behavior. Right now your destiny is all fucked up, you fucking atheist.



Priceless.

 

[trysail]

Excerpted from:

MENCKENIANA, A Schimpflexikon
Expurgated Edition
New York, New York 1928.

NOTE​

This collection is not exhaustive, but an effort has been made to keep it representative. The original materials would fill many volumes: they include hundreds of savage articles and newspaper editorials, and a number of whole pamphlets. During the single year 1926 more than 500 separate editorials upon the sayings and doings of Mr. Mencken were printed in the United States, and at least four-fifths of them were unfavorable. Himself given to somewhat acidulous utterance, he has probably been denounced more vigorously and at greater length than any other American of his time, not even excepting Henry Ford, Robert M. LaFollette, Clarence Darrow, and Sacco and Vanzetti. Here there is room only to offer some salient specimens of this anti-Mencken invective— mainly single sentences or phrases, torn from their incandescent context. Some were chosen for their wit— for there are palpable hits among them!—, some for their blistering ferocity, and some for their charming idiocy. The rest of the material awaits the literary resurrection men of another and perhaps less indignant day.
-THE PUBLISHER

Chapters

• Zoölogical
  "This maggot, this ghoul of new-made graves, this buzzard!"
  -Eugene L. Pearce, in the Tampa Times.
  
• Genealogical
  "Mr. Mencken did not degenerate from an ape, but from an ass. And in the process of 'revolution' the tail was eliminated, the ears became shorter and the hind parts smaller; but the ability to bray was increased, intensified, amplified and otherwise assified about one million times."
  - J. B. Tedder, in the Chattanooga News.
  
• Pathological
  "H. L. Mencken says the Liberty Bell episode was a myth. That man just naturally can't stand for anything that is more cracked than he is himself."
  - The Los Angeles Record
  
• Freudian Diagnosis
  "Mr. Mencken, that American Loud-Speaker, is suffering from a serious superiority complex."
  - The Queen ( London ).
  
• Penalogical
  "Mencken, with his filthy verbal hemorrhages, is so low down in the moral scale, so damnably dirty, so vile and degenerate, that when his time comes to die it will take a special dispensation from Heaven to get him into the bottomost pit of Hell."
  - The Jackson ( Miss. ) News.
  
• As A Critic
  "Mr. Mencken is a typical Hun in his criticism."
  - The Los Angeles Times.
  
• As An Artist
  "Mr. Mencken is no writer at all, but a brick factory."
  - The New Republic.
  
• As An Evangelist
  "Mencken is frankly a diabolist."
  - The Manchester ( N.H. ) Union.
  
• As An American
  "A British toady."
  - The Lowell ( Mass. ) Sun.
  
• As An Intellectual
  "In his glorious upward progress he acquired instead of the gray matter placed in the skulls of Tennesseans by the Almighty, a composite of slime, mould, bunk, miasma, decay, skunk cabbage, devil's snuff, flapdoodle and Hamburger cheese, blended in minor proportions with razor extract, stump water and valerian. So biggon, sooey, scat, shoo!"
  - Nannie H. Chesnutt, in the Nashville Tennessean.
  
• As A Journalist
  "H. L. Mencken thinks journalism is in a low estate. It sure is wherever Mencken touches it."
  - The Council Bluffs ( Iowa ) Nonpareil.
  
• As A Truth-Seeker
  
• As An Editor
  
• As A Statesman
  "A radical crack-brain."
  - The Huntington ( W. Va. ) Herald-Dispatch.
  
• As A Voluptuary
  "The Menckens are accustomed to trafficking in morasses of racy French literature. They have attained that peak of rarefied highbrowism where the palate quickens only upon highly-seasoned eroticism."
  - The Louisville Courier-Journal.
  
• As A Scoundrel
  
• Kosher Or Terefah?
  "Mencken is connected with the New York World, the attitude of which toward Romanism and Rum the reader should know full well. From his name, he seems to be a Jew, or at least a German, and recently in an Alabama daily he was sneering at Genesis.
  - The Alabama Christian Advocate.
  
• Ex-Cathedra
  "One H. L. Mencken, whose name sounds like that of a German, Polish or Russian Jew, said to be foreign-born and a product of the schools of Germany, has sneeringly called the South the Bible Belt."
  - THE REV. JAMES M. GLENN, D.D., in the Birmingham ( Ala. ) Christian Advocate.
  
• Counter-Offensive
  "I do not believe that all the iconoclastic mouthings of H. L. Mencken can weigh as feathers against the gold of a single, little, undernourished, underprivileged or crippled child, made happier by the work of the Lions."
  - PROFESSOR ENEST C. MARRINER, of Colby College, Waterville, Maine.
  
• Winces Of The Called
  
• The Voice Of The Motherland
  
• Miscellaneous Elegancies
  "H. L. Mencken, instead of taking a page ad like the piles cure manufacturers or the fly paper venders or the corn plaster makers, simply says something sufficiently shocking or silly to be quoted."
  - The Nashville Tennessean
  
• Verdicts In Brief
  "A SMART Aleck who has become a member of Phi Beta Kappa."
  - Hearst's Chicago Herald-Examiner.
  
  "A Baltimore Babbitt."
  - O. O. McINTYRE
  

Soli Deo gloria!


​

 

[squarejohn]

I never heard of Richard Dawkins. What's his claim to fame?

 

[cloudy]

I never heard of Richard Dawkins. What's his claim to fame?

You know there's this newfangled thing out, it's called "Google." You can just type in a phrase, or a word, or even a question, and all these citations pop up, just like magic!

From wiki:

Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist and evolutionary biologist. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

He's probably best known, though, for his books: The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, and The Selfish Gene are his most famous works (all non-fiction).

 

[Guest]

. . . .

 

[cloudy]

I like his nickname - Darwin's Rottweiler.

I imagine it is his coherent arguments against intelligent design, or indeed, the idea of faith in God as being delusional that has garnered him such hate mail from those loving, Christian, God-fearin' folk.

He's not only absolutely brilliant, but he also has a wicked sense of humor. What's not to love, ya know?

 

[Guest]

. . . .

 

[cloudy]

His smart-ass grin while reading those ridiculous rants makes the entire thing even more hilarious.

"HAHA you fucking dumbass" made me spit my coke all over the screen. I'm going to use that one one of these days.

 

[squarejohn]

You know there's this newfangled thing out, it's called "Google." You can just type in a phrase, or a word, or even a question, and all these citations pop up, just like magic!

From wiki:

Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist and evolutionary biologist. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

He's probably best known, though, for his books: The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, and The Selfish Gene are his most famous works (all non-fiction).

I'm just an old dinosaur, too close to extinction to appreciate the magic of google. But there are probably thousands of ethologists and evolutionary biologists scattered across the surface of this planet. What makes Richard Dawkins stand out from the others?

 

[cloudy]

I'm just an old dinosaur, too close to extinction to appreciate the magic of google. But there are probably thousands of ethologists and evolutionary biologists scattered across the surface of this planet. What makes Richard Dawkins stand out from the others?

He's also a rather famous auther and speaker.

Look, I'm all for helping someone out, but you could really look all this stuff up yourself.

If you don't like what he has to say, fine, but you can check his bonafides yourself. You're a big boy.

 

[squarejohn]

He's also a rather famous auther and speaker.

Look, I'm all for helping someone out, but you could really look all this stuff up yourself.

If you don't like what he has to say, fine, but you can check his bonafides yourself. You're a big boy.

I never heard of him and I doubt it would be worth my while to check his bonafides. But thank you for your help.

 

[Guest]

. . . .

 

[Bebeslut]

I've only read "The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution," but I found it great. Dawkins traces evolution backwards, from man to slime. However, that backward movement can be a little confusing, at least for a doof like me.
My only other exposure to Dawkins was an interview on All Things Considered (or some other NPR show) and he was really acerbic, which is why I think he draws so much criticism. But so was Mencken, as the above post notes.
Think I'll go to the library and check out another Dawkins tome today.

 

[sr71plt]

I never heard of him and I doubt it would be worth my while to check his bonafides. But thank you for your help.

One wonders why you asked here then. I agree with Cloudy--and see this elsewhere on discussion boards too--that it would have been just as easy and fast for you to do your own research as to ask for someone else to spoonfeed it to you.

Might go on to note that this may be the source of your reactionary, self-centered posts to other topics on the board. You don't actually take the time and effort to do the research. You just turn on Fox News.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I'm just an old dinosaur, too close to extinction to appreciate the magic of google. But there are probably thousands of ethologists and evolutionary biologists scattered across the surface of this planet. What makes Richard Dawkins stand out from the others?

Drinking so early in the morning?

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Dawkins, along with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins, are the new Aggressive Atheists and are totally anti-religion, which is a bigotry in its own right. Certainly they're justified in attacking Religion when it tried to pass itself off as Science and treats itself as a body of empirical facts, but they go too far in rejecting all religious sentiment and the very human feelings that give rise to it. They seem to want to enshrine Science in Religion's throne, and that's just not going to work. The two systems ask different questions and ask them in different ways, and both are necessary.

Ultimately Science can explain why things are, but not what they mean. Religion (and art too, for that matter) are ways of investigating the meaning of things, which is a different kind of "truth." Science can tell us exactly what happens when we fall in love, say -- what parts of the brain are involved and what hormones are released -- but that doesn't tell us anything about the experience of being in love or what it means. Science can tell us exactly what our place in the universe is physically, but what we make of that knowledge -- whether we feel special or alone; whether we find life in such a universe worthwhile or a cause for suicide -- is a question for religion. It's a question of feeling and emotion, intangible internals that can't be quantitatively measured.

So while Dawkins et. al. are right in demanding we give Science its due where matters of Science are concerned, their contempt for all things religious is both regrettable and really very childish. There's no way even to prove scientifically that being alive is preferable to being dead. Science has nothing to say about the superiority of one state over the other. The decision to go on living is an emotional (and quite probably irrational) one, and is informed by intangibles like faith and hope and the pleasures of love and wonder, which are all very religious concepts, even for Dawkins and friends. You'd really think they'd know that.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Dawkins speaks for many of us who have never been spoken for before.

He may be over the top in some areas, but-- it's refreshing, especially when we hear once again those same old dismissive regurgitations as;

Ultimately Science can explain why things are, but not what they mean. Religion (and art too, for that matter) are ways of investigating the meaning of things, which is a different kind of "truth." Science can tell us exactly what happens when we fall in love, say -- what parts of the brain are involved and what hormones are released -- but that doesn't tell us anything about the experience of being in love or what it means. Science can tell us exactly what our place in the universe is physically, but what we make of that knowledge -- whether we feel special or alone; whether we find life in such a universe worthwhile or a cause for suicide -- is a question for religion. It's a question of feeling and emotion, intangible internals that can't be quantitatively measured.

all of which might be Truth (with the ironic capital 'T') in your eyes but not in mine.

 

[wet_special]

I never heard of him and I doubt it would be worth my while to check his bonafides. But thank you for your help.

You know, I read the Blind Watchmaker, and while it was a mind-rendingly boring read most of the times, that was because he was not attempting to write a book popularizing Darwin's theory of evolution as generally true. Instead, he was trying to write a book that teaches what science has so far determined as the most likely path upon which evolution follows.

Now as everyone knows, Darwin's theory is synonymous with "Survival of the fittest." Well, Dawkins takes issue with this view of evolution. Instead he says it is a question of the reproduction of genes. What behaviors lead to the reproduction of genes. He deals with selfishness vs. altruism, and so on. He also addresses the blood bond -- blood is thicker than water, they say. Why do we have a special bond with our blood relatives and kin? He elaborates on this in brain-battering exhaustive detail. Which goes to show he's smart, and for every paragraph in the book there have been hours or days of learning and research done by this man.