{"id":2018,"date":"2013-04-24T15:58:27","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T22:58:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/?p=2018"},"modified":"2013-04-24T15:58:27","modified_gmt":"2013-04-24T22:58:27","slug":"dr-jekyl-retracts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2013\/04\/24\/dr-jekyl-retracts\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr Jekyl retracts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.richarddawkins.net\/foundation_articles\/3846#\">This<\/a> is actually a pretty smarmy retraction by Dr <del datetime=\"2013-04-24T21:56:22+00:00\">Jeckyl<\/del> Dawkins of an honest but nasty tweet by Mr <del datetime=\"2013-04-24T21:56:22+00:00\">Hyde<\/del> Dick.<\/p>\n<p>Mr Dick tweeted (perhaps in response to a recent re-tweet reminding him of his frustration at a three month old exchange) that \u201cMehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist.\u201d And in response to the predictable (but in my opinion unreasonable) blowback, Dr Dawkins claims that Mr Dick&#8217;s &#8220;ill judged words&#8221; were just &#8220;a rather confused mixture of the following three \u2013 admittedly not wholly compatible \u2013 spellings-out:&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>Isn\u2019t it an odd paradox that a journalist good enough to be employed by no less a journal than New Statesman is capable of simultaneously holding a belief at least as absurd as Conan Doyle\u2019s belief in fairies?<\/li>\n<li>Given that he believes something at least as absurd as Conan Doyle\u2019s belief in fairies, is it possible that I\u2019ve over-estimated Mehdi Hasan? Could it be that he\u2019s not such a good journalist as I had thought?<\/li>\n<li>Conversely, it seems so odd that a good and intelligent journalist should believe obvious nonsense, that I can\u2019t help wondering whether he really does believe it, or whether he only pretends to out of loyalty to a loved tradition.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>But let&#8217;s see now. It&#8217;s no denial of free speech to argue that anyone with experience of the modern world who claims to believe the literal truth of a story about flying around on a winged &#8220;horse&#8221; (or for that matter about the virgin birth of a male child) is either lying or nuts, and that allowing such a person to express their views does not extend to giving them a platform in a magazine that people rely on for accurate information and analysis. Yes, such a person may have well-founded views on many issues and may be capable of opening my eyes to issues I had overlooked, but I cannot avoid the fact that he is also capable of believing complete nonsense and so his judgement is not to be fully &#8220;trusted&#8221; (not that anyone ever should be fully trusted of course, but there are different levels of trustability required in different contexts and being published regularly in a major magazine is one of the more demanding I think). Perhaps Hasan has merits which override his evident credulity and it would have been fine for the nice Dr Dawkins to identify such. But the fawning over-compensation with which he does so turns my stomach a bit.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand he ends well with:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There is a distinction between the Doyle\/Dowding belief in fairies and Hasan\u2019s belief in a winged horse. Hasan\u2019s absurdity stems from a major religious creed and is for this reason treated with an over-generous portion of respect. Doyle\u2019s belief in fairies was an individual eccentricity, fit only for mirth. People would blithely write off Doyle among the fairies as a comic nutter while agreeing that he was a very good storyteller; or laugh behind Dowding\u2019s back while agreeing that he was handy with an Air Force. But if you describe a religious believer as a nutter because he believes in a winged horse (or a follower of another tradition because he believes water miraculously turned into wine) you will be in for trouble.<\/p>\n<p>It was an additional intention of my tweet (spelled out in subsequent ones) to emphasise, yet again, this remarkably widespread double standard. It is a double standard that is applied, with peculiar vitriol, by some who call themselves atheists but bend over backwards to \u201caccommodate\u201d religious faith. If you were to suggest that Conan Doyle was a gullible fool among the Cottingley Fairies, I doubt that anyone would call you a \u201cvile racist bigot\u201d; or say to you, as a British Member of Parliament tweeted to me,\u00a0 \u201cYou really are a gratuitously unpleasant man.\u201d The difference, of course, is that Doyle\u2019s ridiculous belief was not protected by the shield of religious privilege. And perhaps that is the most important take-home message of this whole affair.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is actually a pretty smarmy retraction by Dr Jeckyl Dawkins of an honest but nasty tweet by Mr Hyde Dick. Mr Dick tweeted (perhaps in response to a recent re-tweet reminding him of his frustration at a three month &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2013\/04\/24\/dr-jekyl-retracts\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2019,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions\/2019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}