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Placing Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins has a new book out this week, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist. Naturally he’s been out talking about it, and commentators have been talking about him.
Glancing through this stuff, I am struck as always by how precisely I can “place” a fellow Englishman. Dawkins is straight out of the upper-middle-middle-class suburban south of England. (Yes, yes, I know he was born in Nairobi and raised on a farm. Makes no difference.) His second-drawer boys’ boarding school education, his enthusiasm for the Oxford tutorial system and sentimental fondness for the Anglican Church (really), his insouciance towards the milder forms of pederasty, his ornery impatience with metaphysical flapdoodle, . . . I know this guy, in some way that I don’t know anyone that isn’t English (although I think I might get a good part of the way there with an Irishman, Welshman, or Scot), and in a way that nobody not English can know him.
I certainly can’t “place” Americans that well, although now well into my fourth decade of residence in this country. Yet this is a “cousin” nation, with a lot of cultural overlap.
The usual questions:
- Is this a peculiarly English thing? Or
- Is it an old-island-nation thing? Can Japanese and Icelanders “place” each other like this? Or
- Is it universal among old, long-coherent nations? Can Finns, Spaniards, and Thais do it?
- If mutual recognition at this level is a common thing in nation-states, what chance does anyone have of really understanding another country? Or
- Am I just exceptionally blind and deaf to unfamiliar cultural signals? Did my mental equipment for “placing” people just get stuck around age 20, while other people’s matured?
Source: http://secularright.org/SR/wordpress/placing-richard-dawkins/
Ah yes, Richard Dawkins. The pesky socialist’s favourite Luciferian protagonist.
Lovely. Pass the scones please. More tea vicar?
I’ll place him alright and I am English and with much admiration for many things American. He’s just another two bit, dime a dozen secular atheist arrogant know-nothing – a fool. His class background, too, is an irrelevance:
Matt 13:10-16 (KJV) And the disciples came, and said unto Him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? 11 He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God, but to them it is not given. 12 For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. 13 Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. 14 And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: 15 For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. 16 But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.
One day he will prostrate himself on the ground before his Creator and I’ll be there to witness it.
