Friday, November 03, 2006

Dawkins clips again (Haggard and Al-Khatab)

I did not know that Dawkins had done a BBC documentary, The Root of All Evil? in January 2006. This clip, that seems to be all over with the recent evangelical scandal, tipped me off. The most fascinating part of the clip is the pained expression on Dawkins' face, as Haggard bludgeons him to silence by the sheer arrogance of his humility.

Searching for other clips, I found this one about an interesting character called Yousef al-Khatab, aka Joseph Cohen, a secular New York Jew convert to Islam.

Dawkins is remarkably patient with him, but loses it in the end.


Yousef: ...Correct yourself, fix your society, fix your women.
Dawkins: Fix my women! Its not my business. Its my women's business.
Yousef: When you take women and dress them like whores on the street...
Dawkins: I don't dress women. They dress themselves!
Yousef: But you allow women to go on the streets dressed like this. What's going on with your society?


So he grew up in New York, and does not realize that men cannot 'fix' women? The good thing about being a fundamentalist is that, when you lose an argument, you do not even know it.

But what was saddest was the lost expression on Dawkins' face, as he tried to reason with these men, and failed each time. I don't know if he ever was naive enough to imagine he could use modus ponens with these people, but this sure looked like a learning experience for him.

I was getting bored with Dawkins' god-baiting, but now I think he is really doing us a favor.

3 comments:

GS said...

hi,

thanks for this posting.
i enjoyed going through all the clips and other links. its been time since i read Dawkins and i think, yes he is doin a service to us by exposing such things. his getting angry was logical since that baffon went off the topic.


personally i feel religion and nationalism are the two most marketed commodity on this planet by humans. And over the period of time i ahve started regardng them as usual vices people have about which you cant do anything. I think humans collectively are more selfish than they are singularly...more selfish than RD's Selfish gene's...meme or not:-)

regards

Anonymous said...

Too bad you didn't see my link earlier here: here with links to both episodes of the documentary. Apparently the links have now been removed from wikipedia. I highly recommend watching it if you get a chance.

sbkt said...

Thanks, no desh. Too bad I didn't see your link earlier.Yep, I've been looking for the docu online, with no success.