Oh, man, IG! I could go on all day. Executive summary: Dawkins should take that “clear-thinking oasis” lie the bleeping hell off his blog header.

According to Mann’s Law: If a scientist uncovers a publishable fact, it will become central to his theory. This theory, in turn, will become central to all scientific thought. In the case of Dawkins, that fact is that individual genes will behave in a fashion that best ensures their own preservation (“the selfish gene”).

It is indeed difficult to extrapolate, in any mathematically rigorous way, how altruism – “super niceness” – follows from “survival of the fittest individual”. Yet, humans practice altruism, and there are now seven billion of us. Moreover, most of those seven billion are here thanks to inventions such as penicillin, which would be impossible without the altruistic act, “public funding of scientific research”. Ergo, individual “fitness” (survival and reproduction) have benefited immeasurably by individual behaviors that, collectively, are “super nice”. That Dawkins doesn’t see that tells me he’s indeed blinded by his own light.

Almost as distressing (“almost” only because Dawkins can lay no claim to historical or religious scholarship) is his view of Jesus of Nazareth, which could have come right out of Sunday School. Anyone who considers Jesus to have been “super nice” needs to re-read the Gospels, starting perhaps with the 23rd chapter of Matthew. And then re-read them again in the context of how much of what appears in the Gospels can be attributed to Jesus, and how much to the proselytizers who set his story to paper two generations after Jesus died.

There’s a line of thought, with which I’m sympathetic, postulating that every religious figure, from Budda to David (compare 2 Kings to 2 Chronicles) to Muhammad to Joseph Smith to Bob Marley, has been posthumously bowdlerized into “super niceness” to fit the needs of the movement that sprung up around him. Jesus of Nazareth certainly fits that bill, not least because practically every scrap of information that we have about him comes from the bowdlerizers.

Dawkins, not having expertise here, can (should, we being super nice) be forgiven for not understanding this. But it’s still disappointing in someone who so prominently promotes “reason” as he understands it. Which I guess means “reason = discipleship”. Where have we heard this before, mein Führer?

The first part had me chuckling here and there. The second part made me think, “Hmm, that’s worth considering.” The late middle, boring. I think he got so wrapped up in proving his point that he forgot to prove it. The end? Arrogant and assumptive. And I feel like all the questions he raised are still unaddressed.

Don’t much seem to care to remember either. Too busy refining how to sling the SOS. Fixing things is a lot harder than shouting insults at each other over the wreckage. And you just might find out that you don’t have all the answers.

Seems like old times around here all of a sudden, eh?

And this is why I fear that we will be screwed. We need the counterpoints, but nobody can leave them alone long enough to get it together. Nor should they, in a certain sense.

One trouble is, most people (I think) have neither time nor inclination to be analytical; to function, they need to have a solid belief system. But belief in something accessible (such as the leader in a personality cult) is notoriously difficult to sustain. Führers are corruptible, by power or maggots. Ditto belief in an ethical code, because what is “ethically correct” changes with time and circumstance, and not always predictably. There’s a lot to work on.

As with any public figure, it’s impossible for me to work out how much of Dawkins’s public persona reflects the real man. To be sure, no one without a massive ego and sense of mission would have survived the culture wars long enough to produce and defend a The God Delusion. He is a polarizing influence, to be sure, but so are the fundamentalist Christians who are his primary targets, and without Dawkins, the fundamentalists would pretty much have the floor, unchallenged. And we’ve seen where that’s taken us.

I have not read any Dawkins, and I have no desire to change that, but he seems to be the sort of man that religiously worships the idea that he is right, and everyone else should wake up and realize that his way is the only way that can truly save them. And in that respect, he is no different than the evangelists he seems to detest. His god is pictured on the back of “The God Delusion”, right above the “About the Author” blurb.