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If you don’t read, you’re not an author. Or, to more fair, you’re not the author you could be.
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 Professor Richard Dawkins Some time ago, the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a humanist organization I was taken with and wrote for, merged with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Alas, if only Dawkins himself stood for reason and science. Quite the opposite. It is astonishing, the words that manage to negotiate their way around Dawkins’s foot and spew from his mouth. It began with an incident that was eventually dubbed “Elevatorgate.” After a woman quite reasonably suggested that men could do better than to corner a lone woman in an elevator in the wee hours and invite her to his room for coffee, Dawkins wrote: Dear Muslima, In the guanostorm of side-taking that followed, what appeared to be lost on many was the irrationality and callousness of Dawkins’s remark. Mind you, the man has an international audience. What he says, profound or stupid, finds its way around the world in record time. Dawkins would eventually bury something of a not-apology in a later blog post. But in succeeding years, he managed to make things worse. The Atlantic reported that Dawkins actually defended what he called “mild pedophilia”: Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.” More recently, Dawkins and CFI CEO Robyn Blumner have been beating anti-trans and anti-woke drums. This is the antithesis of humanism. The American Humanist Association recognized as much in 2021, officially rescinding the Humanist of the Year award that it had bestowed upon Dawkins in 1996. This is from AHA’s official statement: Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values. His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity. Dawkins’s and Blumner’s response has been to double-down on their anti-trans and anti-woke rhetoric.
To be sure, Dawkins is a renowned biologist who has accomplished much good. His books are for the most part brilliant (though at times rambling). The problems arise when he strays out of his area of expertise. The Center for Inquiry operates a number of worthy humanist programs. Lest those programs suffer further loss of support, CFI’s Board would do well to find the wherewithal to dismiss Dawkins and Blumner, apologize to the world, and correct its course. From a recent New York Times piece: Quebec’s government is finding more ways to lift the supremacy of French, the province’s lingua franca. Provincial laws mandate that English text on storefront signs be half the size of French words and the employers reveal what percentage of their staff cannot work in French. New immigrants are given a six=month grace period before French becomes the only language in which they receive government services, such as taking a driver’s test. Having learned French as a young man in Quebec and retained enough of it to slaughter the language with some fluency to this day, I am at once qualified, and not qualified, to weigh in.
I enjoy French, Canadian French aka Québécois in particular. And having lived among the people, I understand the fear of losing their language and culture in a majority English-speaking country. Yet. Whichever language finishes by prevailing will be a matter of social tide that language-restriction laws can do only so much to stem. If English is going to overtake Quebec, there will be no stopping it by fiat. Meanwhile, draconian language laws serve only to further stoke naturally occurring Them vs. Us flames. I realize that that’s an easy position for this outsider to take, especially an outsider whose native tongue is American English. But I might add that I feel the same way about the growth of Mexican Spanish spoken in many parts of the United States, of which I am a born citizen. If Spanish is some day going to take over, English-as-offical-language laws may slow but cannot stop it. And the idea that my posterity may someday be Spanish-speakers doesn’t bother me in the least.  On Audible, iTunes, and Amazon. Click on the image for Audible.
Let’s face it is the default opener for writers who can’t come up with a compelling lead.
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May 2025
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