Bingowings said:
Dawkins said :
“One day – I must have been about 11 – there was a master in the gallery with me. He pulled me onto his knee and put his hand inside my shorts. He did no more than have a little feel, but it was extremely disagreeable … as well as embarrassing,” he told the publication. “As soon as I could wriggle off his lap, I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him. I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself.”
“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours,”"Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”
“The most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder, and because we attach the label ‘pedophilia’ to the same things when they’re just mild touching up, we must beware of lumping all pedophiles into the same bracket,”
I don't read that as a defense of pedophilia rather a plea for balance.
He speaks from his own experience and has formed a general opinion.
Men, women and children frequently get touched in ways they would prefer not to. But to equate that with rape because the recipient is a child is noncesense.
A "balance" of what kind I wonder. That he doesn't feel irreparably harmed and that he suspects many of his classmates were not irreparably harmed means what exactly? I think his premise is flawed; I think people already recognize the difference between "mild touching up" and rape, they simply find both deplorable. Does he think some such crimes deserve a slap on the wrist? I do take issue with some ways that our society and legal system handles these issues...but his starting point is sketchy.
He is also making a statement about how we view the past.
Getting back on topic somewhat in Biblical times 12 year olds married 30 year olds.
If Mary and Joseph were real people this was probably their age range.
We don't approve now but it was the norm then.
The endurance of a meme says nothing about it's moral qualities.
Certain ethnic stereotypes have endured for centuries but that doesn't make them good or accurate.
Well maybe religion isn't so bad either :P
Dawkins spoke at my college and I told a friend later that Hawkins spoke at my college, that was embarrassing. Mormons and JW's do seem similar in some ways. The one thing I find admirable is that they do go out into the world to make religion just a thing that do in their heads and in churches. There are other ways of making religion real, of course. On Yom Kippur, I went to a synagogue and the sermon touched on what is happening in Syria and the history of Israel. Interesting to me when religion is tied to the world outside the church.