[beckett]

Betty, I remember my very first post to you, several years ago. Dawkins was the subject then too! And I posted an article by Marion Montgomery, which you found persuasive. Here's the kernel of it, as relevant to this thread as it was to that one:

Thus a Nobel Prize–winner in genetics, Richard Dawkins, tells us what he doesn’t know. We are as persons, he says, only "lumbering robots" whose genes have "created us body and mind." There lies hidden in this direct quote, however, a royal we: Dawkins does not assume himself thus described. Rather he stands at a transcendent point, above both genes and body and mind, in a presumption of containing by his pronouncement an absolute comprehension of the nature of man. Thus he becomes an excellent illustration of what I shall call the provincial mind. Alas, his is an intellectual malady conspicuous among our intelligentsia: the modernist mind presuming intellectual autonomy beyond limit.

Marion Montgomery
novelist, poet and critic

[betty boop]

Betty, I remember my very first post to you, several years ago. Dawkins was the subject then too!

LOLOL! deja vu all over again!

Actually, he seems to get more and more strident with the passage of time. I wonder if he can imagine that some people think he's just plain silly when he takes up this subject. He kinda reminds me of a honking donkey, once he gets off on the subject of God....

Second realities are simply illusions. I haven't got a clue why anyone would choose to live in an illusion, and then demand that everybody else come join him there.

As Montgomery said, "his is an intellectual malady conspicuous among our intelligentsia: the modernist mind presuming intellectual autonomy beyond limit." Actually, I think this is a malady of the spirit more so than of the mind. But a disordered spirit will manifest as a disordered mind....

FWIW

Thanks for writing beckett, and for the trip down memory lane!