Post #1992880
2026-05-04 19:09 UTC
Replies (6)
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@Thebratdragon@mastodon.scot 2026-05-04 19:13
@Tattie I agree being a skeptic means starting with yourself, knowing your own biases etc....
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@uberduck@hachyderm.io 2026-05-04 19:14
@Tattie I don't know that I can name a single popular figure who is good at turning that skepticism inward. I wonder if that's because it's just so rare, or if it's because we label people who do so publicly as waffles and deny them notoriety.
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@hedders@mas.to 2026-05-04 19:19
@Tattie What an excellent thread. For me, the frustrating thing about Dawkins is that he was once a serious thinker and has done good work, in his time, but seems now to have become the thing he set his face against. John Cleese Syndrome, you might call it. Or Germaine Greer Syndrome. Either way, a tragedy, really.
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@Tattie@eldritch.cafe 2026-05-07 07:21
Update: Rebecca Watson herself has chimed in on the situation. Wonderful! 😆 https://mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson/116527948702666630
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@beecycling@wandering.shop 2026-05-06 18:46
@Tattie@eldritch.cafe It's said that recruiters for cults just love those people who think they are far too smart for fall for a cult recruitment. Those people do half the work for the recruiter. After all, if I, a smarty pants who would never fall for a cult, doesn't think this group is a cult, then it can't be, because I would definitely be able to tell. 🧠 Smart people are very good at talking themselves into stuff they want to believe is true.
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@thatfrisiangirlish@blahaj.zone 2026-05-07 08:11
@Tattie@eldritch.cafe I feel that's a fate a lot of vocal atheists share, or a lot of converts, as well. They shed the specifics of a faith, and at some point stop to chase its roots and thought patterns. They merely redecorate. Their god becomes science, for example, that they believe in - when science should end the necessity for belief within the limits covered. Our Western(tm) society is one that is deeply influenced by the Christian patterns of thought: hierarchical, patriarchical, conditional, transactional, and Dawkins shows all of that. While he has indeed thrown out all the old decorations of faith, he kept all the infrastructure. Of course an LLM chatbot will work on that well. It's purpose is extracting the users intent, and then filling that form with an averaged mush of training material. A role that a decidedly Christian society knows already as female, and with his unsettled biases, Dawkins names it as such.