Richard Dawkins is an Asshole

He’s also wrong about god. 

Ever since I realized that I didn’t believe in the god of Abraham, something Dawkins and I agree on, I’ve struggled with categorizing my rejection of religion. Am I an agnostic, a non-believer, an atheist, a non-theist, something else, or at times am I all of those things? I know I don’t believe in heaven or hell, that a single, omnipresent, omniscient, entirely benevolent, male entity far beyond human comprehension created the universe. I just don’t buy that; too contradictory. At the same time, I’m not even remotely intellectually equipped or knowledgeable of the hundreds of thousands of human cultures that have conceived of nonhuman intelligence to make the claim Richard Dawkins is famous for; that no gods exist anywhere. That claim is as contradictory as it is overly confident as it is utterly soaking wet with willful ignorance. 

But I suppose we would expect nothing less from a highly educated and academically conscious white man raised in an imperialist culture, during a time when intellectual whiteness advanced largely unchallenged within the mainstream. From the very moment of little Dickey's birth he has been socialized to believe that white men like him, especially Englishmen, invented and perfected the one true way of knowing, science. Dawkins would almost certainly deny this claim (I'm sure he has many times over), asserting his firm grasp on a white scientists' favorite binky, objectivity. Then again, white people, especially white men, are not known for having much of an understanding of what problematic subconscious voices they're listening to. And it's precisely this lack of understanding and/or acknowledgement of the influence of one's socialization, particularly the racist socialization that the English and many a scientist dead and alive are famous for ignoring. In Dawkins we have yet another such character declaring an absolute truth having never tested his ideas beyond the horizon of his problematic cultural preconceptions. This is what Dickey D is saying when he claims there's never been any evidence of a god or the gods: 1) "The bandwidth of my understanding of the evidence for gods is large enough to speak for all human knowledge"; 2) "I have reviewed all relevant evidence for gods"; 3) "Any evidence that I haven't reviewed is irrelevant."; 4)"No, my entire argument is based on a cultural superiority complex disguised as an obvious tautology! How dare you question my superior intellect! I'm  he is saying no other human culture living or dead - and by the way, I have almost no understanding of the role white supremacy played in annihilating countless cultures - has ever correctly conceived of a spiritual realm or the principles that might govern such a realm. The ideas and evidence for god/gods, even the evidence I can never examine, are all incorrect and I know this to be true because it's impossible for me to conceive of such a thing. See what I mean? That’s a fuck boi thing to claim.

But I do agree with Dick that the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, are too rife with contradictions to be believed based on logic. And I also get the frustration and anger nonbelievers feel when faced with the many heinous things people do in the name of religion. It’s horrifying to review the ways in which people cause harm when, if they’d simply stop and seriously question the foundations of their belief system (or simply heed that nagging feeling most humans get when we intentionally cause harm to others), would not likely commit. Fair enough. But what you never hear ‘ol Dicky Dawk talk at length about is the role white supremacy, both religiously powered and non religiously powered, has had in undermining our collective ability to understand our species and the cultural diversity white people in the name of whiteness have been erasing at a breakneck pace over the last centuries. And that issue, or rather the failure to integrate that issue into atheist discourse, is relevant because we are losing ways of knowing, ways of perceiving the world. We talk about the tragedy of losing unknown cures for diseases in rain forests in favor of rangeland and timber (and I bet you Dawkins, if he ever reads this, will do so seated in a rainforest wood chair eating some fine Brazilian steak), but fail to recognize the tragic loss of perspective and knowledge that comes from human beings shaped by a specific biogeography. But, again, this type of failure to draw obvious parallels between seemingly disparate issues is the hallmark of western white supremacist science. We've drawn lines around the boundaries of what we care to explore and declared everything outside of such boundaries irrelevant.

So where does that leave my brand of atheism, which, believe it or not, was the point of this entry. Nothing I’ve read or experienced leaves me to believe that the explanations of the realm beyond my physical existence are correct. I find the abrahamic belief system tree confusing at best and soul crushing at worst. I don’t think Hinduism is right for me and I don’t know enough about Buddhism or other such ways of knowing that have been around for only 15,000 to subscribe to. But, and this is where I get close to blowing up my argument that Dickens is a moron (but he is, he really really is), I’m highly skeptical of any religion that was formed out of the conceptions of humans living in agricultural-based civilizations. Why? I’ll leave the answer for that in my next post, with this teaser; domestication of life as a means of subsistence fundamentally changes the human perception of the world and her/his relationship to it. Don't believe me? Talk to and/or engage with indigenous stories and writings discussing the conflict between them and those who came to civilize them.

When I’m asked to reveal my religious status I usually tell people I’m an atheist, but not a Richard Dawkins atheist. I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe that humans are fundamentally flawed and that part of our purpose is to spend our lives atoning for a flaw in our design. That idea is so clearly, to me at least, the product of the guilt of a people trying to convince their victims and themselves that the horrible things they do are somehow justified, the same way a serial abuser rationalizes their terror to themselves and their victims. Naw playa, fuck that. I’m not perfect by any means, but I’m not fundamentally broken, not by virtue of being born. And without that belief, none of the rest of a belief in the gods of civilization makes sense. Like the Janelle Monáe says, "I'm a free-ass mutherfucker", or, at least, I'm trying to be.