In all of this, it hasn’t helped that some on the progressive side (a side with which I identify, broadly speaking) have confused atheism (technically, simply a negative metaphysical stance) with secular humanism (a truly politically progressive philosophy)...

...a confusion made all the more maddening by the vocal stamping of a number of high profile characters who relish in (and profit from) making outrageous statements with the transparent purpose of increasing web traffic while vilifying and insulting some of their own readers (you know who you are, no need to mention names).

Dickard Rawkins is an expert in saying things that pop into his head. What crazy thing will he say today for no reason other than to be spiteful?

Blumner: I will also say that not everything that Richard says on his twitter feed reflects the views of RDF or CFI, so you know it’s sort of like, if you’re dad or your brother Uh [Mehta chuckles] says something that you may or may not agree with, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re speaking for the family.

Mehta: Sure.

Blumner: So we need to make sure that organisations don’t get attributed to everything that anyone who’s associated with them says.

I think Richard Dawkins is purposefully misunderstood at times as a way to generate clicks on some bloggers' page. It's because his name brings page views and eyes so why not generate a lot of heat around something that is pretty tame if you really unpack it.

I also think Dalton is being fundamentally dishonest with himself. He cares, too. He cares enough to be moved to post a belittling monologue in which he tells the people who find Richard Dawkins to be unrepresentative of their interests to sit down and be quiet and accept him as their lord and master, their better, more worthy king of atheism. It’s also telling that he is only so moved when the target of dissent is Richard Dawkins; absent are the similar videos where he tells all the smug dudes of atheism that their hatred of Rebecca Watson is unwarranted, or that the position of Freethoughtblogs or Atheism+ is a valid side of the atheist experience and all the abuse should stop, or that perhaps criticizing Sam Harris for his position on racial profiling is a good idea, and certainly not so divisive that we should be sending this Myers guy hate mail every day.

But no, I’ve noticed that the people who say differences don’t matter all seem to have differences so great that they think we all ought to accept their side without question.

Nonono. Criticizing what Richard Dawkins says is exactly like lynching him or starting World War III, while receiving death/rape threats for criticizing Dawkins is a part of that 3% where we differ that should be ignored like Brian Dalton says. Professor Moran should be congratulated on the politeness and respect he demonstrates by hitting the nail so squarely on the head.

My goodness, don't you see that despite whatever he says voluntarily, in public, through a medium of his own choosing, Richard Dawkins' reputation is at stake here? If people point out all the crappy things he says, someone else might...

...Aw, hell, I can't keep that nonsense up.

The idea, Larry, that people are doing harm to Dawkin's reputation "just to prove" their own tribal bona fides is as polite and respectful as Dawkins has been lately to anyone who doesn't side with him on "the issue": not at all.

But I'm sure you'll consider the above criticism as part of a witch hunt against you, right? Got to keep comparing your (and Dawkins') critics to violent mobs, after all. It's the reasoned and rational thing to do. The kind of discussion Dawkins says he wants to have.

that 97% thing is really bothering me a lot. Even issuing that proclamation is dubious. I don’t believe in gods and think religion as a whole is damaging. Science is, in general, a good thing. That’s literally 3 things.
How does the Dawk feel about Dungeons and Dragons? or the Arrow/Flash TV universe? How does he feel about Shakespeare and which is his favorite play? He’ll probably say Hamlet. Self absorbed boys with pretentions of genius always say Hamlet. Does he like spicy food? How does he feel about vegetarianism? I imagine he and I have very, very different opinions about hip hop as a whole, since he’s got that Rhodes-inspired British Supremacism thing and is also super old. But would we even agree about “Which is the Beatles’ best album?” as I’m sure he just fucking loves them.
97% of “things” is an awful lot. Hell, I doubt we’d even agree on the answer to the question “What thinker contributed the most to the development of meme theory?” Where he would no doubt answer himself, but the correct answer is Hideo Kojima, who actually constructed an elaborate lab test for it in the form of a series of weird as fuck video games rather than simply coining a term.

And that’s before we get into political and philosophical differences within movement atheism, which is ostensibly the thing we’d be most likely to agree about.

If you handed me a questionaire with a bunch of questions, and him one, I wouldn’t be too astonished if it lined up somewhere between the 97% and the 3%. But I would be surprised if it landed closer to the 97 than the 3.

I see it is still common for Dawk Defenders to blame the man’s massive failures on Twitter on the limitations of Twitter itself. They keep appealing to the difficulty of communicating properly in 140 characters. They keep insisting everything would be better if he had more characters! The problem is, it isn’t just ever one tweet. It is almost always a series of tweets, wherein he keeps fucking digging and becomes more antagonistic and makes it clear that the charitable re-interpretations of the tweets are not actually valid. For fuck’s sake, years ago, when he did this several times, he would go make a full-size statement about the Twitter controversy of the week on his website, and the full-size, paragraphs-long article would only confirm exactly what everyone saw in the tweets: he is an insensitive jackass and a knee-jerk anti-feminist who credulously regurgitates whatever nonsense his fellow assholes feed to him, and he continues to give exactly zero shits about people not liking that.

I just find it to be the height of fucking absurdity that other people are still pretending that he is a kind and sympathetic gentleman who is just having difficulty expressing himself properly on that newfangled tweety word netblog. He’s been on Twitter since 2008. 7 and a half fucking years. And yet, when convenient, the apologists still pretend Dawkins just doesn’t know how to say what he means on the Twitter! Fuck that absolute fucking dishonest nonsense.

Oh, yes, it’s all just offense. But who is the one actually taking “offense”, if we look at it from the big picture? Dawkins took offense that Rebecca Watson didn’t want guys hitting on her in the elevator. He took offense that people thought a young boy should not have been arrested for bringing a clock to school, because “he didn’t really make a clock”. Language purity. He took offense because feminists protested an inappropriate shirt. Dawkins seems to be just one big ball of quivering offense right now, and we’re being told by everyone to lay off being offended because it’s so not freethinking, etc.