It would appear that Richard Dawkins is only the latest in a long line of societally destructive assholes named Dawkins, as there has been a Dawkins on the wrong side of history for centuries:
He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism. Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against “intolerance and suffering”, must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.
One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744. The Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership. Over Norton Park, inherited by Richard Dawkins’s father, remains in the family, with the campaigner as a shareholder and director of the associated business….
In 1796 the oldest son James Dawkins (1760-1843) voted against Wilberforce’s proposal to abolish the slave trade, helping to defeat it by just four votes. In 1807 he was one of a small rump of die-hards opposing the provisions of Slave Trade Act, which abolished selling slaves in the British Empire. He is believed to have been among just 18 MPs who supported an amendment to postpone the act’s implementation by five years. They were defeated by the votes of 174 MPs.
On religious matters James Dawkins was throughout 1813 an opponent of ‘Catholic relief’, one of the acts which lifted restrictions on freedom of worship, property and electoral rights for Catholics.
I note with no little amusement that there is a material overlap between those who are defending Dawkins against the sins of his fathers and those who previously attempted to attack me through my father, who is presently enjoying a 15-year, taxpayer-funded retirement at a minimum security campus in a sub-tropical location courtesy of the Federal government.
Pity the poor Dawkster. He can’t help it. His obnoxious behavior is only the consequence of his selfish, selfish genes.
UPDATE: What a cowardly little bitch he has become.
Remarkably, Dawkins stipulated that his Sunday Times interview must be carried out by someone who is ‘not religious’. This reinforces the suspicion I’ve always had that he wishes only to preach to the converted and sneer at the rest. There is no real attempt to engage; like so much of the evangelistic, atheistic, liberal left it is simply fashionable attitudinalising and means less than a handful of dust.
I suspect what is bothering Dawkins most these days is that is beginning to suspect that he’s going to be trashed unmercifully for years, if not decades, after his death. I don’t think he anticipated the way in which Christians were initially holding their fire or that his side would be so badly intellectually outgunned.