For example, you may have seen the quote going around the net, “Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.”

Each part of it, technically, can be interpreted such a way as to make it not a lie. But I think you’ll agree with me that it’s a misrepresentation.

As you presented it, you imply rather strongly that (a) Dawkins gives at least some credence to the idea, and (b) that he made such a conjecture without specific prompting. Neither of which are at all the case.

I think you may have some confusion over the meaning of “to speculate.”

Your first paragraph:

The Supreme Court declared in 2010 that public universities must permit religious student clubs to select leaders who share their faith. UNC-Greensboro is now getting around this by declaring that a Christian student club isn’t really religious.

What are they getting around? You said the SC said in 2010 public universities must let student religious clubs use faith tests to select their leaders. Your words would literally mean then the ‘Student Christian Club’ must be allowed by the University to select their leaders from Christians only (Jews, Muslims, atheists need not apply, Mormons depending upon whether this club considers Mormons Christians or not etc.). So what is there to get around?

Christian Legal Society v. Martinez is the 2010 ruling being referenced. That ruling did NOT say that Colleges must allow student clubs to discriminate based on religion if they were religious clubs. The ruling said that Colleges could have a rule that said all clubs that received student funds could be required to NOT discriminate based on religion. Colleges were not required, of course to implement such a rule but if they did a Christian group who wanted to discriminate against non-Christians would ‘have to find a way to get around’ it.

But what did I write that misrepresented Dawkins?

Isn’t it obvious? Dawkins wasn’t speculating that “our creators were little green men from outer space”. He was pointing out that that – ahem – unlikely scenario was the best possible case for ‘intelligent design’.

And he was doing this in direct response to a question by a ‘cdesign proponentist’, not spontaneously. He wasn’t even “speculating” as such, he was responding to a specific question in an interview.

Oh, and Dawkins never used the phrase “little green men”, either.

That’s off the top of my head. If I think of other errors in that phrase of yours, I’ll let you know.

That is, of course, a lie. The SC didn’t rule that student clubs couldn’t be religious or make exclude people either from membership or leadership on the basis of not sharing the club’s religious beliefs. The SC ruled that a college *could*, if it wanted, have a rule that student funds only go to clubs that were open to all students.

Likewise the HHS claim is also another lie. The bill created an extraordinary exception for abortion. Individuals who want insurance to cover abortion have to write their own check to their insurance company for a ‘mini-policy’ that covers abortion only. Your employer then is only an abortion provider if you believe that because your boss pays you for your labor, he is entitled to tell you how to spend your pay because it’s really ‘his’.

Even on the birth control pill front, let’s leave aside the rather unlikely set of events that have to happen for the pill to cause abortion (a woman has to start using at *just* the right moment when an egg has been released and fertilized but not implanted yet…BTW NFP can have the same effect, if the couple has sex just before the optimal fertilization period the result may be an egg that is fertilized but finds the uterus hostile to implantation resulting in its death), and the rather more likely fact that use of the pill probably lowers the numbers of abortions that would happen (whether or not abortion is ever made illegal). Fact is the only person who ‘provides’ contraception is a doctor who prescribes it or a pharmacist who fills the script and the health bill says nothing about any mandate to provide contraception.

Douglas Johnson,

As I just said in another thread: Why are responses on these topics from you and others so often snappish, sarcastic, or—as they say—snarky? I realize people have very strong feelings, but is that any reason to abandon politeness and civility?

Please note that I said, “I don’t think—even if you consider them morally equivalent—that preventing implantation and terminating a clinical pregnancy are the same thing.” You are free to condemn anything that interferes with implantation all you want. I did not say it was not the causing of death of a human being. I just don’t think the correct way to describe it is abortion. The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary defines abortion as follows:

1 : the expulsion of a nonviable fetus: a : spontaneous expulsion of a human fetus during the first 12 weeks of gestation — compare MISCARRIAGE b : induced expulsion of a human fetus c : expulsion often due to infection of a fetus by a domestic animal at any time before completion of pregnancy

Failure to implant, whether because of natural causes or because of the effects of some drug, does not seem to me to involve expulsion (expell to force out from or as if from a receptacle : drive out : cast out : EJECT, DISLODGE).

I have not proposed a new definition of abortion. I am using the existing one. Also, I pointed out that it is a matter of dispute whether the drugs you call abortifacients interfere with implantation.

Total side issue, agreed.

But what did I write that misrepresented Dawkins?

P.S. Thanks for the link, though. I always pictured him a calm, semi-methodical thinker. Holy cow did I get that wrong.

And just so you don’t have to pretend that the word never existed, you just argue that abortion only ever referred to a practice whereby the child is delivered and burned at the stake. And then say you’re against that.

(Basically this is the same tactic as the movement to redefine marriage. You don’t say you are actually “redefining” anything, you just say that “hey marriage was only ever a relationship between two random people that never had anything to do with their complementary sex” and viola! Anyone who disagrees is a racist Jim Crow by extension.)

the possibility that our creators were little green men from outer space, as Richard Dawkins has speculated.

It’s a side issue, but… that’s wrong in several ways.

“Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It’s the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be… I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don’t think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.”

You don’t have to agree with Dawkins. But you should at least avoid misrepresenting him.