I like Richard Dawkins

[DanaC]

Well, the thing is, he didn't even say that babies are atheist. Presumably because, as someone who is quite careful with language he knows that for a lot of people the meaning of atheism is less an absence of belief and more an active disbelief. What he actually said was that babies have no religion. The author of that column took his tweet that babies have no religion, suggested that this was implying that babies have a default theological position of atheism and then argued against that 'implied' meaning, rather than the actual thing that Dawkins said.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by DanaC

The author of that column took his tweet that babies have no religion, suggested that this was implying that babies have a default theological position of atheism and then argued against that 'implied' meaning, rather than the actual thing that Dawkins said.

He did twist the words to imply that Dawkins was claiming that babies pondered theology, but the fact is that a complete lack of theological position is still atheistic, so his argument would still fall flat if Dawkins had said what he claimed. If Dawkins had used the words "theological position", it would have been a silly construction to use, because of the implication of theologist babies, but he still would have been technically correct. If you're going to make fun of someone by twisting their words, you should make sure that the twisted words aren't also true.

And ridiculing the idea of "default language" explicitly supports Dawkins' actual point and wording. If you wouldn't count a baby as an "English speaker", why count them as "Catholic"?

And the "nationality" part is just completely incorrect.

Amazingly dumb quote.