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The Richard Dawkins School For Tots

Worst place since the Ayn Rand version, for sure. From the Religion News Service’s report: Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s best-known and outspoken atheists, has provoked outrage among child protection agencies and experts after suggesting that recent child abuse scandals have been overblown. In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), […]

Worst place since the Ayn Rand version, for sure. From the Religion News Service’s report:

Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s best-known and outspoken atheists, has provoked outrage among child protection agencies and experts after suggesting that recent child abuse scandals have been overblown.

In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, he said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”

He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

So if the headmaster twiddles your todger, little boy, don’t complain. It’s not like he raped or murdered you. So says the Prophet Of The Enlightened. He has a habit of this kind of thing. Remember when he told a woman that she was a whiner for complaining about having been sexually harassed in an elevator, because it was not like she had had her genitals mutilated or anything.

All I’m saying is that it might not be a great idea to let Uncle Richard babysit, is all.

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