Alex has a post about the god panel at QED, which he attended, along with a lot of other people I know and a lot of people I don’t know.
Yesterday on QED’s second and last day, Carrie Poppy of Oh No, Ross and Carrie! fame (her talk on anecdotes, by the way, was excellent) moderated the ‘God Panel’, a discussion between Mitch Benn, Richard Dawkins, Mike Hall and Lawrence Krauss and the programme’s one specific atheist event. When a question was posed about mistakes our movement had made, the first example given
– I think by Mitch Benn, though it might have been Mike Hall –was Atheism Plus, an answer audience members seemed to like and onto which other panellists piled.Mitch Benn
(again, it may have been Mike Hall)said A+ makes atheism into more than non-belief.
I can interject here to clarify, because Mitch Benn tweeted at Rhys and me to explain that he has no problem with the principles, only the name. Oh well then! I’m not invested in the name, and not sure I like it either. That’s that sorted.
Lawrence Krauss said a ‘PC’ ‘orthodoxy’ now clamps down on people who say the wrong things.
Richard Dawkins called A+ an ‘obvious example’ of atheists doing things wrong, and bemoaned the use of the word ‘douchebag’ in reference to people deemed sexist. (It wasn’t the accusations of sexism to which he objected, so far as I could tell, but the word ‘douchebag’ specifically.)
PC orthodoxy in a pig’s eye. Yes, when people call me a cunt then I consider that sexist bullshit and I say so. If Lawrence Krauss doesn’t agree then I think he’s wrong, politically wrong, politically “incorrect” if you like. I wish people like Krauss (and others, I’m looking at you M_____l S_____r) would stop saying things like that. I wish they would accept it and move on. They don’t approve of racists screaming about “niggers” outside school buildings do they? Why should sexist epithets be any different?
Alex’s later posts will be about the great things at QED, of which there was obviously far more than this small item.