http://www.theweek.co.uk/people-news/religion/49022/chief-rabbi-slams-dawkins-using-anti-semitic-stereotype

Richard Dawkins

THE CHIEF Rabbi has accused atheist Professor Richard Dawkins of using an anti-Semitic stereotype in his best-selling book The God Delusion.

Lord Jonathan Sacks complained about a passage in Dawkins’s book in which he says that the God of the Old Testament was the “most unpleasant character in all fiction”.

But Dawkins, an Oxford evolutionary biologist, dismissed the allegation as “ridiculous” and said he was not “anti-Jewish” just “anti-God”, reports The Daily Telegraph.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins describes God as “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”.

During a discussion at the BBC’s Re:Think religion festival in Salford on Wednesday, Lord Sacks claimed the remarks were based on centuries of prejudice.

Dawkins insisted the passage was intended to be humorous. But Lord Sacks replied: “There are Christian atheists and Jewish atheists, you read the Bible in a Christian way. Christianity has an adversarial way of reading what it calls the Old Testament – it has to because it says ‘we’ve gone one better, we have a New Testament’.

“So you come prejudiced against what you call the Old Testament and that’s why I did not read the opening to chapter two in your book as a joke, I read it as a profoundly anti-Semitic passage.”

Prof Dawkins expressed incredulity, asking: “How you can call that anti-Semitic? It’s anti-God.”

But Lord Sacks insisted that it was “anti the Jewish God”.

Lord Sacks, who retires as Chief Rabbi next year, later said he was nevertheless fond of Dawkins.

“I was not concerned that Richard was anti-Semitic at all,” he said. “I was concerned that he was using an anti-Semitic stereotype, which has run through a certain strand of the Christian reading of what is called the Old Testament as a result of which thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Jews, died in the Middle Ages.”

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/people-news/religion/49022/chief-rabbi-slams-dawkins-using-anti-semitic-stereotype#ixzz273JN7uO2

2 COMMENTS

  1. oh PLEASE! in no way is that description of G-d anti-Semitic. it’s probably a little blasphemous, but hey, that’s Dawkins’ problem, not mine.

    I hear and read truly anti-Semitic comments all the time, thank largely to the internet, and this ain’t it. there’s nothing offensive about it; in fact I like to think that G-d encourages us to question him; it means we’re thinking about him.

    Dawkins is pretty much a moron, but let’s cut him some slack on this one.

  2. Militant atheism is frequently selective – not in its deity-rejection but in its militancy. For instance, even though Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all "three anti-human religions" for Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), they come from "a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament". The latter text, which is known as "Old Testament" only to Christians (it’s Tanakh for the Jews, without the changes introduced by the Christians), is viewed by Dawkins as responsible for everything, being a "tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God." If this is not religious antisemitism, masquerading as atheism, I don’t know what is.
    (http://unchartedforest.blogspot.com/2011/03/fair-militancy.html; http://unchartedforest.blogspot.com/2010/06/scientific-atheism.html)

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