I just love how these believers in superstition and Chosen (god's) people (insert your imaginary Commander in Chief), and these haters of Reason (and especially of Free thinkers who by default must carry this mantle of sense)...leap in like filthy vultures when they think (or pretend to think) that some world renowned leader in the atheist camp has been caught in error!
These immoral misfits are jumping on Richard Dawkins accusing him of "defending" or "advocating" pedophilia! Of course, he did nothing of the sort. However, I agree with Hemant Mehta, that Richard failed to consider his audience and ought to have made it clear that the fact that he suffered no lasting negative consequences from abuse, that--if not picayune--amounted, at least to him, to somewhat less than a war crime--is not necessarily the way a less sophisticated thinker might judge the matter.
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***Update***: Dawkins has now responded to the criticism. He acknowledges that many other victims of sexual abuse have suffered serious trauma, while still explaining that his own experience hasn’t had the same result. He also points out that some of his childhood friends, subject to the same abuse, may have suffered as a result, but none of them have said as much yet. I’m sure people will still complain this isn’t enough, but Dawkins did exactly what I hoped he would do. I only wish he had said it like this in the first place.
"Today we read, almost daily, of adults whose childhood was blighted by an uncle perhaps, or even a parent, who would day after day, week after week, year after year, sexually abuse a vulnerable child. The child would often have no escape, would not be believed if he/she told the other parent, or told a teacher. In many cases it is only now, when the abused children have reached adulthood, that these stories are coming out. To make light of their stories, even after all these years, might in some cases re-awaken the trauma of not being believed at the time when it was all happening, and when being believed would have meant so much to the child.
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… I cannot know for certain that my companions’ experiences with the same teacher were are brief as mine, and theirs may have been recurrent where mine was not. That’s why I said only “I don’t think he did any of us lasting damage”. We discussed it among ourselves on many occasions, especially after his suicide, and there was indeed general agreement that his gassing himself was far more upsetting than his sexual depredations had been. If I am wrong about any particular individual; if any of my companions really was traumatised by the abuse long after it happened; if, perhaps it happened many times and amounted to more than the single disagreeable but brief fondling that I endured, I apologise."
In the book, Dawkins mentions one occasion when a teacher put a hand down his trousers at a prep school in Salisbury, and four others at Oundle, when he “had to fend off nocturnal visits to my bed from senior boys much larger and stronger than I was”. The Oundle incidents don’t seem to have bothered him. see it through those eyes,” he says. “I find it much harder to put on those goggles where we’re talking about the monstrous cruelty that went on in past times. It’s hard to think of that and The prep school one did, but he still can’t bring himself to condemn it, partly because the kind of comparison his adult mind deploys is with the mass murders carried out by Genghis Khan in the 12th century. “Without condoning what was done, at least try to put on the goggles of the period and to forgive using modern standards in the same way as it might be for the schoolmaster who touched me up but didn’t actually do me any physical violence.”
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