At www.venganza.org — home site of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — one finds the link to an interview in which Richard Dawkins attempts to have a rational discussion with a woman named Wendy Wright. The link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AS6rQtiEh8&feature=player_embedded.
I’m a great admirer of Richard Dawkins’ thinking and his writing, brilliant in thought and in style. I especially admire his sense of humor, so well displayed in Post Modernism Disrobed, an essay in his excellent collection entitled A Devil’s Chaplain.
So it was that in a visit yesterday to www.venganza.org—the site of the Flying Spaghetti Monster—it took me less than a nano-decade (a billionth of a decade, a very useful measure) to decide to click on the link to his interview with the quite unbelievable Wendy Wright (who may well believe a more apt surname would be Right or Righteous). Ms Wright’s phony pasted-on smiles failed to mask her absolute refusal to listen to what Mr. Dawkins said. She proved herself to be yet another piece of evidence of a political and religious conservative who operates with mental barricades. She, like so many of her fellow-travelers, has erected a thought-blocking mechanism which prevents the entry into her consciousness of any concepts which may challenge her preconceived ideas.
Who can guess where Dawkins’ limitless patience and admirable self-restraint with the poor woman came from? Might he have learned them from teaching mentally deficient persons at some time in his distinguished career? Did they derive from a British sense of noblesse oblige as to inferior beings? In any case, Ms Wright’s inability—no, more important: her unwillingness—to think logically blows one’s mind. A medal to anyone who can manage to watch the full interview; half-medals to anyone who can stomach, say, 10 or 15 minutes of the airhead’s stubborn, stonewalling ignorance.
What’s all this got to do with the Dilbert Classics piece which is at http://www.gocomics.com/dilbert-classics/2013/04/21? Well, what Scott Adams has drawn might meet Ms Wright’s criteria for evidence sufficient to convince her that evolution is an unquestionably proven set of facts.
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