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In reply to the discussion: Richard Dawkins under fire for ‘mild pedophilia’ remarks [View all]muriel_volestrangler
(102,122 posts)44. The interview, and a short excerpt from the autobiography:
He says hes pleased how things have changed on the harassment front in the past 40 years. But on other occasions when that shifting moral zeitgeist rears its head as boys, including him, are molested or beaten at his various boarding schools, for instance he fails to be outraged. One master at his public school, Oundle, he writes, was prone to fall in love with the prettier boys. He never, as far as we knew, went any further than to put an arm around them in class and make suggestive remarks, but nowadays that would probably be enough to land him in terrible trouble with the police and tabloid-inflamed vigilantes.
Is he guilty of rationalising bad stuff just because its past? I am very conscious that you cant condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we dont 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 paedophilia, and cant find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.
The mention of paedophilia inevitably brings us to the recent run of arrests of old white men accused of child sex abuse, starting with Jimmy Savile. Has the moral zeitgeist been shifting at their expense? I think we should acknowledge it. Thats one point But the other point is that because the most notorious cases of paedophilia involve rape and even murder, and because we attach the label paedophilia to the same things when theyre just mild touching up, we must beware of lumping all paedophiles into the same bracket.
...
http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2013/9/7/the-world-according-to-richard-dawkins-the-times#
Is he guilty of rationalising bad stuff just because its past? I am very conscious that you cant condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we dont 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 paedophilia, and cant find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.
The mention of paedophilia inevitably brings us to the recent run of arrests of old white men accused of child sex abuse, starting with Jimmy Savile. Has the moral zeitgeist been shifting at their expense? I think we should acknowledge it. Thats one point But the other point is that because the most notorious cases of paedophilia involve rape and even murder, and because we attach the label paedophilia to the same things when theyre just mild touching up, we must beware of lumping all paedophiles into the same bracket.
...
Back at Chafyn Grove I would watch games of squash from the gallery, waiting for the game to end so I could slip down and practise by myself. One day I must have been about 11 there was a master in the gallery with me. He pulled me onto his knee and put his hand inside my shorts. He did no more than have a little feel, but it was extremely disagreeable (the cremasteric reflex is not painful, but in a skin-crawling, creepy way it is almost worse than painful) as well as embarrassing. As soon as I could wriggle off his lap, I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him. I dont think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself. The atmosphere at morning prayers told us that something was up even before [the headmaster] Gallows made his grim announcement, and one of the woman teachers was crying. Many years later in Oxford, a large bishop sat next to me at high table in New College. I recognised his name. He had been the (ah me, much smaller then) curate at St Marks church, to which Chafyn Grove marched in crocodile for matins every Sunday, and he was evidently in touch with the gossip. He told me that the same woman teacher had been hopelessly in love with the paedophile master who had killed himself. None of us had ever guessed.
http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2013/9/7/the-world-according-to-richard-dawkins-the-times#
I don't think his "different standards" claim holds water. If, 60 years ago, a teacher putting his hand down the shorts of a boy had become known, it still would have been held to be an outrage - it is not like caning, which was accepted. And he "doesn't think" the others suffered damage, but he really has no way of knowing that - I doubt he kept up with all them (and he knows 'many' of his friends suffered it too - he doesn't know how many boys that he didn't know well also did, or if some kept quiet because more had happened), or that they would all have opened up to him at all stages of their life for him to know it never affected them.
Yes, I think he is guilty of making excuses. The Roman Catholic church has tried it, and it doesn't work - there really wasn't a point where it was OK for authority figures, whether teachers or priests, to grope children sexually.
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The title makes it seem like Dawkins did it instead of forgiving those that do
coldmountain
Sep 2013
#4
As far as I know, sexual fondling of children by adults has never been acceptable
Crunchy Frog
Sep 2013
#50
Incorrect. He says he knows this particular person did it to others and he doesn't
cbayer
Sep 2013
#10
Oh dear Dicky, Dicky, Dicky! Looks like you came a real cropper this time.
Starboard Tack
Sep 2013
#30
It is beyond creepy. He has also made excuses for the heinous crimes of the RCC.
cbayer
Sep 2013
#38