The illogic of Atheism

No Malf, you're missing the point.  For me at least.  It isn't the position he is trying to assert.  Its the boorish, attacking, unkind, broad negatively stereo typing way in which he goes about it.

Sorry, you beat me to it! 

It may well be that we are looking at the same ones and drawing different conclusions.

In any event, I don't intend to go searching for this right now. Frankly it matters not to me whether or not you buy into what has been said of Dawkins here - again, I do not have those videos or articles at hand. I'm really quite confident that the links Chris and Silence have shared paint a reasonably clear picture of what we're talking about. If more digging is needed, if it's an issue you consider worth pursuing, go for it.

That seems fair. Thank you.

Linda

I think you've misunderstood me. I am entirely in line with the notion that one making a claim ought to generally support it with evidence - but as Chris pointed out, Dawkins came up incidental to the first post and Linda inquired about it. 

I'm not blowing anything. I've stated this before, and perhaps it fell on deaf ears, but this seems to me to be an exercise in argument for the sake of argument. We aren't debating a thing that is very controversial right now. This is not psi. This is not skepticism. It's personal interpretations of the way Richard Dawkins generally comes off. There's no objective evidence for that - it's subjective. It inherently requires people to draw their own conclusions based on how they feel, reasonably, when they listen to or read Dawkins. 1000 articles and videos could be shared which many would say clearly paint the picture of a conceited and derogatory Dawkins, and Linda could 1000 times say that those videos and articles just don't reflect that to her. 

You're acting as if there's some objective evidence to be had here that will allow one side to prevail over the other - and that just isn't the case here.

I think I misunderstood the complaint against Dawkins. I didn’t think it was about whether sometimes he says cutting or derogatory things (especially since the presented examples pale in comparison to Mathis’ article or to the posts of some forum members). But I see now that that is what you and others were drawing my attention to.

Linda

The idea that referring to a specific, less fashionable, god would make the comment less insulting seems to give his argument even more power, imo.

We weren't talking about his argument. His argument is a terrible one, if you can even call it an argument... we were just talking about demeanor

You never say any nice things to me. Really? Do tell?

I have to admit this made me laugh. 

You want me to tell you why it's inane?

I mean, if you are going to mock religion, at least do it in style ...

The idea that referring to a specific, less fashionable, god would make the comment less insulting seems to give his argument even more power, imo.

Unlike others, I was actually trying to understand his argument. I'm still trying.

The closest I've got in the light of people's comments is something like this:
(1) The tooth fairy is a fictional human construct
(2) It's my opinion that God, like the tooth fairy, is also a fictional human construct
(3) Therefore this person is stupid to think the existence of God can't be disproven.

If that's the idea, I just can't see the logic. It's like one of those obviously invalid syllogisms that are given to schoolchildren to criticise.

Perhaps as a zoologist Dawkins is qualified to give opinions about evolution, but I wonder how well suited he is to pronounce on metaphysics and philosophy. It's not as though people haven't been considering these issues in great depth for hundreds of years, and I suspect that generally those people were considerably more highly trained in logic than most of today's scientists.

Further to Dante's quotation from Martin Rees on Hawking, I was interested to see this on Dawkins:

Some former intellectual allies, such as the Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse – who lives and works in the US, where he has fought legal battles to ban the teaching of creationism in schools – see Dawkins’s antagonism as more likely to alienate than convert. To Ruse, Dawkins shows no interest in engaging with his opponents in order to defeat their arguments – “hammering Islam,” for example, “without any real understanding”. “His treatment of philosophical ideas in The God Delusion is frequently funny and certainly good journalism,” Ruse said, “but to put it politely it is deeply uninformed.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015...reputation

Unlike others, I was actually trying to understand his argument. I'm still trying.

The closest I've got in the light of people's comments is something like this:
(1) The tooth fairy is a fictional human construct
(2) It's my opinion that God, like the tooth fairy, is also a fictional human construct
(3) Therefore this person is stupid to think the existence of God can't be disproven.

If that's the idea, I just can't see the logic. It's like one of those obviously invalid syllogisms that are given to schoolchildren to criticise.

It seems plain to me: it is not that the tooth fairy is fictional, it is that the tooth fairy cannot be proved to be non-existent. Nevertheless, any thinking person would scoff at the idea that the tooth fairy might exist and protest that there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea. Dawkins then applies the same argument to the possible existence of God, i.e. that no thinking person should entertain such a possibility since there is no evidence to support it.

Again, Dawkins dismisses thousands of years of theology, personal and communal beliefs and serious religious and philosophical scholars - all with a peurile comparison to a children's fairy story.

Unlike others, I was actually trying to understand his argument. I'm still trying.

The closest I've got in the light of people's comments is something like this:
(1) The tooth fairy is a fictional human construct
(2) It's my opinion that God, like the tooth fairy, is also a fictional human construct
(3) Therefore this person is stupid to think the existence of God can't be disproven.

If that's the idea, I just can't see the logic. It's like one of those obviously invalid syllogisms that are given to schoolchildren to criticise.

I was responding to K, with respect to the specific god(s) he cited. When Dawkins is referring to ‘god’ he is invariably referring to those that are currently en vogue and dominate the religious landscape (abrahamic). Man made organised religions appear to be exclusively in his cross hairs.

If you have in mind a concept of god that isn’t the ‘invisible friend’ variety, with a genital fixation, he (and I) are probably more receptive.