Richard Dawkins Had Lawrence Krauss on His Show

We are not ever going to hear a dialectic

Dawkins on his podcast

I’ve been writing about Richard Dawkins’s podcast The Poetry of Reality, examining the development of its transphobic purpose.

He Dismisses Trans-Inclusivity as a ‘Religion’

The next part I want to discuss is the 8-minute episode released October 10, 2023: “Does Woke Count As A Religion?” This is a slick video remake of his August 3 Substack text post, “Replying to Jordan Peterson.”

Dawkins acknowledges “two challenges” that Jordan Peterson addressed to him online with a critical stance. He coos to Peterson: “I greatly respect Dr. Peterson’s courageous stance against a bossy, intolerant thought police whose Orwellian Newspeak threatens enlightened rationalism.”

The first of Peterson’s challenges to Dawkins: “Does woke count as a religion?” Dawkins says it does, despite not containing supernatural beliefs, because it has:

• “Heresy hunting” (i.e., witch-hunting those it accuses of transphobia). He says the “cult” only makes sense to the “sheep-like” insiders. Repeating his infamous 2021 Twitter quip: “Why is a white woman in America vilified and damned if she identifies as Black but lauded if she identifies as a man?” Acknowledgment of trans people’s genders is a “distortion of language so perverse” that it approaches “2 + 2 = 5.” It’s “cowardice” before “the baying mob,” he says.
• “Hereditary guilt,” in the Christian sense of original sin. “Today’s ‘original sins’ are slavery and colonial oppression,” he says, which is said to affect “all white people.”
• “Transubstantiation,” in the Christian sense that bread and wine are believed to become Christ’s body and blood. “Catholics invoke Aristotle’s silly distinction between ‘incidentals’ and true ‘substance.’” He says that declaring one’s own gender is a “magic incantation” that is supposed to change a person’s substance while ignoring “mere Aristotelian accidentals” of the body. “Transsexuals have transubstantiated genitals,” he says, and “insist that everybody else must go along with their beliefs.” This is an idea he’d been handed recently on a prior podcast episode by his guest, Peter Boghossian (released on YouTube on…