Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry

Re:Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry by tyri_kai_psomi on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @09:52AM (#21060125)

Add to this Richard Dawkins new book, "Outgrowing God" which is rife with inaccuracies, baseless conjecture about the motivations behind some of the ancients civilizations he talks about (an assyriologist posted a pretty pointed takedown of some of the inaccuracies on twitter https://twitter.com/GHeathWhyte/status/1175081067943997440), and theology so bad you would question whether or not he himself has ever actually opened up a Bible.

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Re:Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry by ghostbrainalpha on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @12:40PM (#21062030)

Great... so now I can't trust Richard Dawkins OR the people who review his books.

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Re:Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry by tyri_kai_psomi on Tuesday September 24, 2019 @12:57PM (#21062217)

As the twitter thread notes, he seems to have gotten some of his historical information about ancient Mesopotamia from a website called historywiz (https://www.historywiz.com/flood.htm), which I suppose is good if you are writing a 8th or 9th grade paper on the topic, but not a book.

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Re:Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry by Shorel on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @11:52AM (#21071952)

Interesting and informative.

However your previous remark about Richard Dawkins opening up a Bible is a bit worrying.

It is obvious that the missing historical information is not in the Bible, and that remark can be interpreted a bit like the point of view of Jehovah witnesses, that all you need to read is the Bible.

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Re:Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry by zaque1213 on Wednesday September 25, 2019 @06:49PM (#21076453)

I think their statement about Dawkins’ apparently having never opened a Bible was in regard to his theological understanding, not historical.

Having read Dawkins, my primary critique of him overall is that he regularly demonstrates a willful ignorance as to what religious people actually believe. He’s content to attack straw men and not the propositional truth claims at the heart of religious belief.

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