The latest Richard Dawkins kerfuffle is most amusing. He's now on the progressive left's shit list (who isn't?) for being Islamophobic; pointedly, he's been disinvited by Berkley, California radio station KPFA as part of a promotion tour: "We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech. While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologize for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins views much earlier."
I had read KPFA's press release earlier this morning in the Weekly Standard, and just spotted it again in Andrew Sullivan's latest and, as usual, excellent weekly column for NY Magazine. Sullivan is as amused as I. "As anyone with a brain and an internet connection knows, Dawkins has made a second career out of vilifying religions of all kinds," he writes. What's more, Sullivan asks "Why is he Islamophobic and not also obviously anti-Semitic?"
Sullivan asks because, well, Dawkins once wrote that "the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
So, again, Why is Dawkins not "obviously anti-Semitic?" Permit me to field that one, Andrew. Here's what literary critic Harold Bloom, a Jew, had to say about God of Milton's Paradise Lost, derived straight from the Old Testament: "I find Milton's God the principal blot upon an otherwise magnificent poem…. He is self-righteous, irascible, and anxious; William Blake accurately termed him a Schoolmaster of Souls. You have to be a dogmatic Christian whose values are not aesthetic to find this God attractive."
Indeed, Paradise Lost's "hero," so to speak, is Satan. Other than Hamlet and perhaps Falstaff, he's the most fascinating, engrossing literary character in the English language. Milton's Satan is full of somewhat justified outrage over the ham-handed dictatorialism of the Supreme Deity, and he's not about to take any divine crap without a fight.
I digress, but only out of love for English literature, Harold Bloom, and any kerfuffle over the eminently rational Richard Dawkins.