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Read other letters about this article
Richard Dawkins pisses me off.
There. I've said it. I've been wanting to say that since I got bored one day and typed his name into the search field on youtube.com. If you do that too, you'll find all kinds of interesting clips from shows he's done - and one of those clips is an interview that Dawkins did with Ted Haggard.
If you're unfamiliar with Richard Dawkins do a search here on Salon. They interviewed him not too long ago. If that's not enough, the cover story in this month's Wired magazine is about the "New Atheists", of which, he is their leader, at least according to Wired.
My problem with Richard is perfectly exemplified when you watch the interview he does with Ted Haggard. In the clip, Richard goes to one of Ted's church services and then speaks with him afterward. This man of reason, of science, opens his interview thusly:
(watch it here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gmNjfpoRZpE)
RD: "That was really quite a show you gave us today. A fair amount of money seems to have been spent here."
TH: "Yes, I wanted people to be able to worship and enjoy and to be in a setting where the speaker is close to them. That's why it's in the round. And so they can be close to me, and so I can look at them."
RD: "Well it's certainly very effective what you do. I mean it seemed to me to have all the arts (otts?) of the - I mean I was almost reminded of - if you'll forgive me - of sort of a Nuremberg Rally. I mean, such incredibly... Dr. Goebbels would have been proud."
TH: "I don't know anything about the Nuremburg Rallies but lots of Americans think of it as a rock concert."
Dude, I'm reasonably sure there's no God. I've invested much of my teenage and adult life pondering and researching that question and I'm inclined to agree with Richard Dawkins. But, that being said, he misses completely the point of religion. He wants to sweep aside thousands of years of belief structure because God cannot be proved by science. What he fails to see is that there's an entire social structure built around a common reference (God / the Bible) that needs replacing and that can’t be done by marching into an interview with Ted Haggard and commenting that his services remind him of Nazi rallies. That's not science or even proper debating. That's demonizing and name calling.
And that's more or less where I put this accusation of Ted at the moment. I would be a touchstone moment, I believe, if it is proven that Ted Haggard is a closet homosexual. I believe that there's some good to be had by interjecting the idea of human fallibility (as it will be seen within his congregation) into a persona that is built largely on the us-versus-them mentality that he preaches. He certainly can use clumsy confrontations like the one provided by Richard Dawkins as evidence of this us-versus-them situation. But if he is gay, while being vocally anti-gay, hopefully this will be cause for some introspective thought among some of his flock.
That being said, he's an easy target. He's practically an inevitable target due to his stature within the Evangelical Community. I do not subscribe to his belief structure. I bet I disagree with the majority of his politics but clearly a known male prostitute has less to lose than Ted Haggard when it comes to leveling these accusations.
Before we here on Salon jump up in down with glee at the thought of one more moralist being revealed to be as human as the rest of us, I suggest we ponder the facts for one moment and unlike Richard Dawkins engage in a sustentative discussion based on fact rather than one unproven accusation.
We should not be the side that traffics in sliming somebody because we heard a rumor in the Internet/blogosphere echo chamber. There's enough real dirt to go around without having to make any of it up.
If we do otherwise, we do so at the expense of our credibility and, like Dawkins, we'll look foolish in the process.
