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[quote=Anonymous]Ok Dawkins:

Since then, he has written another 10 influential books on science and evolution, plus The God Delusion, his atheist blockbuster, and become the most prominent of the so-called New Atheists – a group of writers, including Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, who published anti-religion polemics in the years after 9/11.

Since his arrival on Twitter in 2008, his public pronouncements have become more combative – and, at times, flamboyantly irritable: “How dare you force your dopey unsubstantiated superstitions on innocent children too young to resist?,” he tweeted last June. “How DARE you?”

These days, Dawkins describes himself as “a communicator”. But depending on your point of view, he is also a hero, a heathen, or a liability. Many of his recent statements – on subjects ranging from the lack of Nobel prize-winning Muslim scientists to the “immorality” of failing to abort a foetus with Down’s syndrome – have sparked outraged responses (some of which Dawkins read aloud on a recent YouTube video, which perhaps won him back a few friends). For some, his controversial positions have started to undermine both his reputation as a scientist and his own anti-religious crusade. Friends who vigorously defend both his cause and his character worry that Dawkins might be at risk of self-sabotage. “He could be seriously damaging his long-term legacy,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett said of Dawkins’s public skirmishes. It is a legacy, Dennett believes, that should reflect the “masterpiece” that was The Selfish Gene and Dawkins’s major contribution to our understanding of life. As for Twitter: “I wish he wouldn’t do it,” Krauss said. “I told him that.”

For Dawkins, the science has always come first; his atheism is simply a natural extension of a lifelong quest to do Darwin’s work on Earth. As for the suggestion his public interventions over the past few years have done more harm than good – both to himself and his cause: “That does worry me,” Dawkins conceded, and yet he cannot quite resist the urge to wade in. “I think there is a curious desire in humans, maybe not all humans but certainly in me, to put things right,” he said. “There’s a joke in the New Yorker or something like that, of a man at a computer. It’s obviously very late and his wife is begging him to come to bed. He’s saying, ‘I can’t come to bed. Somebody’s wrong on the internet.’”

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.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/09/is-richard-dawkins-destroying-his-reputation

It’s quite a long article, but the crux is (to me) is that Dawkins is engaging online in deeply offensive ways, often from a place of (kindly putting it) disinformation. And it’s making people that used to be his allies (kindly putting it) uncomfortable. He’s crossing from atheism to anti-theism in a very public and possibly harmful way. (To the atheist movement, it seems.)[/quote]

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