http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9542043/Richard-Dawkins-attacked-for-anti-Semitic-remarks-about-Jewish-God.html
Richard Dawkins attacked for 'anti-Semitic remarks about Jewish God’
The Chief Rabbi has accused Prof Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist, of making a “profoundly anti-Semitic” remark by criticising the Old Testament.
Prof Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist, has been accused by the Chief Rabbi of making a “profoundly anti-Semitic” remark by criticising the Old Testament. Photo: EPA
6:30AM BST 14 Sep 2012
Lord Sacks claimed that a remark in Prof Dawkins’s best-selling book The God Delusion, likening God as portrayed in Jewish scriptures to a fictional villain, was based on centuries of prejudice.
He said that although Prof Dawkins does not believe in God, he was nevertheless a “Christian atheist” as opposed to a “Jewish atheist”.
Prof Dawkins, an Oxford evolutionary biologist, dismissed the allegation as “ridiculous” and said he was not “anti-Jewish” just “anti-God”.
The row emerged during a head-to-head discussion at the BBC’s “Re:Think” religion festival in Salford.
Lord Sacks complained about a passage in Prof Dawkins’s book in which he said that the God of the Old Testament was the “most unpleasant character in all fiction”.
Prof Dawkins said that his remark that the stories of the Old Testament suggested God was “jealous”, “petty”, “pestilential”, a “megalomaniac” and a “bully” was a joke. But Lord Sacks replied: “There are Christian atheists and Jewish atheists, you read the Bible in a Christian way. Christianity has an adversarial way of reading what it calls the Old Testament – it has to because it says 'we’ve gone one better, we have a New Testament’.
“So you come prejudiced against what you call the Old Testament and that’s why I did not read the opening to chapter two in your book as a joke, I read it as a profoundly anti-Semitic passage”
Prof Dawkins expressed incredulity. “How you can call that anti-Semitic?” he said. “It’s anti-God.”
Lord Sacks insisted: “It is anti the Jewish God, Richard.”
Prof Dawkins said the moral values embodied by the God of the Old Testament were “very deplorable indeed – all that stuff about slaughtering the Amalekites”.
Lord Sacks, who retires as Chief Rabbi next year, said: “I was not concerned that Richard was anti-Semitic at all. I was concerned that he was using an anti-Semitic stereotype, which has run through a certain strand of the Christian reading of what is called the 'Old Testament’ as a result of which thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Jews, died in the Middle Ages.”
No comments:
Post a Comment