Interesting Links for 05-06-2014
- Teens being too soft for WW2 ‘not a massive problem’
(tags: wwii funny ) - “Eat Less, Exercise More” Isn’t The Answer For Weight Loss
(tags: diet weight health ) - Three-parent babies 'safe' to be born
(tags: parenting children genetics ) - The Architecture of Open Source Applications: LLVM
(tags: compiler programming ) - I would like to see this wolf ( Read more... )
"If you did inculcate into a child's mind supernaturalism … that would be pernicious. The question is whether fairy stories actually do that and I'm now thinking they probably don't. It could even be the reverse."
Which is in line with his tweet you linked ... but the "I'm now thinking" bit does imply that he previously thought otherwise, and presumably said so. This makes the whole affair make more sense to me - while the Mail does sometimes make things up out of whole cloth, it's unusual for the BBC to do so. (Which isn't to say they always give a full, accurate and fair report.)
This is obviously one of those stories where there's vastly more heat than light and very little is going to be contributed to the good of humanity by further discussion. But it does amuse me to scrutinise Dawkins' statements in fine detail, doing close-reading on them as if he were some sort of prophet spouting infallible truths.
On the substance of the matter, I think similarly about fairy tales for children as I do about Father Christmas and wrote about it at length, complete with Daily Mail twisted headline: Why Santa is Evil and Wrong.
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