Samuel Johnson once accounted for the undeserving success of someone by saying--
Quote:Why, I suppose that his nonsense suited their nonsense.
And so it is, it seems to me, with Professor Dawkins.
What the Prof has done is to exercise the sort of cunning which an ice-cream van entrepreneur does on a hot day. Or a Madam when the aircraft carrier is in port on a goodwill mission.
Having noticed, being a fairly observant professor, the breakdown of Christian sexual discipline consequent upon the dawn of the Permissive Society, indeed having taken something of an advantage of it himself, and being fairly expert at putting two and two together, he saw that an increasing number of people would be interested in a justification for the licentious and depraved activities to which they were more and more attracted as a result of Media and the legal profession finding advantages in the phenomena.
And what better than a scientific justification which was not only suitable for the purpose providing a partial and narrow science was employed and making the astoundingly original discovery that organisms are selfish, this being the very reason for the Christian religion in the first place, but also made it possible, and socially acceptable in some circles, for those who were in need of such a justification to mimic the prof's simple and turgid prose and allow themselves to bask in the golden glow of that wonderful invention of Christianity, Science, as if they were scientists themselves or had reasonable pretensions of being. They could cosy up to the cachet of Science
AND justify their embrace of greater or lesser indulgence in aspects of licentiousness and depravity.
What a deal! It was like selling electric blankets to Eskimos. Or pints of beer to the winners of the tug-of-war knockout cup.
One can only assume, given the attractiveness of such a proposition, that the tardiness of the progress of the new dispensation, forgetting for the moment the constant practice of the procedure by the Romans, is due to a residual fear in the population that general licentiousness and depravity is neither the most efficient nor the happiest manner to proceed into the future.
It would not be unreasonable to suppose that the ideas stemming from Darwin would have swept the whole civilised world by 1865 when such advantages are borne in mind.