Richard Dawkins reads his hate mail: Part 2

January 21, 2015 • 11:36 am

Nobody reads hate mail as well as Richard Dawkins. You may have seen his famous reading of hate mail in 2010, which cracked me up. Now, four years later, he reads a new batch. It’s absolutely hilarious. But if strong language offends you or your kids, don’t watch (but you’ll miss something great).

The YouTube notes explain the making of this 7.5-minute video:

In a candid moment, filmmaker Eric Preston, founder and producer at Fusion Films, rolls his camera as Dr. Richard Dawkins – Author, Professor and Evolutionary Biologist – reads fan mail he has received from some of his greatest admirers. (Parental Discretion is Advised!)

What this shows is that Dawkins has a sense of humor about all this—something denied by his opponents, and something very different from a few other atheists who flaunt their hate mail to paint themselves as victims, and even to push themselves further into the public eye. Don’t get me wrong: such mail can be disturbing, and people need to know how awful these trolls can be. But I don’t think their hatred should be turned into a form of self-aggrandizing publicity. Everyone who takes unpopular stands on the Internet receives this kind of stuff.

h/t: Jeff R.

143 thoughts on “Richard Dawkins reads his hate mail: Part 2”

      2. “Yea, water quencheth fire,
        But the wind – only God can abate that.”

        – I forget who said that

    5. Yes! I loved the entire phrase, ” Your feigned intelligence is no more than the Fart of G*d”

    6. That phrase, as per the Christian teachings I received as a child, amounts to blasphemy.

  2. > and something very different from a few other atheists who flaunt their hate mail to paint themselves as victims, and even to push themselves further into the public eye.

    Uh oh, Professor Ceiling Cat, I hope you wear a flea collar!

  3. Love the way that after piling on the vicious bile, several of the end with a “God bless”!
    There are some seriously weird people out there!

        2. Yeah, I thought that’s what he was going for but it didn’t come across that way and it just sounded hilarious.

  5. Warning: Do NOT try and drink any sort of beverage while viewing that video. Spillage will result.

    2. Also, go to the Necessary Room. I had a sibling who got so tickled that he broke wind with every guffaw.

  6. Is anything known about Darwin’s hate mail? The question is whether modern hate mail is getting better, or if it continues as the odium of old.

    1. That’s a very interesting question. It would be fascinating to read such letters.

      Letter writers in the mid-19C came from the respectable classes, so they would be unlikely to use vulgar expressions.

      I imagine that the hatred of Darwin’s religious opponents then would have been just as intense as today’s; but their letters would be couched in language that would not have corrupted their wives or servants, should the latter encounter them.

      2. Charles L. Brace, an American pastor and social reformer, described Darwin’s pleasure in reading his hate mail. Said Brace, recounting a brief visit to Downe in 1872, “[Darwin] told us, with such glee, of a letter he had just got from a clergyman, saying that “he was delighted to see, from a recent photograph, that no man in England was more like the monkey he [Darwin] came from!” and of another from an American clergyman (?) beginning with, “You d—-d scoundrel!” and sprinkled with oaths and texts[scripture?]. . . .” The modern vocabulary of odium theologicum seems much more evolved but the spirit is the same.

        1. That is nice to know. I like thinking of Darwin “with such glee” telling about letters from dissatisfied clergymen. The downloads I have read, of Darwin’s correspondence, do not include such letters. Much of the correspondence is interesting nonetheless.

    2. Darwin wrote and received thousands of letters. I have downloaded 4 volumes (for free). They are quite interesting to read. I don’t know if he received anything like “hate mail” and it was destroyed. I recall he received a letter that upset him after Origin came out, from a beloved former teacher Adam Sedgwick, because Sedgwick was religious and rejected Darwin’s ideas. I hunted and could not find that letter just now. But here is a little gem, just to pick out something to share with you, from a letter Darwin wrote to C. Lyell January 10 1860, in a post script, “P.S. Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull, and undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.”

      No one called Dawkins a hermaphrodite yet…

    3. A physics instructor I had years ago said he and all his colleagues everywhere received buckets of “Dear Dr. [soandso]. EINSTEIN IS WRONG!!!!” and the like. I suspect that Darwin received analogous things, as do contemporary biologists. I also know the Scientologists have sent stuff to clinical psychologists and their graduate students …

    1. From the subsequent replies I guess it is quite hilarious. Still it reminds me a little of the public visiting the ‘lunatic asylums’ in the 18th century for their amusement.

      1. A bit more like the lunatics taking a field trip to Dawkins’ house, uninvited. Nothing much for keeping his own sanity but to let us laugh at them.

      1. I don’t think they were all girls either. Besides, they taught Richard Dawkins about beatch. I loved that he inferred from context when he asked, “does it mean ‘bitch’?”

        1. Ah mahself having been born in the Appalachian South, Ah think he got the inflection jest raught.

          1. I think he got the southern bitch right, but maybe not the Jesse Pinkman Breaking Bad bee-achh. Hard to know which was intended by the sender.

          2. Almost certainly the latter, see my other comment regarding Snoop Dogg. There are plenty of ignorant people in the United States who can neither spell nor construct grammatically correct sentences, but I don’t know that I recall seeing phonetic spellings of dialects other than in books like Tom Sawyer.

        2. I don’t know whether I should be proud or embarrassed to be pointing this out, but the likely spelling the word he was reading was “biotch” or “beotch” though sometimes it is spelled with more vowels to elongate the hard ‘e’ soound. It dates at least back to the early 1990s when Snoop Dogg popularized with songs such as Gin and Juice:

          “At ease, as I mob with the Dogg Pound, feel the breeze
          beeeitch”/blockquote>

          And with that, I feel confident that this is the first time Professor Ceiling Cat has had a relevant reference to a hip hop artist on his website.

          3. ” . . . when Snoop Dogg popularized with songs such as Gin and Juice . . . .”

            I’d like to see the printed sheet music of the melody line of this “song.”

          4. West Coast g-funk artists like Snoop, Dr Dre and Warren G were responsible for some superb music in the nineties. Add in Predator-era Ice Cube and you have some brilliant hip-hop. When Will They Shoot? by Ice Cube is one of the most colossal songs I’ve ever heard.

            Just sticking up for Snoop et al:) Many of us had our hip-hop eras.

          12. Sincere apologies Chris;) In my mid-teens I drifted away from hip-hop and more and more into psychedelia and experimental stuff, but I have very fond memories of that time in my life and still love a lot of the albums and songs from then.

          13. Normally I spell it “biotch” but urban dictionary had this entry and the way Richard was saying it sounded like he was reading it with this spelling.

            Yes, I just analyzed the spelling of a slang term for “bitch”.

          17. You people and your fuckety fucking evidence for assertions!

            Actually, Snoop Dogg has a couple previous hits here too, one for a post on drugs (should’ve guessed that…).

        1. Man, that song had completely LEFT my consciousness until YOU, Ben, had to go and dredge it up. Thanks awfully.

      1. I had a college chum who instead replied to someone attempting to insult him, “I hope you don’t get effed for at least six months!”

  9. You can just tell the intelligence level in this group is extraordinary. Similar to a republican convention I would guess.

    1. I read today in the NY Times of Rand Paul some time ago making a pilgrimage to and genuflecting before the Koch Brothers. I’m sure he’s not the only conservative toadie prostrating (and prostrating? 😉 ) before the altar of the monied elite.

      1. (prostating), confound it. I blame it on the gin in the – what? – Campari? Or is it the Campari in the Gin?

  11. Some of those phrases would make a nice sound button app, especially with Richards’ cultured accent.
    ‘F*ck you, you f*ckity f*cker’.
    That is completely precious.

    1. He rivals Samuel Jackson in the making of profanity into something poetic and grand. He should carry a wallet that says “Bad Motherf**er” on it. Because he is one!

        1. Yes – it’s weird that a video full of such pointless, depressing, ugly messages could be so…lovely. I found it strangely life-affirming.

      2. When I first read your comment, I (really) saw Samuel Johnson, which is a pretty good on itself! I’m thinking, did he have a significant discourse on profanity in his dictionary …. er ….

        Then I looked back later and saw, Oh yeah! Jackson! Now it makes sense. 🙂

        Hee hee hee.

    2. Reminds me of the profanity scene in The King’s Speech which is also excellent.

      Funny for the same reason I think: Surprise factor of that kind of language coming out of a very mild and dignified person.

    3. What I kept thinking on those was: Wow, you have a very, very tiny brain don’t you? You have nothing to say and are covering it up with profanity.

    4. Rebecca Watson once used a clip of Dawkins’ last hate-mail reading as the ring on her cell phone.

    1. Yes, his deadpan, English delivery is just perfect for it. What amazes me is how he can read it and not crack up like every one else in the room!

    1. Yeah, that was an Illuminati reference. One of my Christian relatives is obsessed with the Illuminati…I guess it might be common among the credulous religiati.

        1. When I watch this on youtube I get a google ad saying “Minister Ordination Here”, these algorithms do work after all…

  15. Flipping hilarious! Reminds me of a song I used to have to sing in church when I was a kid. Let’s see, it went something like this, “They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love!”

    Hee hee hee hee

  17. I loved the first lot he did, but these are even better. Great way to start my morning! 😀

  19. We might have to start referring to the good professor as Richard “Fuckity fuck-fuck fart-of-God beahtich Dickins.”

    Oh — and when us free speech advocates say that the proper response to bad speech is good speech? This is one of the best examples of such you’re ever going to find.

    b&

  20. Loved this Dawkins video, I was watching a BBC show .A teenage girl was pregnant and was thrown out of her house.Someone asked how can her parents do that.A lady said perhaps their Christians loved that to.

  21. THAT is how to read your hate-mail. He comes out of it looking breezily phlegmatic and he seems completely devoid of self-pity. He surely gets mountains of this stuff but he chose the funniest ones, not the serious, disturbing, ‘I know where you live’ ones. I don’t think I’d be able to laugh it off like he does though.

    Whenever I get some horrible, unwarranted, hate-filled post or reply my instinct is ‘how can I wind this person up as much as possible?’. I’m incapable of turning the other cheek, or letting it lie.

    Although I suppose even If Dawkins wanted to respond to any of these nutters, sending a reply of ‘Fuck you back, you boring bellend. Yours, Richard Dawkins’ might exacerbate the situation. Must sometimes be tempting though.

      1. It’s always gratifying to spread the delicate beauty of the English language.

        🙂

  22. Regarding the last point, although simple explanations are never the complete picture when describing human behavior, I do think it can be summed up fairly succinctly:

    The difference between the pearl-clutching atheists and Dawkins is that the former see their self-worth in the approbation of others, while Dawkins does not.

  23. I don’t remember the last time I’ve laughed so hard. Humor is the greatest weapon against the disturbed. Now I’m off to watch the 2010 version which I missed somehow.

  24. I love it! Such a dignified person uttering such vile hatred with a merry smile is hilarious!

  27. I loved how so many ended with “and that’s why you’re gay” or some such insult. Monty Python couldn’t have written this better especially the insult “you ugly person” – it reminded me of the Holy Grail scene with the Knight asking directions to the castle and having weird conversations – at one point he says, “what a weird person”.

    I also enjoyed the assertion that Richard Dawkins wants to be a bacteria…comic gold I tell you!

    Beautiful fish tank too!

    1. I think, in a less jocular setting, Richard might even channel Neil Shubin and suggest that we are bacteria, in the same sense that we’re worms and vertebrates and fishes and quadrupeds and mammals and primates and monkeys and apes and humans. Indeed, I can easily imagine Richard having an awful lot of fun with that in a most educational manner.

      b&

      1. We are not bacteria in the same sense that we are fish. We are, um, the bastard spawn of unholy miscegenation between an archea and a bacterium. Neither one nor the other, cursed through countless generations of mutual dependence that has debased our precious germ plasms. They have merged, mutated and metamorphosed into the basis for a most vile and decadent humanity.

        No more tequila for me, but, for the record: Milagro blanco.

    3. Yeah, typical right-wing/religious/tea-bagger thing: Fling “gay!” at someone as an insult. They are living in a previous century. History is passing them by. They are raging over it.

      I told my gay friends, colleagues, and family members: We saw history in 2012: A sitting US President came out in favor of same-sex marriage. Every state plebiscite went the right way (for same-sex marriage rights), even in Maine, where some years before it had gone the other way.

      Here in MN, I am proud to say that we voted down (in 2012) an attempt to prohibit same-sex marriage in the MN state constitution and elected an all-democrat legislature to match our democrat governor, and we had same-sex marriage by statue within a year. Talk about handing those GOPers their heads. It was very satisfying.

      This past summer, we attended our first wedding of same-sex friends. It was very moving. Actually, I thought it was the best wedding I’ve ever attended (except my own! 🙂 )

  28. Well I was enjoying a glass of very nice pinot noir produced here in the NW USA while watching this video. I must admit that part of it ended up in my nose accompanied by tears and gagging when I laughed at the “god fart” comment. I think this gives new meaning to enjoying the “bouquet” of this special wine.

    Thank you Richard and my very special thanks to the “young earth creationists” who made all of this possible.

    John B.

  29. Whenever a trolls comes at me, I think of these readings and have a laugh. Everyone not towing the party line will experience this sooner or later. But I wonder, watching the crazy responses on Twi**er (did I get the * right?), I think some people just want to be outrageous and see if a celebrity will take the bait and pass it on. How many of these extraordinary, filth filled emails are from genuine haters? We’ll never know.

  32. So sad. This proves that there are idots and fools that claim to believe in God. Notes and comments like those sampled by Dr. Dawkins clearly give him cause to bash, beat up, and otherwise ridicule those of us in the faith community. This is amazingly sad!

    1. Even if they did give him cause(and I ask you – does he look bitter and filled with a desire for revenge?), and even if I agreed that he “beat up” on believers is it not possible to simply avoid him? If it genuinely makes you sad just filter it out. He’s not unavoidable after all:)

      I would like to say that from what I can tell(and I’m admittedly quite new) most of the people here, unlike the people writing to Dawkins, have no particular animus towards religious people like yourself. If there is ridicule it’s because many people think religious beliefs are a bit daft. It’s not intended to be personal, it’s just criticism of ideas, and the last few weeks have convinced me that there’s almost nothing more healthy than that.

      Don’t be sad. Be glad you’re not one of the plonkers in the video.

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