He just thinks differently. He knows what his intention is, so all the furor is irrational thick-headedness to him.

He's trying to illustrate a fundamental logical syllogism by using a terrible, tone deaf example. He could have used "getting your car stolen" v. "getting your bike stolen", but he decided to use rape. The point he was trying to make was only ever tangentially about rape at all.

Remember he is first and foremost a evolutionary biologist so his ideas and knowledge are under constant assault from fundamentalist religious folks. Pretty sure you would be pretty reactionary if the thing you devoted your life to researching was under constant assault. I cut him more slack than the young "Hurr Durr…

I, for one, welcome our new coconut oil overlords.

Richard Dawkins is like a freshman philosophy student frozen in time.

I can agree with that, I just disagree with the premise that "atheists like this guy because they enjoy hearing their own opinions reverberated" is an unfair generalization.

Well he posted a response on his website about it, in which he says he should have put quotation marks around a part of the tweet, like so:

And what if you're date raped at knifepoint? Does the universe just swallow you up in a black hole of equal worseness?

Too bad it was impossible for him to not quantify rape badness on Twitter at all.

Call me an ass or an over simplifier but I think his point is that he's not endorsing /in favor of/encouraging a bad thing/event and everyone missed the point and started talking about how there are several degrees of badness of said thing, which he doesn't endorse at all.

You're doing exactly what he's laughing at people for doing: applying a zero-sum, essentialist twist to a statement which is neither.

He's making a fairly benign and obvious point (that saying Crime X is worse than Crime Y doesn't mean you support Crime Y), but chose the most ridiculous, inflammatory example to make his point.

Threatening someone with a knife to make them do something against their will is a crime in itself, and likely to be traumatic to the person threatened. It doesn't matter whether the person holding the knife wants sex or money or something else altogether. You can make a pretty good argument that someone threatened…

The fact that you say "as a man who has not been raped" is so, so comical. You just said in this very article that he was sexually assaulted as a child. This is a post about there being no degrees of sexual assault in which you imply that there are, in fact, degrees of sexual assault when it is convenient for you.…

No, he is explaining basic logic using a terribly bad example.

I misread the headline and thought I was jumping into a post about Richard Dawkins manscaping.

The bad thing is that I think a lot of young women go to them, because they're the most obvious and well-publicized source. I remember being 18, in college, and looking at them hoping to glean some information on how sex was supposed to work. I was lucky enough to have a good partner, so I quickly realized how dumb…

No, I'm dead serious. What are the strides we've made since 1994 that are the issue here? How specifically is an internet article mocking a product that seeks to shame women for the natural way their body looks affecting our progress?

Oh man. Don't tell me ellenjane is an atheist!

Don't you think the notion that agnostics are just atheists who are afraid of criticism is pretty much refuted by your own complaint? Why exactly would we opt for an ideology that gets us criticism from both theists and atheists if we're so terrified of that criticism?