An article from the Spectator last August, by Andrew Brown…who has written many things I’ve disagreed with strongly, usually in a blog post. I think many of them were attacks on Richard Dawkins and defenses of religion.
His article contains a startling piece of information.
[T]he Richard Dawkins website offers followers the chance to join the ‘Reason Circle’, which, like Dante’s Hell, is arranged in concentric circles. For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet ‘Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities’. Obviously that’s not enough to meet the man himself. For that you pay $210 a month — or $5,000 a year — for the chance to attend an event where he will speak.
When you compare this to the going rate for other charismatic preachers, it does seem on the high side. The Pentecostal evangelist Morris Cerullo, for example, charges only $30 a month to become a member of ‘God’s Victorious Army’, which is bringing ‘healing and deliverance to the world’. And from Cerullo you get free DVDs, not just discounts.
But the $85 a month just touches the hem of rationality. After the neophyte passes through the successively more expensive ‘Darwin Circle’ and then the ‘Evolution Circle’, he attains the innermost circle, where for $100,000 a year or more he gets to have a private breakfast or lunch with Richard Dawkins, and a reserved table at an invitation-only circle event with ‘Richard’ as well as ‘all the benefits listed above’, so he still gets a discount on his Richard Dawkins T-shirt saying ‘Religion — together we can find a cure.’
The website suggests that donations of up to $500,000 a year will be accepted for the privilege of eating with him once a year: at this level of contribution you become a member of something called ‘The Magic of Reality Circle’. I don’t think any irony is intended.
$100,000 a year or more.
Can he forgive sins? Knock a few years off the sentence in Purgatory?
That “offer” is no longer on the RDF website. I wonder if the Spectator article embarrassed them.
You say “That “offer” is no longer on the RDF website. I wonder if the Spectator article embarrassed them.”
Was it ever actually there, do you know?
Graham, the lower levels were discussed earlier on this very blog (http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/04/spin-in-the-dawkins-circle/#more-19516). At $100,000, he’s selling himself high indeed.
I’m a staunch supporter of the Nordic Model and don’t see the prostitute as being at fault in any way. But, I dunno, I guess I have my price and it’s somewhere well below $100,000. At those stratospheric levels, I find my support evaporating.
The offer is still there but only up to 10k. The 100 to 500 k offer is gone, as far as I can see. (And it wouldn’t be on a different page with nothing pointing to it, so it must be gone.) It must have been there when Brown wrote this article, unless he simply hallucinated it.
Well, if the charismatics can do faith healing, maybe Dawkins can reason your cancer into submission over twitter?
But really, nothing in the post seems that out of line with what other foundations do for fundraising. Chicago Shakespeare Theatre sends me offers to receive similar perks for ponying up similarly obscene amounts of money.
Ophelia, I asked the question because Mr Brown has been economical with the truth on the subject of Dawkins many, many times.
However, a more serious is raised by Jimmy from Chicago. He notes, rightly, that other foundations raise money using similar methods. If you really wish to take issue with Dawkins, you should not look at the fund-raising methodology but, rather, at what the money is then spent on.
Can that be criticised, I don’t know, I haven’t looked. It does seem to me, however, that if, indeed, there is anything to be criticised here it would be in the uses to which funds are put rather than in the, quite open, methods used to raise them.
Over to you.
But I don’t think other foundations do raise money in exactly that way – not that crudely and nakedly. If they do, I think they’re wrong too. I take issue with the way this “fundraising” is done because I dislike the hero worship and star system that have grown up around Dawkins, and I think they’re doing a lot of harm. What the money is spent on is a different subject.
I dislike it as well, but then fund raising is the task I loathe the most (even more than taking minutes!). However, if it works and is legal then I cannot really argue with it. I can think of a couple of charity fund raisers I’ve known who’d cheerfully opt for it if it brought in the goods.
As I noted, what is far more important is what is done with the money. Do you have any issues with that?
12 * 210 ≠ 5,000, Mr. Brown.