Prominent atheist Richard Dawkins made news recently for telling an Irish Times reporter that children need “to be protected so that they can have a proper education and not be indoctrinated in whatever religion their parents happen to have been brought up in.”
Poor Richard Dawkins. In his book, The God Delusion, he describes the God of the Old Testament as “a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
As my colleague Gil Mertz aptly notes, such a passionate description should raise the question in reasonable minds whether this sounds like the unbiased hypothesis of a neutral scientist or a very angry man who hasn’t forgiven God. Dawkins could easily dismiss the existence of unicorns or leprechauns with no emotion, but it is revealing how the question of God’s existence strikes such a nerve.
For more on his interview with the Irish Times
