At the most, i meant that I think the religious extremists find it hard to argue with people who don’t have a mouthpiece, so some people arguing against them fall into the trap of speaking as if Dawkins is always the voice of atheism.

There seems to be a general idea among religious believers and non-believers that atheism must be a belief system, with a set of credos like “evolution is true” “Dawkins is infallible” and so on. Disturbing human tendency to find an authority and follow it. Anything but think. For unthinking believers, it must be particularly hard to conceive of thinking for yourself so they assume nobody else would want to do it.

I suspect it never occurred to most non-believers that Dawkins was setting out a belief system they had to follow.

(For myself, I have big problems with Dawkins’s views in general, as one of the sociobiology adherents from the 1980s. I agree with lots of what he says about religion but I’m buggered if I’ll take him seriously as a social scientist. In the argument between Dawkins and Terry Eagleton, I think Eagleton makes some good points aginst Dawkins’ views – though I also think that expecting a biologist to be a social scientist is mad – as if Terry Eagleton could do biology research, plus – ad hominem – I think Eagleton is something of a prat. )