The previous post\u00c2\u00a0<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0didn’t mention – possibly because of the Guardian article’s\u00c2\u00a0 unreadability – that the writer claimed that Dawkins’ utimate\u00c2\u00a0objective was to exterminate believers.<\/p>\n

This was just slipped in to the text in about the third paragraph. Granted that reading further made you want to gnaw your own toes off in preference, few readers will have got much further.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other minor absurdities\u00c2\u00a0included the claim that believers were treated like soft drug users – OK if they keep it to private consumption but not when they act as dealers, i.e., try to spread their message – and that wise atheists pretend to be Christians\u00c2\u00a0by attending church to get their children into a Church of England school.<\/p>\n

First of all, in everyday social life, the mass of\u00c2\u00a0people might indeed treat devout Christians more favourably if they keep their beliefs to themselves than if they start preaching. (This is why the local C of E vicar gets more\u00c2\u00a0public respect than doorstepping mormons.) However, in most of the world, practising religion is not criminalised, whether a matter of personal belief or public proseletising. No matter how publicly you preach, the police in England will studiously ignore you. Hence the drug law analogy is nonsense, put in just to make religious belief seem edgily hip maybe.<\/p>\n

On the point of atheists pretending to be Christians to get their kids into a decent local school, funded by the taxpayer but free to teach nonsense to kids- don’t even get me started on this one. (Too late, it’ll have to be another blog.) The wierd thing is that he thinks this hypocrisy is a good thing. Kids seeing their parents observing a religion they don’t believe is supposed to set a good example of morality in action, then?<\/p>\n