Or is atheism mental illness?

That is my question after reading a synopsis of a program being run by the taxpayer-funded BBC in England, hosted by "scientist" Richard Dawkins.

CONTROVERSIAL scientist Richard Dawkins will assert tomorrow evening that religion is a “virus” that amounts to child abuse.

The new two-part series, to be shown on Channel 4, will compare Moses to Hitler and claim that God is racist. It will also argue that religion is a “backward belief system” responsible for terrorism.

The controversial films, which were produced by IWC creative director Alan Clements and written by Dawkins, are a polemic against faith and a stout defence of science.

Entitled The Root Of All Evil, the series shows Dawkins visiting theological hot-spots in Lourdes, Colorado Springs, the al-Axa mosque and an English faith school. In each case the presenter, who is an atheist, attempts to show that religion is an “elephant in the room” trying to subvert reason.

In the first film, The God Delusion, Dawkins claims that Lourdes, a Catholic pilgrimage destination in France, symbolises a belief system based on “delusion”. “If you want to experience the mediaeval rituals of faith, the candle light, the incense, music, important-sounding dead languages, nobody does it better than the Catholics,” he says.

Dawkins then travels to the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, where he hits out at the influence of “Christian fascism” and “an American Taliban”.

This is followed by an interview with Yousef al-Khattab, an American-born Jew turned fundamentalist Muslim, who clashes with Dawkins after saying he hates atheists.

So what we get here are hate-filled rhetoric, generalization from a handful of examples, and caustic ridicule of people who dare disagree with this so-called scientist who excludes the positive data about religion from his study and conclusion.

And then there is the second half of this atheistic "Mein Kampf".

In the second film, The Virus of Faith, Dawkins turns his attention to the effect he believes religion has on young people. “Innocent children are being saddled with demonstrable falsehoods,” he says.

More controversially, he states “sectarian religious schools” have been “deeply damaging” to generations of children. “It’s time to question the abuse of childhood innocence with superstitious ideas of hellfire and damnation ,” he says. “Isn’t it weird the way we automatically label a tiny child with its parents’ religion?”

Dawkins also questions the fundamental tenets of Christianity. On the idea of a spiritual creator, he says: “The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist.”

The author of The Selfish Gene then criticises Abraham, compares Moses to Hitler and Saddam Hussein, before calling the New Testament “St Paul’s nasty, sado-masochistic doctrine of atonement for original sin”.

Yeah, that sure sounds like an objective look at religion.

And yet somehow this man is taken seriously in the intelligent design/blind evolution debate. If his work here is any indication, he is clearly incapable of engaging in neutral, objective study of anything -- and is motivated by a blind, unreasoning faith that his ideology is correct.

It seems to me that passing this ideology along to children would be every bit as abusive as raising them a Nazi, Kluxer, or an Islamist. And it seems that Dawkins has a worldview that is pathological -- indeed, that is so xenophobic as to constitute a mental illness.

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Posted by: Greg at 12:04 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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