The Dawkins Delusion

"Isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?"
(Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, page 354, Black Swan edition, 2007)

"Our society...has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them. ... Please, please raise your consciousness about this."
(The God Delusion, page 381-2)


Granted, religion is odd, and that the Creator, if He existed, would have better things to do than worry about me "not doing as I was told" and "fighting with my brother" (sins I officially confessed to many times as a child), but what is odder is Richard Dawkins's belief that he will win people over to his way of thinking by accusing them of abusing their children at the same time as being mindless automata, unable to throw off the chains of thought bequeathed to them by their parents. This is the Dawkins Delusion and let us pray it does not persist as long as the God one.

It does raise the question, however, of why religion (or rather the belief that there is more to life than THIS) persists? If all Dawkins can offer in its place is his marvelling at how we would find we are related to the merest insect if only we would take part in some feature-length episode of Who Do You Think You Are? then of course people are going to turn away from his teachings. With all due respect to Great Uncle Pond Skater, there is of course more to human existence than its evolutionary history and, it must be admitted, the utterly marvellous way we have come to be. There is also art and literature, language and science, socialism and barbarism, none of which can be explained by natural selection.

Moreover, there are also those twin, nagging feelings in the backs of my and (I hope) your minds that (i) other people are essentially the same as me, yet (ii) there is something that makes them alien to me. But that mystery is not God (and we are not 'fallen'); it is Man. Or, to bring things down to earth, it is the way that ordinary men and women have made their society. Let us commence, therefore, the proper study of mankind.