Darwin's Rottweiler

After the last post I started looking around the net at Richard Dawkins' latest offerings. He released a doco earlier this year called The Root of All Evil? about how religious dogmatism and irrational faith lead to all sorts of terrible things. Best of all, it's downloadable in two parts. (But, be warned, they're almost 320 MB each.)

Watching it makes me understand why it is Ruse is so critical of Dawkins' approach. It's not just his plummy accent, the condescention is mainly in his choice of words. Some choice examples:

If you have the delusion that you're Napoleon, it must be a fairly lonely feeling because nobody else agrees with you.... But these people here [at Lourdes], thousands of people, all have exactly the same delusion.

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, an ethnic-cleanser urging his people on to acts of genocide.

Are you telling me that the only reason why you don't steal and rape and murder is because you're frightened of God?

But the best bit is when a slimy American preacher tells him to stop being so arrogant -- they're both as bad as each other in that scene!

One of his best points is about the indoctrination of children. He questions why people refer to children as being Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Muslim when we would see a phrase like "Tory child" as ridiculous because it's so obvious that children are too young to make up their minds about these things. He even asks an Hassidic Rabbi "Why should children be victims [sic.] of the particular tradition in which they happen to be born?" This had occurred to me before when I wondered what would happen to a Hispanic man named Jesus (or Emmanuel) who became an atheist (even if he converted to Protestantism it could seem a little blasphemous). Personally, I'd like to see this name reclaimed -- if I had a son born on 25th December I'd definitely call him Jesus!

One point that is sure to raise the most hackles is his comparison of Moses to Hitler and Saddam Hussein. I don't see how anyone could defend Moses' genocide of the Midianites but I'd be curious to hear how one might try to explain such an action without recourse to out and out racism.

So I recommend you all go and download it (but do it at uni or somewhere without a download limit). While it does look like the sort of thing that Compass would run eventually, more than likely Richard Alston would intercept it, realise that it could loose him Steve Fielding's support, and lean on Janet Albrechtson to have it pulled.