It's amateur night on LJ

Hands up who reads lj_maintenance? Thought so. Someone there finally got around to suggesting that people might want to turn of Javascript because of the recent security problems (suggesting, mind, not "do it right now"). I told them they were doing it wrong, but I doubt anyone's reading the comments after 5 pages of sycophancy.

Richard Dawkins and the Root of all Evil

Apparently (as in, I read on some blog somewhere), one of Channel 4's newspaper adverts for Richard Dawkins's Root of all Evil? programmes was a picture of the New York skyline with the Twin Towers intact. It was captioned "A world without religion".

From this you can tell that the UK's most famous atheist meant business. Watching the introduction to the first programme, The God Delusion, it's obvious Dawkins is worried by the apparent resurgence of militant religious faith, both Islamic and Christian, and has decided to draw his own line in the sand. Over the course of the two programmes, he outlines his case against religion.

( 1: The God Delusion )

In the second programme, The Virus of Faith, Dawkins is concerned with how religion is spread to children, and with the morality taught by the religious scriptures.

( 2: The Virus of Faith )

So, what did I make of it all? I'm in broad agreement with Dawkins, in that I'm worried about playing the Netherlands (a handy bit of flat ground where generations of Europeans have staged wars) in a battle between two armies of crazy people.

I don't think his ambition to stop the religious indoctrination of children is a realistic one: while public money should not be going into religious schools, the right of parents to bring up their kids as they like is not something the government should mess with, except in extreme cases. It's sad that some kids end up scared to death of hellfire and need the services of the counsellor he talked to, but there's not much a government can do about that.

Some reviewers have accused Dawkins of attacking extremist straw-men. Since many of his targets in the programme were Americans, I'm not sure how true that is: the perception on this side of the pond is that America is 51% populated (and 100% governed) by people who think they have an invisible friend who likes laser-guided munitions but doesn't like the gays. The fact that the atheists in Colorado Springs had formed a support group speaks volumes.

Dawkins's interviewees might be unrepresentative in another sense. We might place the religious on two axes: how crazy are they, and how much do they think about stuff? All of Dawkins's religious interviewees were people who had thought about stuff and were crazy anyway. In that sense, they're the dangerous sort: the people who will tell other, simpler souls, to, say, vote against gay marriage, or in extreme cases, to fly airplanes into buildings. The religious people I know in Cambridge are largely not crazy and have thought about it. In that sense, they too are unrepresentative.

Most theists haven't thought about it very much, and are varying degrees of crazy. Dawkins's argument about them seemed to be that they're the soil in which the real nutters grow. I'm not sure that's a good enough reason to condemn all religion, especially when Dawkins has given us plenty of other good reasons. As an acknowledged Internet expert on kooky religious groups, I can tell you that to my knowledge, none of CICCU's alumni have ever flown an airplane into a building. Something else is going on, as I've said before. I wish I understood what it was.

In any case, the selection pressure on variant strains of theism seems to favour craziness at the moment, although I'd concede that some of those pressures are coming from sources external to the religion in itself, such as politics. Some of the pressure is merely from the fact that being crazy means you're more enthusiastic (check the etymology), excited and exciting. You make converts, you stand on street corners, you write threatening letters to the BBC, and so on. The Bishop of Oxford is right: liberals should be more outspoken about their liberalism. And rationalist atheists, it seems, should start forming support groups. The Root of All Evil was part of an attempt to turn the tide, and despite its flaws, I welcome it for that alone.

Dawkins' reaction as he walked back from his talk with Michael Bray was that he'd quite liked Bray, who didn't seem to be an evil person. He quoted the physicist Steven Weinberg: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion". I think that's my take-home verse.

Those of you who missed the programmes or who are Foreign may obtain the videos of both programmes by waiting for them to fall from the back of a passing lorry or by fishing them from the torrent of information that is available on the Internet. Verbum sap., as E.E. "Doc" Smith used to say.