Atheism: Dawkins on the need to curb religious liberty

Last year, atheist crusader Richard Dawkins, Oxford's Professor of the Public Understandign of Science, asked to have his name removed from a British petition that would make it illegal to teach one's religion to children, on the grounds that he had not read all of the petition's objects. That, however, should not be mistaken for support for religious liberty, as this article in Commonweal (April 20, 2007) illustrates:

The National Secular Society (NSS), of which Dawkins is an honorary associate, has campaigned for a godless Britain since the nineteenth century, and devotes its Web site to decrying and ridiculing religious faith. The NSS, whose associates include twenty British parliamentarians, as well as such establishment cultural figures as the playwright Harold Pinter, vows to combat “religious power-seekers” and “put them in their place once and for all.” For his part, Dawkins has said he would remove all financial support from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim schools and make them teach atheism; prohibit hospital chaplains from solacing the ill; and undertake other measures to combat the “infantile regression” of religious belief. And what about parents who persist in telling their children about religion? “It’s probably too strong to say the state should have the right to take children away from their parents,” Dawkins told an interviewer. “But I think we have got to look very carefully at the rights of parents-and whether they should have the right to indoctrinate their children.”

It's interesting that, in the Western world, the "godless" movement has quickly developed an authoritarian bent. The arguments are not new at all, as many sources have noted, but the drive for power is.

And, here Brit Michael J. Penfold addresses the Dawkins delusions.