Dawkins Unhinged

After sucha length of time that I've been inactive today has turned into a veritable orgy of posting....but I had to quote a bit from Michael Fitzpatrick at Spiked: The Dawkins Delusion:

There is an old Irish joke, retold here by Richard Dawkins, about somebody in Northern Ireland who responded to a survey question about religious affiliation by declaring himself an atheist. ‘Would that be a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?’ came the insistent reply. Faced with a similar inquiry, I would be obliged to declare myself a Catholic atheist. By this I mean that I am an atheist by conviction, but a Catholic by upbringing and tribal affiliation.

I know that some people raised as Catholics blame the Church of Rome for their difficulties in later life, nourishing a particularly degenerate literary genre. As a child taught by nuns and brothers, I endured a fair amount of pious claptrap and casual corporal punishment and some inappropriate sexual interest. But any detriment suffered was far outweighed by a sound education and by exposure to a rich cultural heritage – of art and music, scripture and ritual. For this I retain gratitude, affection and respect.

Though as an atheist I feel I should welcome Dawkins’ diatribe against religion, as a Catholic atheist, I find myself repelled by his crass polemic – and I am not alone. In his comments on Catholicism, Dawkins reveals a combination of old-fashioned Protestant anti-Popery with the fashionable contempt of the liberal intelligentsia for any kind of religious faith. Thus he refers to the ‘semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence’ (p167). Discussing the consequences of clerical sexual abuse in Ireland, he suggests that ‘horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place’ (p317). These are statements of such unmitigated prejudice – and indeed absurdity – that it is shocking to find them in a serious book by a reputable author.

It is amazing how some things come full circle. One of the earliest posts at The Iconic Midwest dealt with a similar type of pig ignorance from someone who ought to be able to know better. (See Evolving Faith) Of course Dawkins has been a little nuts for awhile now. Like a lot of people I knew him mostly from his book The Selfish Gene, which remains one of the best introductions to the Darwinian sythesis out there. So I was horrified when I saw Dawkins in an interview with Charlie Rose where the only thing more shocking than his intellectual dishonesty was his deeply rooted bigotry.