Whats your opinion of Richard Dawkins?

God is not anything - not a thing, being, object, entity, and so on.

So in this interpretation, all religious language is metaphorical. The whole problem starts with 'literalism' which is mistaking the symbolic for the actual.

And I think Dawkins is mostly concerned with rejecting those who mistake the symbolic for the actual. The real actual has got nothing to do with this debate.

His most recent book "The Greatest SHow on Earth" Tries to be an argument based upon scientific examples rather than a screaming session about religions and delusions.

not to mention his continued defense of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war.(invasion of Iraq)

dyslexia wrote:

not to mention his continued defense of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war.(invasion of Iraq)

Richard Dawkins defended nothing of this kind. I think you're mistaking Richard Dawkins for Christopher Hitchens.

The ethnic cleansing begun in the time of Moses is brought to bloody fruition in the book of Joshua, a text remarkable for the bloodthirsty massacres it records and the xenophobic relish with which it does so. As the charming old song exultantly has it, "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the walls came a-tumbling down ... There's none like good old Joshuay, at the battle of Jericho." Good old Joshua didn't rest until "they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword" (Joshua 6:21).

Yet again, theologians will protest, it didn't happen. Well, no---the story has it that the walls came tumbling down at the mere sound of men shouting and blowing horns, so indeed it didnt' happen---but that's not the point. The point is that, whether true or not, the Bible is held up to us as the source of our morality. And the Bible story of Joshua's destruction of Jericho, and the invasion of the Promised Land in general, is morally indistinguishable from Hitler's invasion of Poland, or Saddam Hussein's massacres of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. The Bible may be an arresting and poetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should give your children to form their morals.[...]

Do not think, by the way, that the God character in the story nursed any doubts or scruples about the massacres and genocides that accompanied the seizing of the Promised Land. On the contrary, his orders, for example in Deueronomy 20, were ruthlessly explicit. He made a clear distinction between the people who lived in the land that was needed, and those who lived a long way away. The latter should be invited to surrender peacefully. If they refused, all the men were to be killed and the women carried off for breeding. In contrast to this relatively humane treatment, see what was in store for those tribes unfortunate enough to be already in residence in the promised Lebensraum: "But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Ivites and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee."

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it? The following offences merit the death penalty, according to Leviticus 20: cursing your parents; committing adultery; making love to your stepmother or your daughter-in-law; homosexuality; marrying a woman and her daughter; bestiality (and, to add injury to insult, the unfortunate beast is to be killed, too). You also get executed, of course, for working on the Sabbath; the point is made, again and again, throughout the Old Testament. In Numbers 15, the children of Israel found a man in the wilderness gathering sticks on the forbidden day. They arrested him and then asked God what to do with him.

As it turned out, God was in no mood for half-measures that day. "And the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall surely be put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp. And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died." Did this harmless gatherer of firewood have a wife and children to grieve for him? Did he whimper with fear as the first stones flew, and scream with pain as the fusillade crashed into his head? What shocks me today about such stories is not that they really happened. They probably didn't. What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahweh---and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us.

Dawkins, when called upon to discuss his penultimate books, has engaged in fairly rude critical remarks about most EVangelical religions(especially some of his terms like "Hill williams" in one radio series back in the 1990's). I dont have much use for their doctrine as my posts on evolution have held up. HOWEVER, I dont like cheap shots for the camera and the typical Brit smarminess as if hed discovered something of which noone else was aware.

I have said throughout, that his two recent books are a RETURN to some kind of dispassionate scientific reportorial skill.

Dawkins, when called upon to discuss his penultimate books, has engaged in fairly rude critical remarks about most EVangelical religions

I believe that this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life.

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.

Like what? You keep condemning Dawkins on the basis of abstractions like "fairly rude critical remarks", but somehow you never cite the remarks and explain to me why you find them rude. How am I supposed to have a reasoned conversation with you when there's such a dearth of primary data?

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character if all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously, malevolent bully”