Dawkins has lent his support, both moral and financial, to an atheist camp for children (By the way, The Times’s use of the word groom in the headline is in poor taste, given its common modern usage in news articles):
Budding atheists will be given lessons to arm themselves in the ways of rational scepticism. There will be sessions in moral philosophy and evolutionary biology along with more conventional pursuits such as trekking and tug-of-war [very Darwinian]. There will also be a £10 prize for the child who can disprove the existence of the mythical unicorn.
Instead of singing Kumbiya and other campfire favourites, they will sit around the embers belting out “Imagine there’s no heaven . . . and no religion too”.
Dawkins, who is subsidising the camp, said it was designed to “encourage children to think for themselves, sceptically and rationally”.
They will sing Imagine to each other?
Will they do so wearing Dawkins’ T-shirt, drinking hot chocolate in RDF mugs, under a large painted portrait of Richard Dawkins?
Is Dawkins is too aggressive towards religion?
No.
Religion deserves it, and it is religion that is consistently aggressive to other faiths and those with no religion. Dawkins books are an excellent and needed attack on religion.
However, Dawkins’s endless supply of self-promotional material sometimes looks like it is hijacking atheism, although I am in no way making the brain dead suggestion that militant atheism is a threat like christians who shoot doctors, or jihadists. It isn’t. Atheism, and secularism, are the protective buffer that stops the religious killing one another. However, even as a fairly militant atheist secularist, there is something about the personality cult around Dawkins that makes me uncomfortable.
What sort of numptie scrapes one of these off their bumper, and replaces it with one of these?