The theme of this second and concluding part was religion as child abuse. Richard Dawkins argued that religion is a virus and that children tend to have very low immunity to it because natural selection has 'programmed' them to believe anything a grown-up tells them. Once infected many will thereafter remain in the permanent state of intellectual infancy we call Faith. (I had a fearsome Baptist nanny from Motherwell that used to read me Bible stories when I was very little and I recall my profound scepticism even then. But then I never even believed in Father Christmas.)Dawkins concluded that religious miseducation (largely through faith-based schooling) is a "threat to progressive values and to the rule of law". Along the way he did less to alienate his own natural constituency than he had in part one, largely because the opponents he chose to engage with were less obviously certifiable, making these encounters appear less like a clash of intransigent absolutes.
However, the argument was still muddled in one important respect. On the one hand he wished to explain away all human spiritual urges as a natural extension of simian social ethics ("Chimps are DOS, humans are Windows 2000" was the rather insight-free analogy tossed into the mix by an LSE economist) and on the other it was clear that his specific targets were the systems of social control and religious oppression that have evolved around the three desert monotheisms tracing themselves back to Abraham.
Chimps don't conduct funerals yet our ancestors were conducting them for many thousands of years before Abraham and his one God. A programme that focussed specifically on the cultural distortions associated with widespread belief in a cosmos created and ruled by a single despotic lawmaker would have been more original and interesting.
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