The Root of all Evil

Having more or less suggested at the outset that carol singing sits at the summit of a slippery slope leading to rucksack bombs on the tube, the Grand Inquisitor of Unbelief went on to confront some formidable spokesmen from the theo-fascist herd. You could practically see the steam coming out of his ears during these exchanges.

It's not hard to see why the Professor's adversaries insist on dealing with him as a rival truth rather than as an alternative way of looking at truth. Dawkins's own breed of absolutism seems to beg to be treated this way − it's as if he's bidding for his own patch of unhallowed turf in Jerusalem.

V admires his "extreme" position and the way he matches intolerance with intolerance. Yet when it comes to religion she is far less worried about the fundamentalists than she is about common-or-garden Roman Catholic hypocrites and the kind of routine acquiescence to handed-down ignorance that she grew up with in Central America.

For Dawkins there are no half-measures in irrationality. In a very interesting post from last December 3QuarksDaily pin-pointed some of the philosophical problems that arise from the notion that scientific enquiry addresses a background of fixed, absolute reality and how, for Dawkins, any hint of deviation from this is tantamount to stating that "snow is green".

At one point in the programme last night he let slip a telling comparison with fascism which reveals a weakness in the strict association between Faith and the evils he would eradicate. Didn't the secular totalitarianisms of the twentieth century demonstrate that a straight swap of Reason for Faith doesn't necessarily guarantee an end to collective delusion and violent oppression? Perhaps religion isn't so much the root of all evil as one of the better excuses for it.

Dawkins faces the same old dilemma that has afflicted rational westerners since Plato - ours is an elite ideal that yearns to be populist, and at the same time wants to forget the historical lessons which show how the realisation of that dream nearly always leads to trouble.