Dawkins to Attack Religion On Channel 4

From the National Secular Society

NSS Honorary Associate Professor Richard Dawkins will launch an all-out attack on religion in a two-part programme for Channel 4 this month. The Root of All Evil (a title Richard says he wouldn’t have chosen) will be broadcast on January 9th (“The God Delusion”) and 16th (“The Virus of Faith”) at 8pm.

This strongly opinionated series, which is sure to create a stink among the faithful, accuses Christianity, Islam and Judaism of beliefs that defy science, of mental and child abuse, and of stunting the mind’s capacity for understanding. He examines how fundamentalism across all three religions has risen, in particular focusing on the rise of the neo-conservative evangelism in the US — today’s only Superpower — and what this means to the future of our world. The programme also takes a humorous look at the more bizarre expressions of religious fervour, like a vision of the Virgin in a grilled-cheese sandwich, or the Rapture Ready movement of America, that believes Armageddon is on its way, any day now. A powerful and timely documentary.

The Catholic journalist Cristina Odone has already had a fit of the vapours over the programme in her column in the Observer. She wrote: “The separation of Church and State was supposed to deal with the scientific illiteracy of religious teachings about geo-centricity and the Garden of Eden. But this separation has done little to deal with the religious illiteracy of secular scientists; it should be noted that while Richard Dawkins is invited to parade his ignorance about religious belief on our screens, as he will do in The Root of All Evil, no similarly incisive theologian gets airtime to denounce the secularist moral vacuum. Despite what Professor Dawkins says in his purple polemics, the Christian worldview today accommodates scientific progress. Most Christians in Britain do accept evolution; though the majority of American Christians do not. They recognise, too, that when we speak of mankind and of our Universe, we must contend with more than one dimension. Along with the spiritual, there is also the physical. Different rules apply to each sphere, and different authorities govern them.”

In an interview in the Radio Times, Dawkins is asked: “If there was no religion, where would that leave morality?” He replies: “If your only reason to be good is that you’re frightened of the great CCTV in the sky watching your every move, it doesn’t say much for you as a person. There is something ancient about the impulse to morality, a strong empathic tendency in the human mind, with clear Darwinian roots. This genetic empathy came first – religion climbed on the back of it.”