So perhaps Eaghll’s address was a little off, he should have addressed his letter to the general public who read Dawkins, not to Dawkins himself. This change of address, however, doesn’t get around the prescriptive issues you raised, it just changes whose point of view we are trying to correct. But if we can’t be prescriptive from time to time, what is it exactly that we’re doing, beside talking to ourselves?

But for what it’s worth, Dawkins isn’t the only atheist biologist writing about religion, and many of the others actually get it. David Sloan Wilson is a good place to start.

This statement suggests that vegetarianism or veganism is foreign to Brazilian culture. It is not. It also suggests that while his mother assumes meat as an option, the child could not have been exposed to others who assert their choice to not eat meat publicly. While not as prevalent as in the United States, vegetarian restaurants that advertise themselves as such exist in most major Brazilian cities, and there is an active and vocal vegetarian community in Brazil. The possibility that this child was exposed to the option of not eating meat by a cousin, the family of a playmate, or even on television cannot be discounted. The involvement of Brazilians in the ecological movement is quite prominent, as their territory has become ground zero for many environmental debates. Moreover, at one point the child seems to break into song as he lists “os animais,” and incorporates cows, chickens, and other animals into the lyrics. Such a song might be sung at a daycare or taught by a nanny. It’s not possible to know based on the video alone.

I don’t want to suggest that such spontaneous “embodied ethics” is an impossibility. I’m not an ethicist nor am I familiar enough with the field to make any intelligent claims about it. I merely want to suggest that the author’s claim that the “discursive coordinates of his world do not even permit the possibility” of taking such an ethical stance is an assumption based upon limited knowledge of the child’s “world,” and may reflect a lack of knowledge about Brazilian culture.

Her view as a mature adult was that, of these two examples of Roman Catholic child abuse, the one physical and the other mental, the second was by far the worse.

Earlier in the same paragraph, he says:

Once, in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.

So Dawkins explicitly does compare religious and sexual abuse, directly contrary to what you say in the comment to which I responded. That is the point on which I corrected you. If anyone is being disingenuous on this point, it’s not me.

There is the matter of intent. The sexual abuser knows that what he is doing is wrong. The religious abuser believes what he is doing is right. Dawkins doesn’t suggest that the religious indoctrinator is acting from evil; only that the results can have extremely detrimental effects on the human brain and psyche.

Being fondled by a priest simply left the impression (from the mind of a 7 year old) as “yucky” while the memory of my friend going to hell was one of cold, immeasurable fear. I never lost sleep because of the priest – but I spent many a night being terrified that the people I loved would go to Hell. It gave me nightmares.

The friend was a Protestant girl who died; the writer of this extract was told her friend had gone to Hell because she was not a Catholic. Dawkins notes that the example of sexual abuse concerned is “relatively mild”. The comparison seems to me entirely justified: severe psychological child abuse is recognised as being comparable to physical and sexual abuse in its effects, and psychological abuse such as this girl suffered should not be given a pass simply because it is religiously motivated.

Why are people granted political power just because they give themselves fancy titles like ‘Father’ and ‘Reverend’ and ‘Holiness’ and ‘His Grace’?

How pathetic that, in an attempt to refute the man’s arguments, you accuse him of such unfounded and base statements. But this is the type of repines the world has come to expect from the religious community.

The concept of “pointing to The Sacred” always makes me think of that big pointing hand in the opening credits of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Wham! Hierophany.

God has been understood as being-itself

Which is just a piece of blithering nonsense, like most of your comment and indeed, of the OP. An excellent example of the “Courtier’s Reply”.

Having read Dawkins at length, I know that you’re thrashing a straw man. Your critique would benefit greatly from actual examples–not because they’d help to make your point, but because by searching for them you’d find they don’t exist, which might lead you to put more thought into what you’re saying.

(Or not; most Dawkins critics are happy to attack him for things he’s never said or written, and sometimes for the opposite of things he’s said or written.)

He’s not? These guys use radical, eliminationist rhetoric all the time. When called on it, they will sometimes retreat to saying that they don’t want LEGAL repression of religion — but even there, sometimes they waffle and make noises about how it’s a shame they can’t stop kids from getting indoctrinated by their parents.

Dawkins’ attempt to put teaching of religion to one’s children with sexual abuse of children is one of the more famous instances of this. Comparing activity A to criminal activity B is not a neutral thing to do, it says that at least on some level you would like activity A to be treated as criminal.

How the New Atheists don’t get the obvious point that, if governments were ever given this power, they’d probably be the first ones thrown in jail, I’ll never understand.