Why, Dawkins, why?

Here is a short blurb of my views on the first segment of Dawkins’ tirade against religion, “The root of all Evil”, of which the first part was shown last week, and the remainder of which will be shown tonight.

I think in general it was poorly done.

Here is how he missed the mark.

His main point was to show the idea of faith to be a corrupt form of thought pattern; a logical construction that is outdated. However, to prove his point, he concentrated on interviewing extremists. From fundamentalist Islam to Christian televangelists he ran the gamut, but, I imagine that a large majority of religious folks sat there thinking to themselves, “Sure those guys are crazy, but that has nothing to do with us.”

The only instance during which he chose to address believers in the main stream was at Lourdes, were the faithful, and desperate, come for spiritual healing. In this setting, he chose to tastelessly probe the beliefs of some very pitiful people who seemed to be hanging on to this last shred of hope for dear life, and in doing so, he came off as being very crass and insensitive.

I hope for his next program he attempts something that I think would be far more interesting, and leaves the deathly ill and the fundamentalists alone.

I think a conversation with typical members of mainstream faiths, about what makes them faithful, and how they view the rationale of that decision, in comparison to other decision in their life, would be far more revealing.

We will see tonight…