Richard Dawkins: Islam as “one of the great evils of the world”

He feels the same way about Christianity

With quotes:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

“Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.”

“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries”

“So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal’s wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?” [comment …. mention of Pascal’s wager … see recent filing]

Because you can criticize (even blaspheme Christ!) Christianity and no one raises up to issue a Fatwā.

Not so with Islam (as David Letterman can attest)

A man who professes to know nothing with certainty professes dogmatically that something is evil. By what absolute standard can an evolutionary atheist believe with certainty that anything is genuinely good or inherently evil? Of course, in the case of Islam Dawkins is correct. However, Dawkins has to unethically borrow from Christianity in order to dogmatize about Islam.

Dawkins: “Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.”