Letter: A cure for the dawkins
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: At the beginning of his excellent essay Andrew Brown complains of an attack of the dawkins, a condition named after the well-known atheist. He then goes on to argue that the longevity of a religion, together with the quality of the lives of its adherents, is a good measure of whether or not it is reasonable.
He fails to point out that full-blown dawkins, which he describes as a state where there seems nothing to choose between any religion and another, is in fact a religion in itself. It involves adherence to a faith system (or, perhaps, lack-of-faith system) every bit as demanding as any other, as anyone who has read a little philosophy of science will realise.
Is dawkins, then, a religion worthy of acceptance? I am not in a position to comment upon whether the character of Richard Dawkins' life is of a quality to attract us to dawkins, but the fact that the latter, in its present fanatical form, only arrived on the scene with the incarnation of Richard Dawkins himself must surely lead us to treat it with suspicion.
Canon JOHN INGE
Ely Cathedral
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