Sauce for the Atheist Goose

Richard Dawkins seems to have upset a bunch of people again with his latest “Muslim jibe”. So, Muslims, taken as a whole, are less well-endowed than Fellows of Trinity College when it comes to Nobels. So?

Frankly, I don’t give a fig how many Nobel prizes any group of people have won. What interested me about the angry backlash was a piece by one Owen Jones in The Independent. Not to get all meta about it, but Not in our name: Dawkins dresses up bigotry as non-belief - he cannot be left to represent atheists sums up perfectly for me the problem with religious “tolerance” that Dawkins and others have drawn attention to.

Jones says “[a]s a non-believer, I want the atheist case to be made”. He also wants to disown Richard Dawkins and disqualify him from making the case, because Dawkins is too fundamental an atheist for Jones’ taste. But isn’t that exactly what Dawkins and others have been asking of so-called moderate religious leaders? Just come out and condemn the fundamentalists as unrepresentative of your views instead of shilly-shallying around. Disown them. Then maybe we can talk.