Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born March 26, 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer. He holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.[1][2]

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Dawkins moved to England with his parents at the age of eight and later completed his education at the University of Oxford. He came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he made a widely cited contribution to evolutionary biology with the theory, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that phenotypic effects are not limited to an organism's body but can stretch far into the environment, which includes the bodies of other organisms.

In addition to his biological work, Dawkins is well-known for his views on atheism, evolution, creationism, intelligent design, and religion. He is a prominent critic of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the observed complexity of living organisms, and instead described evolutionary processes as being analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and made regular appearances on television and radio programmes, predominantly discussing the aforementioned topics.

Dawkins is an atheist;[3][4][5] a freethinker, secular humanist, sceptic, scientific rationalist,[6] and supporter of the Brights movement.[7] He has widely been referred to in the media as "Darwin's Rottweiler",[8][9] by analogy with English biologist T. H. Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of natural selection. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith qualifies as a delusion—as a fixed false belief.[10] As of November 2007, the English language version had sold more than 1.5 million copies and had been translated into 31 other languages,[11] making it his most popular book to date.

To begin, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge just how strange it is that a meeting like this is even necessary. The year is 2007, and we have all taken time out of our busy lives, and many of us have traveled considerable distance, so that we can strategize about how best to live in a world in which most people believe in an imaginary God. America is now a nation of 300 million people, wielding more influence than any people in human history, and yet this influence is being steadily corrupted, and is surely waning, because 240 million of these people apparently believe that Jesus will return someday and orchestrate the end of the world with his magic powers.

Of course, we may well wonder whether as many people believe these things as say they do. I know that Clinton Richard Dawkins] and Richard [Dawkins] are rather optimistic that our opinion polls are out of register with what people actually believe in the privacy of their own minds. But there is no question that most of our neighbors reliably profess that they believe these things, and such professions themselves have had a disastrous affect on our political discourse, on our public policy, on the teaching of science, and on our reputation in the world. And even if only a third or a quarter of our neighbors believe what most profess, it seems to me that we still have a problem worth worrying about.

Now, it is not often that I find myself in a room full of people who are more or less guaranteed to agree with me on the subject of religion. In thinking about what I could say to you all tonight, it seemed to me that I have a choice between throwing red meat to the lions of atheism or moving the conversation into areas where we actually might not agree. I’ve decided, at some risk to your mood, to take the second approach and to say a few things that might prove controversial in this context.

Given the absence of evidence for God, and the stupidity and suffering that still thrives under the mantle of religion, declaring oneself an “atheist” would seem the only appropriate response. And it is the stance that many of us have proudly and publicly adopted. Tonight, I’d like to try to make the case, that our use of this label is a mistake—and a mistake of some consequence.

My concern with the use of the term “atheism” is both philosophical and strategic. I’m speaking from a somewhat unusual and perhaps paradoxical position because, while I am now one of the public voices of atheism, I never thought of myself as an atheist before being inducted to speak as one. I didn’t even use the term in The End of Faith, which remains my most substantial criticism of religion. And, as I argued briefly in Letter to a Christian Nation, I think that “atheist” is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people “non-astrologers.” All we need are words like “reason” and “evidence” and “common sense” and “bulldung (mb)” to put astrologers in their place, and so it could be with religion.

While it is an honor to find myself continually assailed with Dan [Dennett], Richard [Dawkins], and Christopher [Hitchens] as though we were a single person with four heads, this whole notion of the “new atheists” or “militant atheists” has been used to keep our criticism of religion at arm’s length, and has allowed people to dismiss our arguments without meeting the burden of actually answering them. And while our books have gotten a fair amount of notice, I think this whole conversation about the conflict between faith and reason, and religion and science, has been, and will continue to be, successfully marginalized under the banner of atheism.

So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

Now, it just so happens that religion has more than its fair share of bad ideas. And it remains the only system of thought, where the process of maintaining bad ideas in perpetual immunity from criticism is considered a sacred act. This is the act of faith. And I remain convinced that religious faith is one of the most perverse misuses of intelligence we have ever devised. So we will, inevitably, continue to criticize religious thinking. But we should not define ourselves and name ourselves in opposition to such thinking.

So what does this all mean in practical terms, apart from Margaret Downey having to change her letterhead? Well, rather than declare ourselves “atheists” in opposition to all religion, I think we should do nothing more than advocate reason and intellectual honesty—and where this advocacy causes us to collide with religion, as it inevitably will, we should observe that the points of impact are always with specific religious beliefs—not with religion in general. There is no religion in general.

The problem is that the concept of atheism imposes upon us a false burden of remaining fixated on people’s beliefs about God and remaining even-handed in our treatment of religion. But we shouldn’t be fixated, and we shouldn’t be even-handed. In fact, we should be quick to point out the differences among religions, for two reasons:

First, these differences make all religions look contingent, and therefore silly. Consider the unique features of Mormonism, which may have some relevance in the next Presidential election. Mormonism, it seems to me, is—objectively—just a little more idiotic than Christianity is. It has to be: because it is Christianity plus some very stupid ideas. For instance, the Mormons think Jesus is going to return to earth and administer his Thousand years of Peace, at least part of the time, from the state of Missouri. Why does this make Mormonism less likely to be true than Christianity? Because whatever probability you assign to Jesus’ coming back, you have to assign a lesser probability to his coming back and keeping a summer home in Jackson County, Missouri. If Mitt Romney wants to be the next President of the United States, he should be made to feel the burden of our incredulity. We can make common cause with our Christian brothers and sisters on this point. Just what does the man believe? The world should know. And it is almost guaranteed to be embarrassing even to most people who believe in the Biblical God.

The second reason to be attentive to the differences among the world’s religions is that these differences are actually a matter of life and death. There are very few of us who lie awake at night worrying about the Amish. This is not an accident. While I have no doubt that the Amish are mistreating their children, by not educating them adequately, they are not likely to hijack aircraft and fly them into buildings. But consider how we, as atheists, tend to talk about Islam. Christians often complain that atheists, and the secular world generally, balance every criticism of Muslim extremism with a mention of Christian extremism. The usual approach is to say that they have their jihadists, and we have people who kill abortion doctors. Our Christian neighbors, even the craziest of them, are right to be outraged by this pretense of even-handedness, because the truth is that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless human misery, than Christianity has been for a very, very long time. And the world must wake up to this fact. Muslims themselves must wake up to this fact. And they can.

I have been very interested recently in the veritable flood of books coming out sprouting an atheist manifesto. Authors such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray seem to be competing for who is the more accurate atheist, or who can ‘crucify’—for want of a better word—organised religion the best.

Even though I am not an atheist, in my blogroll I have two very famous ones, Bill Maher from the United States and Phillip Adams from Australia, so I am never far away from the latest in atheistic thought. However, even though I believe the above mentioned purveyers of godlessness have some good points to raise, I am also critical of them, and it has nothing to do with Allah, God, Yahweh, Vishnu or Jesus.

What these three gentlemen are ‘preaching’ is that there is no God, and that we are silly buggers if we swallow the nonsense. Christopher Hitchens’ latest book “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, looks at how religion can control everything we do, and in essence, can poison us and everything we touch.

“In Belfast, Hitchens saw locals terrorised for “no other reason than membership of another confession”. In Belgrade, he’d seen Croatian Roman Catholics slug it out with Christian Orthodox Serbs. In Beirut, a suicide bomber’s severed head stared at him in the street outside the French embassy. And so on….Rather than target one weak point hard, Hitchens goes hard at them all: faith is condemned as an overrated virtue; the holy texts are a sham; religious metaphysics are false; intelligent design is foolish; and, best argued of all, religious people are very, very dangerous.”

Religion can be a very scary thing if it dominates ones life and dictates ones actions. This has happened many times throughout the course of history. Christians in the deep south of the United States would hang you from the nearest tree if you said Jesus was a fruitcake. Extremists in the Islamic community will either deal you a death sentence or bomb whole sections of the community if your religious views don’t gel with theirs. Take the recent news coming out of Iran:

“Iran’s toy market is being inundated by models of Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter and the young must be protected from their harmful cultural effects, the nation’s prosecutor general was quoted as saying….Mr Dori Najafabadi’s comments came in a letter to an Iranian vice president, urging measures to protect “Islamic culture and revolutionary values”.

Hitchens and the others, even from just a simplistic view at a synopsis of the books on offer, make some valid points. What worries me, however, is the cocky arrogance that I have seen displayed from Dawkins, Hitchens, and the likes of Bill Maher. Part of their criticism is that religious nutters hold to their fundamentalism and this is what makes them dangerous. But what I think is dangerous is a level of arrogance that treats an innocent, simple living religious follower like he or she is a moronic, mindless fool. There is nothing wrong with a point of view, but please, let people believe what they want. Take task with the more extreme actions, not with the innocent day to day events of a local church, temple, mosque or synagogue. Arrogance and superiority only breeds contempt.

Religion does poison everything, but so do overconfident negative observers of the world.