Well, here's an example.

Last night a relatively inarticulate young man asked a question, saying that he too is an atheist as regards a personalized, interventionist deity. But, he said, one can cite Einstein, Aristotle, and Galileo on the immanence of a non-personalized, non-interventionist deity and not necessarily be in argument with science. Dawkins said, "Well, that's very poetic, but I'm only interested in science." That's clearly not true, and it doesn't address the question.

Last night, Dawkins mentioned a talk he had given in Virginia that was attended by a number of students at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and told us that he had told these students to leave that school and enroll in a "real school." He was applauded in Virginia, he said, and he was rewarded with applause here for the story. I don't think we can conscientiously state that his instructions to them addressed anything but his contempt for them, for Falwell, and for his assumptions about the school. But conscientious argument doesn't play well to the groundlings.

I should note that I had many of the same issues with Robert Thurman (i.e., playing to the crowd or playing for laughs) when he was here a couple of months ago. He dodged a tough question that I asked him about statements that he had made about appropriate Buddhist responses to the terrorist attacks in 2001 that could include violence, and he dropped the ball rather badly. So I hold my speakers to the same standards whether they represent "Science" or whether they represent "Tibetan Buddhism."

You know that in the documentary Dawkins quotes (and says he agrees with) Stephen Weinberg, who says, "Without religion, good people will do good things. Evil people will do evil things. But it takes religion to make good people do evil things."

You understand, of course, that that is an argument that cannot be disproven, because if I point out any example of a person who did something evil motivated by something other than religion, he can say, "well, he's evil."

So, for example (I love this example, because I think the parallel is set up really well by historical accident), Pim Fortuyn's murderer was a vegan animal-rights activist. Fortuyn was a flamboyantly gay conservative politician, so one would expect some religious group or other to be pissed off at him, but it took a vegan animal-rights activist to kill him. Under the Weinberg/Dawkins rubric, the murderer was evil. Easy call, because religion had no part in it.

Theo Van Gogh's murderer was not particularly religious for most of his life, and seems to have become an extremist follower of a little known imam primarily because of the cultural situation in which he found himself (many young Turkish and Moroccan people in Holland are becoming more religious and/or observant than their parents, and it appears to psychologists there and abroad that this is a way to forge a community in a diaspora where they are consistently rejected on race reasons). When he killed Van Gogh, he asserted that he was doing so because of Van Gogh's association with the artist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has been an outspoken critic of Islam. So under the Weinberg/Dawkins rubric, this was a good person who was driven to do evil by religion.