I've attempted to be charitable to Dawkins before and I will attempt to do so again. I still think that, on matters of religion, Dawkins is the atheist equivalent of Pat Robertson, BTW. Afterall, the idea that God was angry with the homosexuals and feminists and that is why he allowed 9/11/01 to happen was an attempt to raise the consciousness of the American public. When people hear the word "gay" Robertson wants it to sounds like a fingernail scraping on a blackboard, lest there be more terrorist attacks.

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Ed Brayton writes a wonderful letter to Richard Dawkins that can be found here. I just wanted to set the record straight on the one point that concerns me. Ed writes:

The irony is that I only found out about the petition and your promotion of it in the process of defending you against the charge that you favored such coercive policies. An ID advocate accused you of that in a reply to me on another subject and I came to your defense, saying that despite your statements about parental religious instruction being child abuse, I had seen nothing at all to indicate that you would support coercive policies to end such a practice.

In my article on the typology of ID critics, I never accused Dawkins of advocating coercive policies.
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Since Richard Dawkins withdrew his support for a petition to make religious upbringing illegal, many are now trying to make it look as if the petition was so out of tune with the rest of Dawkins' writings that only those with an irrational hatred of him could believe that he had truly endorsed it.

PZ Myers, for example, quotes from Dawkins' The God Delusion, where Dawkins voices his support for comparative religion, where children can learn about the "many mutually incompatible belief-systems." But that doesn't say anything about the right of parents to raise their children in a particular religion. And as I previously noted, in Dawkins' so-called retraction, he really only regrets signing the petition because it would have also made comparative religion classes illegal. He nowhere affirmed his support for the legal right of parents to give their children a religious upbringing.

In fact, anyone who has followed Dawkins' public statements on religion would have plenty of reasons to think that he would want religious upbringing made illegal. After all, this is a man that has referred to a Catholic upbringing as causing more harm than sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, and who thinks that merely talking about a "Catholic child" or a "Protestant child" is "a kind of child abuse". And in his newest book, The God Delusion, he repeats psychologist Nicholas Humphrey's demand that we should not "allow parents to teach their children to believe … in the literal truth of the Bible":

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Since we have been receiving a lot of new traffic over the last week or so, and many people rely on stereotypes when thinking about Intelligent Design, I thought I would repost three blogs that better clarify my position. (Of course, the best clarification will soon be found here).

Some ID Positions

Over on the Panda’s Thumb, ID critic Steve Reuland outlines the basic positions of ID. Since none of his assertions would help someone to understand my views, I thought I would answer the various questions he poses.
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Don't let anyone tell you that Telic Thoughts has a monopoly on bringing you news about front-loading. We've gotten some competition from Intelligently Sequenced, where Nathan Munson writes:

As the articles states, "sea urchins are echinoderms, marine animals" and the purple sea urchin, "has 7,000 genes in common with humans, including genes associated with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases and muscular dystrophy." Of great interest to intelligent design advocates of front loading is the fact that although the sea urchin has no eyes, nose or ears it does have genes that are homologous to genes found in humans that are involved in vision, hearing and the sense of smell.

PZ Myers lashes out at me as follows:

I was suspicious immediately. For one thing, Mike Gene pulls a bait-and-switch that Ed fell for without question: he claims that Dawkins endorsed this petition on his website. This is not true. There is a different petition from the same group that is endorsed at richarddawkins.net, which encourages the removal of government support for faith-based schools. There is no link anywhere on that site to the controversial petition. When an ID creationist pulls something that sneaky, it's a good idea to think twice.

Of course, it is PZ Myers who got it wrong. It seems that everyone but Myers knew that there was indeed a link to the petition that asks “the Prime Minister to make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16." In fact, at the time of this writing, it is still there; Dawkins has not removed it from his web page. Myers somewhat acknowledges he was wrong by later crossing out the sentence, “There is no link anywhere on that site to the controversial petition" and adds, "(Wait—there is a single link without comment in a list of petitions)." The single link is the link that supposedly did not exist and is found at the top of the page among a list of two petitions. But if Myers is going to lash out at me with knee-jerk accusations, it’s not a good idea to do something like this from a position of complete ignorance.

To paraphrase Myers:

Mike Gene also does not have horns and a forked tail. Some people, though, are awfully quick to use their ignorance to impose outrageous beliefs and actions on the man.

Richard Dawkins has regretted signing and promoting a petition to make religious upbringing illegal. Or, well, sort of. In reality, he only talks about "teaching the Bible as literature" and "teaching comparative religion", which he is in favor of. But at no point does he mention his stand on religious upbringing - where the Bible may be taught as history, and where only the beliefs of one religion is taught. Should that be legal for parents to do?

But that isn't all. In a later comment, Dawkins goes on to claim that "LABELLING children with the religion of their parents is child abuse." Oh yeah? There exists a large body of professional literature on the subject of child abuse. Where are the studies that show that being called a Catholic child or a Muslim child is child abuse? Dawkins often speaks about the importance of science and evidence. So why doesn't he use the scientific method to answer this question?

Update: The petition is still being promoted on Dawkins' website, so it's possible that we're dealing with an imposter.

Update 2: Forget the previous update. PZ Myers has been in contact with Richard Dawkins, and presumably it is him in the comments.

From here:

I did sign the petition, but I hadn't thought it through when I did so, and I now regret it. I have asked the organizer to remove my name. Unfortunately, it seems that the list has already gone off to Downing Street but the organizer, Jamie Wallis, has kindly asked their web manager to remove my name. I suspect that he himself may be having second thoughts about the wording, and I respect him for that. It isn't always easy to get the exact wording right.

I signed it having read only the main petition: "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16." I regret to say that I did not notice the supporting statement with the heading, "More details from petition creator": "In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians." If I had read that, I certainly would not have signed the petition, because, as explained in The God Delusion, I am in favour of teaching the Bible as literature, and I am in favour of teaching comparative religion. In any case, like any decent liberal, I am opposed to the element of government coercion in the wording. Furthermore, the Prime Minister, thank goodness, does not have the power to 'make' anything 'illegal'. Only parliament has the power to do that.

I signed the main petition, because I really am passionately opposed to DEFINING children by the religion of their parents (while 'indoctrination' is such a loaded word, nobody could be in favour of it). I was so delighted to hear of somebody else who cared about the defining or labelling of children by the religion of their parents (how would you react if you heard a child described as a 'seclular humanist child' or a 'neo-conservative child'?) that I signed it without reading on and without thinking. Mea culpa.

Ed Brayton has replied to my blog where I offer a typology of ID critics. I should point out that I offered this typology up to readers of Telic Thoughts in an attempt to encourage more fair-mindedness about the critics of ID, recognizing a diversity of thought and attitude among them. For example, one should not use Richard Dawkins as the archetype of all ID critics and then paint someone like Ed with this particular broad brush.

Ed take's issue with two points in my blog.
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