Oh, Thank you, Your Ass-Holiness....

[OnlyNatural]

Not only will I kindly give you the page number, I will also kindly give you the quote, and also kindly put it in bold for you. Somehow I have the feeling you will not kindly admit that I was right though...just a hunch. You'll find a way to justify DickDawk's views on the subject since he has become a Christ figure to the Atheistic religion.

Chapter 9, on page 316 of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins

"Nevertheless, it is clearly unjust to visit upon all pedophiles a vengeance appropriate to the tiny minority who are also murderers. All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affection for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defense, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience)."

Alright, I found it on p. 355 in my copy. You're right in the sense that this quote exists. What Dawkins seems to be saying is that child murder, including sexually-motivated murder, is a worse crime than molestation. I assume most people would agree with that. Child molesters are despicable people, but compared to the horrific rape and murder of an 8-year old girl that he describes just prior to this quote, I'd say the rapist-murderer is at least slightly more despicable.

I'm surprised to hear Dawkins describe molestation as 'embarrassing but otherwise harmless.' Maybe if the inappropriate contact is extremely mild... There's a difference between having a priest slap your ass briefly on one occasion, and being brutally raped on an ongoing basis. But if you want to consider molestation in general, I would disagree with Dawkins on that point. I would never consider sexual abuse to be 'harmless.' The physical harm is temporary, but the psychological harm can last a lifetime and can be devastating. Some people never get over it.

I don't understand why you, like a lot of religious people, assume atheists see Dawkins as a Christ figure. Obviously he's just a human being. He has some excellent things to say on a lot of subjects, but that doesn't mean I would swallow The God Delusion whole as if it were a bible or something. As an atheist, I question things, and if I don't agree with something, I don't find some delusional way to justify it just because the person who said it is also an atheist.