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

[Statler Waldorf]

---

On page 355 (off of google books) 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)."

He is speaking about his own experiences. He says he attended three boarding schools who all employed "pedophilic" teachers, and that he was a victim of one of them, yet the experience was more embarrassing than harmful, and he would come to their defense if they were hounded like child murderers.

How you can take what he wrote about his own experiences and think it applies to his general thinking about molestation is quite beyond me.

---

I think it's quite clear he is talking about molestation in general, and he would defend a molestor against the "mobs" even if he were a vicemt of one because it is an embarassing but otherwise harmless experience. How you can even attempt to defend Dawkins on this one is beyond me, I have heard of fan-boyism but c'mon.