http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/12/17/svdawk17.xml

More recently, though, he's drifted away from science and into
polemics, laying about various manifestations of woolly thinking with
his rationalist sword. Next year he'll be seen on television examining
- or rather eviscerating - New Age beliefs.

'I had my fortune told not long ago. The woman who was reading my
tarot cards said, "Well, I see your father over on the other side and
he's grieving because you didn't say goodbye."

'I strung her along for some time before telling her that my father is
alive and well - whereupon she promptly started going, "Stop the
camera! Stop the camera!"'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/12/17/svdawk17.xml

Preaching to the converted
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 17/12/2006

What does Christmas mean to our most fervent non-believer? John
Preston talks to Richard Dawkins

Christmas Day in the Dawkins household will begin with a sung
eucharist at 11 o'clock.

Before lunch, grace will be said and thanks offered up to God for all
his bountiful mercy. Then at 4pm the family will attend festal
evensong…

Except that it won't be quite like that, of course.

'Britain's most famous atheist', as he's now regularly dubbed, has the
same disdain for Christmas as he has for all other religious
observances.

But while Richard Dawkins's impassioned atheism has brought him
ever-increasing numbers of admirers - his latest book, The God
Delusion, has sold more than 200,000 copies in hardback - it has also
roused his enemies to new heights of fury.

In America, where he has recently been lecturing, the Religious Right
refer to him, quite without irony, as 'The Devil Incarnate'.

If Dawkins finds this disturbing, he doesn't show it. A dapper,
fastidious and remarkably fresh-faced man of 61, he sits in his north
Oxford home, in front of the largest plasma screen I have ever seen,
exuding an air of amiable equanimity.

A small white dog, which started barking angrily when I came in, is
quietened with the words, 'Sshh, John is a friend.' Given that a)
we've never met before and b) I'm a journalist, this would suggest
that he's the possessor of an almost saintly nature.

And herein lies one of the central paradoxes of Richard Dawkins.
Fervent atheist he may be, but he's also a curiously evangelical
figure. It requires no great leap of the imagination to envisage him
declaiming from a pulpit, lambasting sinners for their moral laxity.

Yet Dawkins's dislike of any notion of God - along with his scorn for
anyone who persists in believing in God - is so strong that at times
it threatens to unbalance him.

As anyone who saw his two-part television documentary The Root of All
Evil? will recall, moderation tends to drop away. In its place comes a
kind of wintery exasperation at the foolishness and primitivism he
sees all around.

I wondered whether in the various public debates he's taken part in
recently anyone ever said anything to persuade him that religion had
something in its favour. Dawkins steeples his fingers and looks
thoughtful. 'I wish I could say yes, but I really don't think so.'

Does this mean that people who believe in God, who cling to what he
has referred to as 'a backward belief system', are - to put it bluntly
- thick?

'Ah… I was slightly worried that you might pick that up. I never feel
personal hostility to people who believe in God,' he insists. 'For
instance, I'm great friends with the local vicar, and also with the
local bishop.'

But didn't he once say that a dog-collar was always a sign of a low
IQ? At this Dawkins, quite unexpectedly, starts to giggle.

'Actually, that was my wife [the former Dr Who actress, Lalla Ward].
What, in fact, she said was that whenever she sees a dog-collar, she
imagines one of those electronic streamers going round and round
saying, "Low IQ, Low IQ, Low IQ…" But she was only joking,' he adds,
not altogether convincingly.

'Besides,' he says, 'I think it's important to remember that you're
dealing with a whole spectrum here. If you've got a Creationist who
claims that the world is only 6,000 years old, I'd say that person was
both pig-ignorant and thick _ thick, because if you're that ignorant
you really ought to be doing something about it. But with someone like
the Archbishop of Canterbury, it would be quite wrong to say that he's
thick. I'd say mistaken, put it that way.'

In The God Delusion, Dawkins quotes John Lennon's Imagine and suggests
that without religion the world would be a happier and more harmonious
place.

'Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no
witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot…' But surely, I suggest, this is a very
naive way of looking at things. Even if religion disappeared
overnight, there would still be a predilection for violence in the
human character.

'Well,' says Dawkins, sounding quite unruffled, 'that could be right.
It's always arguable that if there wasn't a religious label people
would find something else. Let's take football, for example. With
Rangers and Celtic, say, would that rivalry continue if you took
religion out of the equation? You think it would?'

'I do,' I tell him, 'because whatever else religion does to people, I
don't believe it makes them innately aggressive.'

'Yes,' he says, 'I agree with that.'

Yet isn't he implying quite the opposite?

'Hmm, let me try to think that through… If the only thing you've got
against someone is that they support the wrong football team, you
might get into a fight about it, but you will stop short of killing
them. Now that's something you might well not do if you've been taught
from babyhood upwards that your God will approve of such behaviour.
You don't have to produce evidence to support your belief. You simply
say, "It's my faith", and are blind to any kind of argument. If part
of your faith is the righteousness of killing infidels or apostates,
then that does seem to me to go further than the ordinary aggression
which you pessimistically attribute to humans anyway.'

One of the traditional arguments in favour of religion is that it
encourages people to do good.

In his recent book Sacred Causes, the historian Michael Burleigh
asked, 'When have committed rationalists ever operated soup- kitchens,
hotlines for the suicidal or hostels for crack addicts?'

When I put this to Dawkins, his eyebrows rear briefly above the frames
of his glasses. 'Let's say for the sake of argument that is actually
the case, although I've never seen any evidence. What would it be
proving? Might it not be showing something rather ignoble, namely that
perhaps everybody does good deeds if they think people are watching?
Religious people think God is watching them all the time. If I thought
there was a perpetual spy-camera in the sky looking down on everything
I did, then I think I might behave a bit differently to the way I do.'