----- Original Message ---- From: Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com>
Dawkins is a loyal participant in that most right-wing of intellectual projects, the attempted absolution of imperialism for its crimes. In *The God Delusion*, he urges his readers to "[i]magine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers ... no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars ... no Northern Ireland 'troubles.'" Elsewhere in his odious little book, he confidently asserts that "[i]n Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants are euphemized to 'Nationalists' and 'Loyalists' respectively" and informs us that "without religion, and religiously segregated education, the divide simply would not be there. The warring tribes would have intermarried and long since dissolved into each other." Trying to pin all the nastiness in the world on a single social force is always a fool's errand, but attempting to do so with religions seems to take one to particularly reactionary, not to mention, ridiculous, places. (We also witness Parenti take a halting stap in this general direction, with his ludicrous suggestion that occupied Afghanistan, whose constitution states that "[t]he sacred religion of Islam shall be the religion of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan" and "[n]o law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of Islam in Afghanistan," is something other than a theocracy.)