The problem is not that Dawkins quoted a fact, it is that that fact was used, in isolation, to be deliberately provocative. Saying there are fewer Muslim winners of Nobel prizes than a Cambridge college is factually true. However the clear implication was that there are fewer BECAUSE they are Muslim, and because Islam has put a break on the ability of Muslims to achieve academic success. As a scientist, one could accept that as a hypothesis to be tested, but you cannot accept it (as Dawkins intended it to be interpreted) as an obvious ‘fact’.

The reality is that there are a million factors that explain why Cambridge University has won a lot more nobel prizes than any group you care to mention, the main one being that it is an institution of scientific research, and winning them is rather its raison d’etre. It won them because it set out to win them.

I do regard the active belief in the non-existance of God as a religion. This is the Humanist or Atheist position.

A Secularist should be advocating that one’s religious belief doesn’t matter, not that one should not have a belief.

The snag is anyone with a religious belief is going to clash with the Secularist position at some point. The question becomes where should the lines be drawn. There is no easy answer as so much of this is context dependant.

His sweeping statements and crass comments counting the number of Nobel prizes won by Muslims are simply not worthy of an intelligent person. If religion is the reason why Muslims have not won Nobel prizes, then why is it that so many Christians have inconveniently won the blasted things? Oh, because of the west? Because of greater liberalism and enlightenment of Europe? No, because both liberalism and the Englightenment were in large part brought about by devoutly religious people. They studied at universities that were founded to support religion and continued to promote it (often in sectarian terms) until recent times.

I do believe that religion can be a destructive and harmful phenomenon. However, it is the humans who use religion for highly unspiritual ends that are the problem, not religion itself. It is humanity that is to blame, and I don’t believe for an instant that a godless world would have reduced the sum of human misery over the last few millenia by more than a fraction, if by anything at all. Religious wars, religious genocides and religious cultural and political imperialism are universally about much more than religion … they are about power, money, demographic pressures and the ‘battle for survival’ of one society against another. They’d have happened anyway. You’d think a Darwinist would understand that.

One of my cousins married in a “Humanist” ceremony.
I have also attended a funeral which was rather on the athets side of agnostic.
I have even sung a piece of music which felt rather like the atheist version of a requiem mass (a most depressing piece).

At what point do you cross the line between being a religious position and being a religion?

Not believing in God is a religious position, but on it’s own it doesn’t really qualify as a religion. Once you’re got things like “The Atheist Community”, or start capitalising the word “Atheism”, then….

Atheism, the mistaken (in my opinion) belief in the non-existance of God is a religion too.

I have lost interest in Richard Dawkins, so I have no idea if his recent comments were racist or not, but religious intollerance gets people far more worked up than racial remarks anyway.

Now what winds me up are the Secularists who want everyone to use the same religious insignia as the Atheists. They simply have not thought that one through.