From Deformable Mirror:
And thanks so much for making me so happy to be a Christian. I mean, if a Christian public intellectual supported a war that ended in horrific bloodshed and was utterly unrepentant, I'd (to put it mildly) not regard him as my hero.
But Dawkins has decided that the poor man's Coffin Joe is his hero, though he couldn't be more unfortunate in his choice of words. 'Soldier' seems a really poor word to apply to someone who's never worn a uniform in their life, but who is very eager to send young men to fight and die so that he can get on Fox News.
Maybe I was unfair to Coffin Joe in comparing him to Christopher Hitchens, given that Coffin Joe comes up with some genuinely funny jokes and seems to think that kids are valuable. Hitch certainly ain't gonna shed no tears for Iraqis who've been blown to pieces and I'll never get why his fans always seem to crack up about his North Korea joke.
Still, Coffin Joe would probably be a bit swarthy and working class for new atheist taste: in common with many genuinely brave secularists in the developing world.
It really sticks in the craw a bit to see Dawkins fawning over Hitchens whilst not once mentioning Iraq (or Kosovo for that matter). Especially as he mentions Hitchens' biography of Mother Theresa as an example of why he admires him.
This is the same Richard Dawkins who, in The God Delusion, describes having been sexually abused as a child as "an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience".
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