After making atheist provocateur Richard Dawkins a deity himself for his vitriolic attacks on Christianity, the left is suddenly experiencing a case of tightly wound panties over the discovery that Dawkins doesn’t reserve his misanthropy for Christianity. He also thinks the feminist focus of “rape culutre” is ridiculous and that Islam is violent and dangerous. Dawkins may or may not be particularly smart. Obtaining a doctorate and academic tenure doesn’t necessarily mean you are smart or talented (his bio suggests he was more the benefactor of the British class system than anything else, but that is another matter). What is certain is that he’s a boorish and unpleasant little man.

All was fun and games so long as he was making cute but profoundly stupid statements ridiculing Christianity like:

“horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was [suffered by some children at the hands of deviant priests], the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.”.

Unfortunately, the “a” in atheisim means “against” and the “theism” means “belief in god.” So his personal theology, if you will, requires him to reject any manifestation of a god.  So are we surprised when he tweets:

and makes a trenchant observation like:

Of course not. This is his schtick. His alleged belief system. The way he gulls the anti-science science-loving left into giving him money. This bothered some on the left:

To be sure, it’s always okay to critique religious beliefs. It’s healthy to do so and no religion should be immune from — or its followers resistant to — well-intentioned and reasonable inquiries about faith claims. But there’s a difference between problematizing a religion’s tenets and persecuting its adherents. There’s also a difference between raising legitimate concerns about doctrines, scriptures and the rationale of one’s beliefs, and hurling insults that shift the tenor of the debate into a machismo register better suited for high school locker rooms.

I checked for this guy’s defense of Christians in general or Catholics in particular and found none. I know. You are as shocked as I am. But here I have an advantage. I know what Dawkins is and therefore his opinions have no weight. What is offensive here, of course, is not his attack on a religion or its adherents but rather his attack on the favored pet religion of the leftm Islam, and having raised him up as their own seraph on a rod must reconcile these statements with another member of their Godhead: Tolerance.
To make it worse for them, Dawkins has branched out into commenting on sex. That a left wing atheist would have a rather expansive definition of pedophilia isn’t surprising, what was sort of surprising was seeing it in print:

In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, he said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”

He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

And from there he branched out into rape and managed to use his statement on pedophilia as justification:

Feminists were not amused by his “mansplaining” of their favorite issue.

This kind of blue-on-blue engagement is always fun to watch. Dawkins could do no wrong so long as he promoted the left’s peculiar and irrational Christophobia but when he branched out into criticizing their beliefs and values then suddenly he needed an intervention or he was a bigot or a sexist. All of those things may very well be true, or he could just be an idiot. But they are not new developments and are no surprise to anyone who has paid the tiniest bit of attention to him. That the left is only now discovering them says much more about their own mental capacity than it does about a poseur like Dawkins.

Note that no one has complained about Dawkins’s logic that makes taking a child to church worse than pedophilia… but I guess he needs to go away and learn how to think.