I’ve never known what to think about Richard Dawkins, except for the fact that he and PZ Myers are objects of profound veneration among the online atheist community. I know I should dig past all that and try to figure out what they’re actually saying and why they’re saying it, but I get enough of people telling me that my faith is Teh Stupid from liberal political blogs, thank you very much.

Anyway, Zack Exley reports that Richard Dawkins has stepped down from his post at Oxford University to write

“… a children’s book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking. I haven’t read Harry Potter … I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.”

Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of “bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards”.

“I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know.”

Exley notes:

What’s so funny here is that [Dawkins] is turning even more into the mirror image of angry fundamentalist Christians who want to stamp out any delusion that’s not their own. For them too, unorthodox thinking is forbidden even for children. Dawkins says that scary fantasies are even more harmful than physical abuse for children. Maybe he could make a united front with Christian fundamentalists who would like to ban Harry Potter and cancel Halloween.