Although I’ve never actually read any of his books (*chagrin*) I am familiar enough with Richard Dawkins through references and extracts that I feel confident when I say that he is definitely one of the good guys. He has a new book called The God Delusion, from which the following extract is extracted:

There are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten Commandments, which are the subject of such bitter contention in the culture wars of America’s boondocks. The other is by example: God, or some other biblical character, might serve as – to use the contemporary jargon – a role model. Both scriptural routes, if followed through religiously (the adverb is used in its metaphoric sense but with an eye to its origin), encourage a system of morals which any civilized modern person, whether religious or not, would find – I can put it no more gently – obnoxious.

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.

If you continue reading the extract you will see that he goes on to reference the same repulsive bible story that I mentioned here some time ago. What’s really amazing about the story of Lot’s flight from Sodom and Gomorrah is that you can’t possibly read it without being horrified by Lot’s behaviour, and yet the story is constantly referenced by evangelicals as though it offers some sort of useful message.