>>11
When I said he was an embaressment to atheists I meant contemporary professionals who discuss their atheists beliefs and criticise religion. Dawkins is much different and it has nothing to do with appearances, it's his clearly extremist attitude. I once heard him say that Stalin was a confucian on this documentary a while ago. He just cannot admit that religion isn't the source of this problem, just human nature and the fact that pretty much any idea can be corrupted.
The reign of terror after the french revolution was claimed by the thugs responsible to be in the name of liberty, reason and science. These 3 things you womight believe to be inherantly anti-ignorance and the opposite of tyranny, but it is this belief that the revolutionaries used to justify their acts of injustice and support their tyranny.
Believe it or not there were non-marxist professional atheists and agnostics before Dawkins gained publicity and they were informed enough to realise that any ideal can be corrupted, but were delighted to look through history and see that not cult has been directly linked to atheism. Tyrants persecuted religions for their own ends, but they couldn't really be said to be cult-atheists. As predicted though something like this would eventually happen, Dawkins is sowing the seeds for some kind of atheist-cult. Cults generally thrive indehumanising their opponents, there is already loads of bigotry against anyone who has something to say about nihilism across the internet and it's growing because unlike other popular forms of bigotry there are no famous historical examples to fall back on of people doing insidious evil in the name of atheism.