Why are they throwing brickbats at God?

There are many to seek to eliminate God and religion from our lives. We live in a world that has found a new religion: secularism. With our science we can master the universe. We really do not need God any longer. I found this article, by Margaret Sommerville, in CERC http://www.catholiceducation.org/ (Bi-Weekly production of my good Canadian friend, J. Fraser Field)

The author states that Richard Dawkins has done more than all religious people together to put God on the current public agenda.

He is on a highly publicized, international campaign to convince the world that "religion is the root of all evil". I think he’s seriously misguided, at best, and that his campaign is dangerous. Here are just a few of the reasons I think that.

Terry Eagleton, an eminent literary scholar, reviewing Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, in the London Review of Books, says that Dawkins’ writing on theology and is equivalent to someone writing on science whose sole familiarity with science is The Book of British Birds. ..Dawkins confuses religion and the use of religion — I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt intellectually and assume he does so deliberately — in order to promote his thesis that religion is evil. Religion itself is not evil — just as science is not evil — but it can be used for evil purposes, just as science can.

Using religion to convince the 9/11 terrorists to commit mass murder by knocking down the World Trade Towers was a profoundly evil use of religion. Using airplanes to carry out that evil was a profoundly evil use of aeronautical science. However, Dawkins looks only at the evil uses of religion — never the good it effects — and only the good uses of science — never the harms it does. A balanced ethical approach requires us to recognise both the goods and harms of both religion and science, and to try to stop the evil uses and to promote the good ones of each. ...

(Margaret Sommerville AM, FRSC is an Australian/Canadian ethicist and academic. She is the Samuel Gale Professor of Law, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and the Founding Director of the Faculty of Law's Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University.)