>rom his writings, I gather that Dawkins would be content to live in a world where gentle Anglican vicars presided over their bored, civilised congregations in England's vales and hills, while the British Empire did its dirty work elsewhere, in places like Kenya, India, and West Cork. He saves his real ire for the creeds of the unruly natives — all those nasty Muslims and Catholics and tribalists who don't know their place.

Islam gets called out more often because it does more damage. Most of the English CofE faithful, I suspect, don't actually believe in their religion; they attend the services and get on with their lives. They're not preaching the evils of condoms or calling for the lynching of those who criticised them or, yes it has to be said, undertaking terrorism in the name of their religion.

>This is not the place to describe the many problems and hypocrisies of neoliberalism. Suffice it to say that I do not believe that liberal democracy, which condemns the majority of the world's population to varying degrees of slavery, is a perfect system. I do not believe that the metaphors of liberal democracy allow us a perfect view of reality. And therefore I do not believe in the primacy of the scientific method as a source of knowledge. It might be the best we've got, but when it comes to human advancement — including the advance of science itself — other sources of knowledge can be just as useful, and often more important.

Simply untrue. Indeed the scientific method may be only the best we've got rather than perfect, but that still makes it the best we've got. "other sources of knowledge" - like what, mysticism? are less useful.

>What's more, skeptics never acknowledge that racial science was defeated by political ideology, and not by science itself. In fact, there was nothing that could have defeated it within the empirical framework of racial scientists. Their racist experiments confirmed their racist hypotheses based on their racist observations. But while the science supported them, politics, in the aftermath of World War 2 and the Holocaust, did not. After 1945, racial science became politically unacceptable in western liberal democracies, and remains so in spite of the various attempts to revive it. It was not disproved by the scientific method; instead, the political ideologies behind racial science were discarded, and replaced by new ones that did not accommodate it.

Which is a bad thing, because it makes it very hard to be confident we know the truth about racial matters. Racist "science" is unscientific, but so too is politically correct "science"; which is more harmful is indeed a matter of politics, because both are simply expressions of politics. Neither is founded in science or skepticism.

>Cheating people out of their money is one thing, but cheating them out of their lives is quite another. To read some skeptic takes on alternative medicine, you'd think only heart disease rivalled it as a killer. It's true that alternative medicine is not going to cure anyone of serious illness, but it's also generally true that the terminally ill only turn to it when real medicine has given up hope on them.

Generally, but not exclusively. People really do die because they looked to "alternative medicine" rather than medicine; the fact that most people who use "alternative medicine" don't does not really excuse this.