Richard Dawkins hates fairies. That's not a homosexual slur. He also hates "wizards and magic wands and things turning into other things." And he's not sure if children should be exposed to such ideas.
From the New York Times:
Having sufficiently inflamed the passions of his adult readers with “The God Delusion,” his treatise on rationalism and atheism, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins…is writing a book for children. Dr. Dawkins said [the] book that would explore children’s relationships with fairy tales and encourage them to think about the world scientifically rather than mythologically. “I would like to know whether there’s any evidence that bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards and magic wands and things turning into other things — it is unscientific, I think it’s antiscientific…Whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know.”
It's important to note that the book does not have a publisher or release date, according to the New York Times. But Dawkins' "The God Delusion" has sold quite well, so if he does pen something along the lines of, "Stop Believing in Wizards You Dopey Kid" or "The Harry Potter Delusion", he'll probably find someone willing to print it.
The blog GBG Atheist News (GBG stands for "god be gone") has a post from 2007 that quotes Dawkins as saying, "i might try to do a children's book about how to think for yourself and how to ask questions about interesting topics and how you might go about answering them, Which might be subversive to religion but i don't think would be explicit about that" (apologies for punctuation; apparently this particular group of atheists don't capitalize the letter "I" and do whatever they feel like doing with commas). Dawkins recently said that Harry Potter and other stories "could have a 'pernicious' effect on children." (dailymail)
Interestingly, there are some people who dislike the Potter books
because they feel they are anti-religious -- those who think it promotes witchcraft
and/or Satanism and/or other evil things. (Like these fun folks who burned a pile of Potter books.)
Obviously if a child is 14 and still believes firmly that fairies exist, that might be a bit odd. But I think it's a parent's job to dispel any "delusions" before they become problematic. Heck, I believed in Santa Claus for the first few years of my life, and I'm Jewish. I turned out OK.
Source: nytimes
Image: dailymail
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