Richard Dawkins has written an interesting article about religious tolerance. The message seems to be that we should not be tolerant of people who believe in stupid things.

The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be ‘raptured’ up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds.

I don’t necessarily think taking such a hard-line is a good idea, but it’s an interesting article nevertheless. There is a really nice counter-argument to the famous “watchmaker argument” that I hadn’t heard before. To paraphrase:

If the universe is too complex to have been created by natural phenomena, any supernatural intelligence you invoke to explain it is necessarily even more complex… Therefore, you are retarded.

Dawkins has written an entire book about the watchmaker argument, by the way. Maybe I’ll get around to reading it one day, but I’m starting to tire of people who try to convince me of things I’m already convinced of.