America's Future Foundation

Richard Dawkins, professional atheist, intends to write a book on the ill effects of Harry Potter on children [Note to self: Fertile ground for an atheist-fundamentalist alliance?]:

Looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.

If Dawkins isn’t careful, he’s going to end up founding the atheist equivalent of the Parent’s Television Council, where scores of underpaid twenty-somethings scour the airwaves 24-7, tallying up on their scorecards the number of times David Caruso flashes an ass cheek or Peter Griffin says “bitch”, “ass”, or “suck”—except instead of doing that, Dawkins and his lot will be tabulating references to fairy godmothers, magic beans, and such.

So this is where Dawkins’s courageous revolution against the “God Delusion” leads us, is it? Towards a scrubbing of our kiddie lit of “unscientific” references to fairies and spells and magic, lest they corrupt our children’s ability to learn tensor calculus when they get older? Did this pompous fraud really just suggest we might need to anathematize the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen?

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