Actually Alex, I thought Dawkins was uncharacteristically thoughtful in the particular quote I noted—when Dawkins declares that, “If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed,” I’m thinking, well, yeah, OK; and that maybe the fellow is beginning to see the light.

Although, alas, elsewhere in the debate he reaffirmed his view that our noblest acts, our “morality,” is little more than a misfiring of Darwinian behavior; that good and evil (i.e. right and wrong—outside of the human mind tuned by evolutionary processes) have no meaning to him.

As far as giving atheism a bad name, I’d say that the hostility and rhetoric, not to mention the mass murders, of various atheistic regimes in recent history already have, although folk like Dawkins seem unable to acknowledge that reality.

Maybe Dawkins’s sentiment, that God would have to be “a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed,” is what many “atheists,” that are really just agnostic, actually feel, for the admittedly limited perspective of various theologians? If so, well, Happy Thanksgiving my agnostic brothers and sisters.