Do not conflate religion with belief. Belief might be called "irrational" or "un-scientific", but that's hardly bashing it, since that's what even a believer might say that it is! Religion implies a whole lot more - organisation, churches, dogma, scriptures and the interpretation of them, practices, etc. - which is (insert 'mainly' here if you believe a god provided some words of wisdom at the beginning) the work of man.
You've already agreed (and then disagreed!) that religion has done harm in the past... why should someone who thinks that religion is doing harm in the present stay silent?
I'd say that's taking a shallow view of it. The militancy aspect may well have been helped by Dawkins, but most of what they're saying (including Dawkins) has been said before. The guardian review you quoted says "Dawkins makes much of the oppression perpetrated by religion,
which is real enough." It's an accepted fact, basically, worthy of just a four word comment there.
That review continues into some waffle about science being used to oppress in the same way as religion.... nope. Since it was deliberately bogus, it was pseudo-science, which is not the same thing at all.
No, but I just read up a bit about him finding a god (
http://creation.com/review-there-is-a-god-by-antony-flew). Really can't say I agree with his logic - that a living cell is so complicated it must've been designed. He would of course have been familiar with the
Miller-Urey Experiment that got as far as producing amino acids, and of course with evolution from single-celled creatures onward. Even though he anyway wasn't convinced by natural selection as a theory, it appears to have been the inital jump from amino acids to a single-celled organism that finally caused him to believe in a god.
quote...
Flew was particularly impressed with a physicist’s refutation of the idea that monkeys at typewriters would eventually produce a Shakespearean sonnet. The likelihood of getting one Shakespearean sonnet by chance is one in 10690; to put this number in perspective, there are only 1080 particles in the universe. Flew concludes:
‘If the theorem won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance’ (p. 78).
OK, except that the chance of getting from amino acids to cells may not be a simple combination of the probablilities of each intermediate step. Going from basic molecules to amino acids hardly required any chance at all. Given that the early earth probably had billions of amino acids interacting in billions of different ways each second for billions of years... chance has a good chance