Richard Dawkins vs. Harry Potter?
Why the author of 'The God Delusion' is writing a children's book
Apparently, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins thinks books like Harry Potter might have a negative effect on the emotional development of kids, said Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times. “Having sufficiently inflamed the passions of his adult readers with The God Delusion—his treatise on rationalism and atheism”—Dawkins has now decided to write a book that will “explore children’s relationships with fairy tales and encourage them to think about the world scientifically rather than mythologically.”
“This isn’t about Harry Potter at all,” said Harrison Scott Key in WorldMag.com. Dawkins has a beef with “Christianity and theism in general.” He believes that teaching kids about hell, for instance, is a form of child abuse. Will it make “Junior feel so much better to know the chasm of unfeeling blackness will envelope him upon death” instead?
Look, it “depends a great deal on context” and the “way in which the stories are presented,” said Derek James in Thinking as a Profession. And even if studies showed that fantasy books do have a negative effect on kids, “I’m pretty sure Dawkins” is more interested in “informing parents so they can make choices about what and how to present material to children” than he is in condemning books like Harry Potter.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Political cartoons for January 31Cartoons Saturday's political cartoons include congressional spin, Obamacare subsidies, and more
-
Syria’s Kurds: abandoned by their US allyTalking Point Ahmed al-Sharaa’s lightning offensive against Syrian Kurdistan belies his promise to respect the country’s ethnic minorities
-
The ‘mad king’: has Trump finally lost it?Talking Point Rambling speeches, wind turbine obsession, and an ‘unhinged’ letter to Norway’s prime minister have caused concern whether the rest of his term is ‘sustainable’