UPDATED: The God Delusion [VIDEO]

In a BBC interview on Friday, Evolutionary Biologist and sharp religion critic, Richard Dawkins, talks about his new book, The God Delusion (I"m just ecstatic that he referenced the Flying Spaghetti Monster).

He claims to want to speak to the middle ground; to people who haven't really thought too much about faith and God in order to challenge their belief. An uphill battle, to be sure. He employs all the usual suspects: "people need to believe in fairy tales" "just look at organized religion" but fails to see where every method for assessing reality is hopelessly mired in its own methodology. Or: the scientific method may be positively divine for assessing the physical world, it has built-in limitations w/r/t the spiritual one.

He's toned his contempt down, even acknowledging that there might be a God (you can't prove a negative) but he winds up pushing the tired claim that religion is the root of mankind's conflict and that, one presumes, it'll be rainbows and unicorns (if they existed) when religion goes the way of the dodo. Certain of his claims are just silly: There are similarities among the world's religions so they can't all be true!

Things I like about Richard Dawkins:

1. He eviscerates Creationists regularly
2. He refuses to debate them b/c, as Stephen Jay Gould suggested, they don't mind losing a debate, they just want the credibility the debate provides.
3. His heart seems to be in the right place
4. He's preternaturally nerdy
5. He's uses the Bush administration as an object lesson in the dangers of theology-driven policy making