Richard Dawkins is delusional. That might be a strange thing to say about an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, but his new book, "The God Delusion" (406 pages of turgid polemics published in late 2006 by Houghton Mifflin), amply documents his delusion. And what is that delusion? That Dawkins is debunking religion -- all religion, for all time and eternity. The bigger delusion, really, is that Dawkins thinks he's talking about religion at all.

Dawkins' 'analysis' is no analysis at all; it's simply a polemic that takes only one very narrow & particular kind of religious ideology -- that of the contemporary religious right (whether of the Jerry Falwell Christian variety or the Muslim Ayatollah Khomeini sort) and generalizes to all religions & spiritualities across all cultures and all epochs; clearly, that's simply bad science -- if one could call it science at all.

Ironically enough, for someone who is so obsesses with fundamentalist religion, Dawkins seems completely unaware of significant developments within even this limited sphere of religious experience. For example, the National Association of Evangelicals -- the largest and most influential such organization in the United States -- right now is being convulsed by arguments and debates over what constitutes the proper scope of their work, with traditionalists insisting on sticking with the narrow political agenda of opposition to abortion and LGBT rights and the like and 'modernizers' (as some observers have called them) arguing for an expansion of the agenda to include action to combat global warming. Lest one think that the latter is a 'fringe' element within NAE, this new movement-within-a-movement includes figures of the prominence of Richard Cizik, NAE's vice-president for governmental affairs. Many evangelical Christians are now beginning to ask "What Would Jesus Drive?" and some are ditching their gas-guzzling SUVs in response.