Richard Dawkins.

[Lynchenberg]

Do you feel as though Richard Dawkins sort of has a cult of personality built around him?

[Neon Black]

I don't know about a cult of personality, but he, along with people like Carl Sagan and Christopher Hitchens have become poster boys for the fedora-wearing, Reddit breed of atheism - a type of atheist that I find noteworthy for being loud, obnoxious, aloof, disrespectful, ignorant, and really not too bright, which I find ironic for a group of people supposedly espousing the virtues of skepticism and the scientific method (and I say all this as an atheist myself).

I have read Dawkins' books The God Delusion and Climbing Mount Unprobable back in 2007 or so and found them to be very stimulating material. He's a decent speaker, a good philosopher and a better scientist, but his status as a more-or-less famous person at this point has a lot of people pulling him in a lot of different directions, mostly groups with political and social agendas instead much of an interest in science or philosophy. I remember seeing him on a panel beside AronRa and Rebecca Watson, and he seemed to spend most of his time there quietly fluctuating between boredom and extreme discomfort.

[PorpoiseMuffins]

I think Richard Dawkins has got a lot of other stuff going on, not directly related to being an atheist. I don't know what, and I think his heart is in the right place, but he has other motivations.

More to the point I haven't heard him say anything much in the last few years and I wonder if he's had a bit of a rethink in his approach to religious people.

Sorry if all of that's a bit vague, but that's what I think anyway.