Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

FFS?

No need to swear YFC. (You Funky Cat!)

I have always found Mr Dawkins a non-ranting, non-shouting, quietly spoken, intelligent and learned Professor and gentleman. I have attended a number of his lectures and met him a couple of times on his forays North. I have watched him deal courteously and effectively with born-again zealots who claim the Earth is 8,000 years old and that dinosaurs existed in "Biblical" times. He never denigrated or humiliated them. Even though they often turned up to deliberately disrupt his scientific lectures with religious mumbo-jumbo and hatred.
I find more wonder and spirituality in Dawkin's explanations of the origins and evolution of Life on Earth than in the bilge oozing from a dozen kiddy-fiddling RC priests. It is closetted theologians who live in boxes and shut out the real world - and try to shut others out of it too - through their "religious" interpretations of how they would like the world to be (women at home having babies, anti-gay, anti-Sunday sailings in the Western Isles for everybody etc). The theologians didn't like Copernicus. The world and the Universe was too much of a challenge for them back then. And it still is.

Any of the times I have seen Dawkins in debate he is informed. I've never seen him in what you describe as a "proper argument" and I don't know exactly who among us would recognise a "proper theologian" if we saw one. And if I take "a proper theologian of any creed" to mean someone who "explores the nature of divinity without reference to any specific tradition" then I am as qualified to speak as any "proper theologian" on this planet. But on matters of natural selection, the origins of life on this planet (and probably others) and the processes of evolution I'd rather listen to Richard Dawkins any day than some cleric. Or Russell Grant who claims he can foretell the future.
What did your fairie look like and what was it doing? Where was it?