A public event with the eminent scientist and rationalist Richard Dawkins was cancelled late last year by a Berkeley radio station. A spokesman for the station said that Dawkins had “said things that I know have hurt people,” a misleading allusion to the atheist Dawkins’s forthright criticism of Islam which, along with all religions, he regards as irrational. The station’s general manager declared: “We believe that it is our free speech right not to participate with anyone who uses hateful or hurtful language against a community that is already under attack.”This is only one of the more recent in...
