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Concept
The Root of All Evil?
Summary
The Root of All Evil?, later retitled The God Delusion, is a television documentary written and presented by Richard Dawkins in which he argues that humanity would be better off without religion or belief in God.
The documentary was first broadcast in January 2006, in the form of two 45-minute episodes (excluding advertisement breaks), on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. Dawkins did not think The Root of All Evil? was an ideal title. His book The God Delusion, published in September 2006, explores topics from the documentary in more detail.
The God Delusion explored the unproven traditions that are given as fact by religious faiths, and the extremes that some followers take them. Dawkins argues that faith is not a way of understanding the world (described as "non-thought"), and he asserts that it is opposed to modern science which tests hypotheses and builds theories to describe the world. Dawkins visits the United States to interview pastor Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and to Jerusalem to interview Yousef al-Khattab (Joseph Cohen), an American born Jew who settled in Israel before converting to Islam. Responding to charges that scientific understanding does not entitle one to reject religion, Dawkins describes Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot thought experiment.
In The Virus Of Faith Dawkins made a more emotional appeal. The programme examined the moral framework that religions are often cited as providing, and argued against the indoctrination of children. The title of the programme comes from Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene in which Dawkins introduced the idea of the meme. DNA travels from parents to offspring in genes, but some DNA in the form of viruses can also pass between any individuals.
Dawkins compares religious faith to a virus, being passed from parents to offspring and teachers to pupils. Dawkins visits a London Hasidic Jewish school, in which students are largely isolated from outside ideas.
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