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New saint is criticised

by
18 March 2010

by Muriel Porter

THE British biologist and writer Richard Dawkins has told the 2010 Global Atheism Convention, held in Melbourne last weekend, that creat­ing saints was “pure Monty Python”.

Professor Dawkins, who was a speaker at the convention, was responding to a question about the recent decision by the Vatican to canonise Australia’s first saint, Mary MacKillop. Creating saints “gives the lie to the claim that sophisticated theologians can look down on the fundamentalist wingnuts. They are all the same,” he said. He referred to Pope Benedict XVI as “Pope Nazi”.

Other speakers at the three-day convention included the philosopher A. C. Grayling and the Australian ethicist Peter Singer.

The president of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, David Nicholls, said that the convention would “give atheists the impetus to consider their vote next time they are in the polling booth, and will en­cour­age secular organisations through­out Australia”.

The Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, an Anglican, is a regular churchgoer; Tony Abbott, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party, is a Roman Catholic and a former seminarian.

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