Richard Dawkins is one of a number of strident voices from science who criticize religion. Listening to the news yesterday, I wondered if he hadn’t got the wrong target.
Dawkins argues that religion is bad for us, but I think it’s magic that is the problem. Religion has many positive elements, but when we allow magic into it, it becomes devisive and dangerous.
Two quick examples. When some Christians argue that women should not be priests, they are appealing to magic, not religion. They feel that only a man can represent another man. Bizarre in the real world; makes sense in magic.
Similarly (and this was the news story) if you believe that giving a teddy bear a name that happens to be associated with a significant element of your religion is a terrible thing, so terrible that a teacher than allows this to happen should be charged with a crime, then this has nothing to do with religion. It’s a pure response to the assumption that magic is real.
Note this is quite different from the supernatural. It would be perfectly possible to have religious concepts that are outside nature. What magic does is bring the supernatural into nature, saying that, for instance, the use of a particular word can make a physical change to objects. And that’s where religion stops and the dangerous stuff begins.
I don’t think Dawkins makes any distinction between magic and religion. In fact, I suspect that he thinks religion is a more civilized, politicized version of the kind of evocative, sympathetic magic you mention, in which the invocation of a name – a spell – is thought to have physical effects. In fact, much of the God Delusion is devoted to an assault on this aspect of the power of prayer. Dawkins’s assault – and there is no other word for it – is as simple-minded as one would expect from any other rabble-rousing demagogue, but I do not think that he makes the distinction to which you refer.