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I think that Dawkins believes that education is all that is required to prevent the continued spread of religion. I think Hood believes that education is an important factor but that it is a little more complicated than that. I am with Hood on that one.
Religion is a memetic virus that encourages belief in certain false patterns. It's successful because people have an innate tendency to see false patterns as real. It goes without saying that the hosts of the disease are equipped with the necessary biology to support it. But I don't think even Dawkins suggests that we can eradicate the innate desire and tendency to connect dots, even when they don't have anything to do with each other. I think Dawkins is just saying that only education can provide the correct connections and eliminate the incorrect connections. I doubt that education can ever be 100% successful in that, basically because some people are so detached from reality, but it is the only possible tool to attempt to do so, and I see no reason to believe religion could not be gutted by education. It happened in Scandinavia, it's happening in Europe generally, and it's even happening in the US, though we got a late start and are encountering stiff resistance.

Religion is clearly culturally transmitted, and as such, subject to the possibility that culture will decide to transmit something else instead. Like scientific knowledge. Atheist genes are not different from theist genes, after all.

Then again, maybe atheists are an emerging species, call it homo skepticus. Maybe we have a sufficiently different brain structure that cognitive dissonance causes us intolerable pain. But judging by my own occasional gullibility, I doubt it. Still, if we are an emerging species, we're already setting up barriers to interbreeding.

'Born again athiests". LOL Good one, Don.
Does that mean that we ex-sheep are now BAA lambs?
"Born again" is a common reference. Notice the Greek mysteries, where initiates were "reborn" in an artificial womb (cave); modern fraternities; most secret societies. The Christians probably stole the concept from the Greeks, and fraternities (I don't know about sororities, but suspect similar in initiation rites) possbily from Celtic practices. "Born again," refers to enlightenment, or acceptance of a particular social discipline. One might think that could apply to Libertarians, n'est-ce-pas?


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