This is the full speech by Richard Dawkins at the “Protest The Pope” rally, 18th September 2010.
“Original sin means that from the moment we are born, we are wicked, corrupt, damned, unless we believe in their god, or unless we fall for the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell. That is the disgusting theory that leads them to presume that it was godlessness that made Hitler and Stalin the monsters that they were. We are all monsters unless we are redeemed by Jesus. What a revolting, depraved, inhuman theory to base your life on.
“Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity. He’s an enemy of children who’s bodies he has allowed to be raped, and who’s minds he has encouraged to be infected with guilt. It’s embarrassingly clear that the church is less concerned with saving child bodies from rapists, then with saving priestly souls from hell, and most concerned with saving the long term reputation of the church itself.
“He’s an enemy of gay people, bestowing on them the sort of bigotry that his church used to reserve for Jews before 1962.
“He’s an enemy of women, barring them from the priesthood, as though a penis were an essential tool for pastoral duties.
“He’s an enemy of truth, promoting bare-faced lies about condoms not protecting against AIDS, especially in Africa.
“He’s an enemy of the poorest people on the planet, condemning them to inflated families that they cannot feed, and so keeping them in the bondage of perpetual poverty, a poverty that sits ill beside the obscene wealth of the Vatican.
“He’s an enemy of science, obstructing vital stem-cell research on the grounds not of true morality, but of pre-scienctific superstition.
“Ratzinger is even an enemy of the Queen’s own church, arrogantly dissing Anglican orders as “absolute null and utterly void” while at the same time, shamelessly trying to poach Anglican vicars to sure up his own pityfully declining priesthood.
“Finally, perhaps of most personal concern to me, Ratzinger is a enemy of education. Quite apart from the lifelong pschological damage caused by the guilt and fear that have made Catholic eduction infamous throughout the world, he and his church foster the educationally pernicious doctrine that evidence is a less reliable basis for belief than faith, tradition, revelation, and authority – his authority.”
