Lord (Chris) Patten, new chairman of the BBC Trust, has been sounding off, militantly, at the militancy of atheists.
He scored a bit of an own goal, though, with this remark:
“It is curious that atheists have proved to be so intolerant of those who have a faith,” he said. “Their books would be a lot shorter if they couldn’t refer to the Spanish Inquisition, but it is them who tend to have a level of Castillian intolerance about them.”
Richard Dawkins replies (in an email to me, which he says I can quote):
The God Delusion would be precisely two sentences shorter: “In this book, I have deliberately refrained from detailing the horrors of the Crusades, the conquistadores or the Spanish Inquisition. Cruel and evil people can be found in every century and of every persuasion.”