Dawkins's dogma

Richard Dawkins is taking a pasting from Terry Eagleton in the LRB (subscription required). Not that I agree with all of what Terry says, but some of it is spot on:

It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase ['opium of the people']; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the 'heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions', was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.
.....
The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism.
.....
Such is Dawkins's unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history - and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.

(Via Jonathan Derbyshire.)