Mr Beatties' letter in last week's Citizen regarding Richard Dawkins (Selective About Religion) seems to miss the point.

Blind followers of faith have been willing over millennia to go to war with one another, commit genocide, detonate bombs strapped to themselves or fly passenger aircraft into buildings, not because of science, but because of their belief and interpretation of fictitious religious publications.

The world would be a far greater place had we not had the religious dogma.

If we had not had science and people who were prepared, at great risk of being burned at the stake, to challenge the nonsense in the Bible, we would still be living in the Stone Age, believing the earth was the centre of the universe, the sun went around the earth and the world was flat.

Richard Dawkins has stated his case and backed it up by well researched universally accepted science.

I have yet to see any religious holy man put forward any factual evidence whatsoever of the existence of any deity.

As for Mr Beattie's comment about Mr Dawkins not accepting a quote from the Bible which he quite clearly believes is a book of fact, I would ask him the following.

Could he be good enough to explain how Noah, first of all was able to build a boat as large as he did, went to every country, island and far flung place on earth, collected two of every species of animal, beast, insect, fish and bird, was able to get both male and female, even though it is almost impossible even now to distinguish the gender of lizards, snakes, insects etc.

And how was he able to get all the different foods these beasts require and stop them from eating each other while travelling and keep them all safe in rain which is falling at the rate of 32 feet per hour for 40 days and nights and all presumably all undertaken with sail power?

If that is the kind of prevarication I am being asked to believe as true by a holy book/man, that some supposedly kind deity sought fit to cruelly drown every man, woman, child and animal and bird on the planet that he is supposed to have created in the first place, I think I will respectfully stick with the facts, logic and science.

Mr C Richmond

Whittle-le-Woods