Playboy’s interview with Richard Dawkins is described as a “candid conversation with the controversial atheist about the simple beauty of evolution, the improbability of God and why the pope should be arrested”:
PLAYBOY: Do you believe, as Christopher Hitchens did, that the pope should be arrested?
DAWKINS: Hitchens wrote me suggesting we should arrest him, but we soon gave up on the idea of literally making a citizen’s arrest by creeping up with handcuffs or something. Instead we asked Geoffrey Robertson, a distinguished human rights lawyer, to speak about the legal case against the pope for covering up pedophilia. He also looked at the alleged immunity of the pope from prosecution as the head of a state, calling into question the notion of the Vatican as a legitimate sovereign state. I responded to the pope’s uncalled-for truculence when he landed in Edinburgh. The first thing he said was to blame atheists for Hitler. Although I don’t blame the pope for being a member of the Hitler Youth, as he was very young, I felt this was pretty cheeky, really. If I were him I’d keep my head down over Hitler.
Readers familiar with the history of moral philosophy may dispute Dawkins’ answer to the next question:
PLAYBOY: What is your view of Jesus?
DAWKINS: The evidence he existed is surprisingly shaky. The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It’s almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren’t that interested in whether Jesus was real. Even if he’s fictional, whoever wrote his lines was ahead of his time in terms of moral philosophy. (my emphasis)
The whole interview is available online.
h/t: Hemant Mehta