JAIPUR: Richard Dawkins — scientist, bestselling author and the world’s foremost atheist— comes across as mild-mannered and genial but doesn’t believe in pulling his punches. He certainly didn’t on Monday at the Jaipur Lit Fest as he blasted the “lamentable disgrace” of Salman Rushdie ’s enforced absence. He also launched a broadside against the “virus of faith”, and said he looked forward to the “complete death of organized religion” in his lifetime.“Far too much sympathy is shown to people who claim to be motivated by religion — sympathy that would not be shown to people acting from mere prejudice. I have a problem with Santa Claus, baby Jesus and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, but I can’t act on this without being held accountable. I may, on grounds of taste, want to murder a TV personality, but I can hardly do so. And yet, it seems it is somehow acceptable for someone to act without accountability simply because his religious sentiments have been hurt,” said Dawkins.Reading from a modified statement that he had originally written after the fatwa was first pronounced against Rushdie, Dawkins pointed out that in the 16th century, some Catholics in England had written to a senior figure in the Vatican asking if it was acceptable to murder Elizabeth I. The answer was that since the Queen had led millions away from Catholicism, her murder would be a commendable act. Dawkins didn’t spell it out, but two points were clear— he wasn’t targeting a faith but all of them, and nothing much has changed in almost 500 years. “Religion is deadly because it makes people willing to die and kill for it without a shred of evidence to back up their beliefs,” he said.Asked by a member of the audience if he wasn’t being presumptuous in dismissing lots of stuff that science doesn’t understand as hogwash, he replied, “If we don’t understand something, we should roll up our sleeves and get to work trying to figure it out. We should not be lazy and call it supernatural.”To another query about the scientific efficacy of Yoga, he said, “By science, I don’t just mean men in white coats in labs. Any system of thought that is open to inquiry and is willing to change its beliefs when confronted with evidence to the contrary is science. But when someone says, “This is the truth for all time & it can never be questioned”, that’s unacceptable for me.However, when asked how the rise of religious fundamentalism could be checked in India, he said he did not know enough about India to answer the question with any authority. He did add, “I am aware that side by side with spirituality, there is also a noble tradition of atheism in this country and I would like to have better contact with free-thinkers and rationalists here.” What does the author of “The Selfish Gene” feel about studies positing the existence of a ‘God Gene’? “I think it’s probably true that there might be certain genetic propensities which lead to religion. But I won’t call it the ‘God Gene.‘ There could be a genetic predisposition in children to obey authority, which is a good thing from the evolutionary viewpoint, but it makes you vulnerable to nonsense too,” he said.The ideal world for Dawkins is a world without religion, but his short-term remedy is absolute separation of the state and the religious bodies. “There shouldn’t be any privileges given to the religion by the state, no tax exemption.”Today’s secular democracies do make a distinction between the Church and the State, but politics and religion still provide sustenance to each other, even in the US. When will we see the first atheist President of the US? “I suspect we have already seen several atheist US presidents, they just didn’t admit it,” responded Dawkins. “I suspect Lincoln was an atheist, probably so was Kennedy. Obama is an intelligent man, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a closet atheist”. Does that make them all hypocrites? “You can’t be an American politician without being a hypocrite,” signed off the renowned biologist and ardent Darwinian.