Britain's best known atheist Richard Dawkins is sputtering mad over Pope Benedict's equating the godless to potential Nazis.

In his speech to Queen Elizabeth when the pontiff arrived yesterday for his four day visit to Scotland and England, Benedict hit his standard theme of warning against secularism and backed it up by praising the way Britain fought "Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society."

"Despicable outrage," Dawkins howled, describing himself as "incandescent with rage" as he called for a letter-writing campaign against the pope, to the papers and British Broadcasting Company. Dawkins writes:

Even if Hitler had been an atheist, his political philosophy was not based upon atheism and had no connection with atheism. Hitler was arguably (and by his own account) a Roman Catholic. In any case he enjoyed the open support of many of the most senior catholic clergy in Germany and the less demonstrative support of Pope Pius XII. Even if Hitler had been an atheist (he certainly was not), the rank and file Germans who carried out the attempted extermination of the Jews were Christians, almost to a man: either Catholic or Lutheran, primed to their anti-Semitism by centuries of Catholic propaganda about 'Christ-killers' and by Martin Luther's own seething hatred of the Jews. To mention Ratzinger's membership of the Hitler Youth might be thought to be fighting dirty, but my feeling is that the gloves are off after this disgraceful paragraph by the pope.

But over at The Guardian, Andrew Brown says Dawkins should chill out over this attack on "atheist extremism." Brown writes

He didn't mean us. He didn't even mean Richard Dawkins. He was talking about the Nazis, who, he said "wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live...

For (Benedict), a nation that turns away from God entirely has nothing to keep it from treating people as disposable means, rather than ends in themselves. The liberal appeal to reason, to choice, and to human rights doesn't go far enough. He believes in all three, but he thinks they must be derived from something else. That something else was once generally understood to be Christianity. If that is no longer true, Benedict believes we are all shrunken and impoverished...

What rights we have depend on what kind of people that we think we are, and that is exactly the kind of question which social change and multiculturalism sharpen. It's not a question to which there is any agreed answer in Britain today.

Can Pope Benedict really avoid controversy? Should he? Isn't his job to call people to God inherently fraught with challenges?