Dawkins suggests that religion might have originated as a misfiring of the brain's falling-in-love mechanism
Regardless of one’s religious beliefs I find it very insulting to the religious community that someone should suggest they believe in God because of a mental defect.
I guess it is very convenient to squelch someone’s opposing views by calling them mentally deficient.
I don't think Dawkins was suggesting that religious people
in particular are mentally deficient or defective compared to others: I read it more as saying that this defect is common to
all human beings. Religion, after all, appears to have evolved independently multiple times: every remote and hitherto-uncontacted human society ever discovered has practised it. Which I guess means that if being defective is defined as being abnormal, it's atheism which is defective when compared to the broad span of human existence during which religion and its precursors held sway. Rationality itself is to some extent a battle against human nature.
Peter
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