Dawkins continues to debate Christians that have no intellectual background in terms of critical thinking, and in one video immediately used the term, "religion", as a strawman. Nobody had mentioned the word, but he immediately got it in there.
The term is used in a facile, indolent, flippant, binary, generalised way, by many atheists. I shall explain each.
1. Facile, it presents a simple picture without seeing any nuance, by being presented as a purely negative word that has nothing of value when weighed next to "science", which is another word used in the positive. (a nice neat bit of propaganda, where you can exalt your own group and vilify the other group by making out one word is qualified and the other one disqualified. )
2. Indolent, and 3, flippant. It is a LAZY term, that generalises, and is flippant because it ignores doing a proper investigation of the matter. It is just used as a broad brush to tar people with and make them seem unsophisticated and gullible.
4. Binary. The concept of presenting a false disjunction/dichotomy, of, "you're either scientific and rational or a wishful thinking religionist".
5. A generalisation, because "religion" is actually such a very BROAD term. You can be an atheist that believes crystals can heal or a Christian, and both would count as, "religious".
Dawkins doesn't have to deal with the specific claims of Christians or the bible, or God, if he lumps it all in as, "religion" then paints religion as totally negative and worthless.
In fact if the trilobyte's eye was designed by God or even if you believe God used evolution to evolve it, whatever the case God would have existed before, "religion" since there were no people there when God designed it. So God cannot be put into the "religion" category unless the atheist first assumes his conclusion that God is an invention of religion. (circular reasoning)The atheist does not have knowledge God doesn't exist, so it is one of the premises of their argument that God stemmed from religion rather than the other way around. An UNPROVEN premise they wish you to believe proven simply because they are sure it is true. (intellectual arrogance)
Until you start to see these errors in such people, until you start to see you are being a SUCKER by being suckered into the halo-effect of listening to people like this, I am afraid you will stay in the trap of being lied to.
People like Dawkins are really only smart at tricking people into thinking their subjective worldview is objective reality. He is half-smart, and he can dupe the unsmart, what you must do is be cleverer than people like him by seeing through his rhetorical tricks.
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