Richard Dawkins says a lot of crazy things. My favorite was when he told Ben Stein that our world was seeded by aliens.

My least favorite is from an interview in which he says that not only were he and his fellow students systematically preyed upon by a teacher, it was “mild pedophilia” and “did no lasting harm.”

Desensitizing a grown man to the concept of child rape is harm enough. I wonder whether his fellow students would agree?

I do not know any other victims of child sexual abuse who would pass it off as harmless.

It is not harmless. It is rape.

But here is the thing–so often Dawkins is most instructive when he fails to see the obvious–what he is really saying is that the children of his generation were taught to be quiet and deal with a terrible injustice.

And for Dawkins, at least, that was not a good thing. For him to draw a distinction among various kinds of egregious injuries to children is to show a grave gap in his thinking, his logic, his philosophy, and his grasp of the law.

If he is wrong about this, what else is he missing? What else is he getting so very wrong?