Dawkins argued that his molester, who targeted not just Dawkins but other children as well, did not “[do] any of [them] any lasting harm.” He went on to argue that we cannot judge the molesters of the 1950s by today’s standards, “just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism.”

Dawkins criticizes religious people for an inability to think critically, but rather than look to the science on the subject, which is supposedly his job, he defaults to conservative logic and victim-blaming, perhaps because twitter applauds him when he says something controversial. Also, why is he weighing in on such subjects in the first place? For someone whose expertise is in evolutionary biology, he certainly seems to consider himself an authority on the entirely unrelated field of sex crimes.

Dawkins appears to have adopted the sexism and other forms of narrow-mindeness he purports to hate in religion (plus bonus defenses of pedophilia), proving his own mantras wrong with every new opinion he posts. Read Dawkins’ Twitter at any time for tweets about “objective reality” interspersed with paranoid tweets about Islam, and of course his regularly scheduled uninformed opinions on rape culture. Although he is gradually losing sympathizers, the so-called “new atheist” movement still holds him in too heroic a light. In his time, Dawkins did groundbreaking work in the field of biology, but his relevance—especially in social matters—is fading quickly. If the new atheist movement wants to move beyond outdated idols preaching old-fashioned discrimination, they need to disown Dawkins—or at the very least, subtract themselves from his one million-plus Twitter followers.