Links to two interesting petitions appear at the top of Richard Dawkins’s web site. One of the petitions reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abolish all faith schools and prohibit the teaching of creationism and other religious mythology in all UK schools.

The second and more insidious petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16.

Dawkins’s name appears on the list of signatories to both petitions, but there is no way to verify whether that “signature” was added by Dawkins himself or by someone using his name. The second (as listed above) petition actually has Dawkins’s name twice on the signatory list. Whether Dawkins himself “signed” the petitions, his web site is certainly promoting the petitions.

Over at Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog, there’s a rather long discussion of both petitions. According to some of the commentators there, the first petition should be seen quite specifically against the backdrop of government-run UK schools in which all students are expected to participate in Christian prayers and worship services, religious lessons, and so on. In that light, the first petition calls for something not terribly unlike the way the US Constitution’s establishment clause has been interpreted to apply to public schools in the USA. The petition is very poorly worded, however; prohibiting “the teaching of … religious mythology in all UK schools” (or any schools, for that matter) would certainly impoverish the humanities. Goodbye, Edith Hamilton. Hello … what? Never mind the Bible. There would be no teaching of the Odyssey. No teaching of the Aenead. You couldn’t even teach about the historical figure of Augustus Caesar properly without reference to Roman religious mythology. I’m all for the prohibition of religious indoctrination in public schools, but teaching (about) “religious mythology” is something quite different, and quite important to literature, history, anthropology, and other worthy fields of study.

The second, “anti-indoctrination” petition is just too Orwellian to believe. Richard Dawkins is apparently not the originator of the petition, but the language sounds as if it had been lifted right out of The God Delusion.

Important Update: In the comments to Ed Brayton’s posts on the petitions, Richard Dawkins himself wrote:

I did sign the petition, but I hadn’t thought it through when I did so, and I now regret it. I have asked the organizer to remove my name. Unfortunately, it seems that the list has already gone off to Downing Street but the organizer, Jamie Wallis, has kindly asked their web manager to remove my name. I suspect that he himself may be having second thoughts about the wording, and I respect him for that. It isn’t always easy to get the exact wording right.

I signed it having read only the main petition: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16.” I regret to say that I did not notice the supporting statement with the heading, “More details from petition creator”: “In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians.” If I had read that, I certainly would not have signed the petition, because, as explained in The God Delusion, I am in favour of teaching the Bible as literature, and I am in favour of teaching comparative religion. In any case, like any decent liberal, I am opposed to the element of government coercion in the wording. Furthermore, the Prime Minister, thank goodness, does not have the power to ‘make’ anything ‘illegal’. Only parliament has the power to do that.

I signed the main petition, because I really am passionately opposed to DEFINING children by the religion of their parents (while ‘indoctrination’ is such a loaded word, nobody could be in favour of it). I was so delighted to hear of somebody else who cared about the defining or labelling of children by the religion of their parents (how would you react if you heard a child described as a ‘seclular humanist child’ or a ‘neo-conservative child’?) that I signed it without reading on and without thinking. Mea culpa.

At the present time (4:43 PST on Saturday, December 30, 2006), however, the links to the petitions remain prominently displayed at the top of Dawkins’s home page. Of course, it’s quite conceivable—even likely—that Dawkins doesn’t actually maintain his own site, but has a third-party webmaster that does it for him. Also, Dawkins’s retraction seems only to concern the second petition listed above, the “anti-indoctrination” petition, not the “anti-faith schools” petition.