(I am finding your tone very disagreeable; I am pretty sure you have adopted it deliberately, and suspect you don't care if I find it diasgreeable, but I mention this just in case I'm wrong about any of that.)

I do not think that "if one declares one's mind to operate in a specific way, it operates that way" and did not say that; I said that in the specific case where what you are doing is declaring "I believe / don't believe X", if you do so sincerely, then indeed you have / don't have the belief in question.

This is unlike declarations like "I am being rational" or "I am fully informed about these issues"; the relevant difference is that in general, if you think you believe something then in fact you believe it. A declaration like "I have a headache" would have the same property.

(Of course 1. it is possible that some of these people are lying about what they believe, and 2. I guess there are cases where someone believes something "superficially" but deep down knows they're wrong. #1 seems unlikely to me in these cases. #2 is always possible (though of course just as possible for theists as for atheists) but I would want some concrete evidence before thinking it likely in any particular case.)

I regret that you have not yet succeeded in conveying to me exactly what divergence you see between atheists' statements about their cognition and their actual cognition. Perhaps it would be helpful if you would state it explicitly, rather than gesturing in the general direction and saying "look how stupid these people are".

(Three hypotheses. 1. "They say they don't have a positive belief in gods, but in fact they do." Seems super-implausible to me; show me your evidence. 2. "They say atheism just means not having a positive belief in gods, but in fact they positively believe there is no god." Perfectly plausible but not actually an error. 3. "They say they are being rational but actually they aren't". You have explicitly said that wasn't your meaning. Probably your actual meaning is something other than these three but I don't know what.)

Until we're on the same page about what it is you're claiming, I suspect we're going to be talking past one another a lot, so I could just stop here. But I'll try to address some of the other things you said:

> This is an interesting and common [...] behaviour [...]

Maybe it is, but if what you want to claim is that it's wrong then it would be more productive to say what's wrong with it. (And when the "behaviour" in question is two opposite things, I am not quite sure on what basis you're considering it a single thing.)

> on an absolute scale, how bad is he?

Twenty-three.

To make my point more explicit: I don't know how to answer that question "on an absolute scale" since so far as I know there isn't any sort of generally agreed absolute scale for rationality.

> all the usual suspects are fair game for criticism, but when the same is done to The Right People, for some reason that's inappropriate, if not outright disallowed

I'm deeply confused; I haven't said (and don't think) it's inappropriate to criticize the likes of Richard Dawkins or Sean Carroll or whoever, and I've no idea at all where you get "outright disallowed" from. It's perfectly appropriate to criticize them. I'm just not convinced as yet that your criticism is very accurate -- but since I don't yet know for sure just what your criticism is, it's hard to tell for sure.

I think it is worth distinguishing "I disagree with your criticism of X" from "X should be above criticism". I am not sure you are actually making that distinction.

> Have you ever seen him go up against someone with some mental horsepower?

I'm not much of a debate-watcher and on any not strictly biological topic I would expect others to do better (in terms of intellectual rigour, or fun-to-watch-ness, or both) than Dawkins. So, no. A quick YouTube search suggests he's had a debate with William Lane Craig, who's pretty smart; I wouldn't expect there to be much enlightenment to be had from that one. There's also one on "humanity's ultimate origins" with Rowan Williams (with Anthony Kenny in the chair). I'm pretty sure Williams and Kenny are not creationists, so most likely the arguments there are philosophical rather than biological, so again I wouldn't bet on Dawkins being super-enlightening in this, but you never know.

I'm not sure what the relevance of a debate between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Curt Jaimungal is to the question of whether Richard Dawkins is any good. In any case, I had a listen to that and it's totally unclear to me what about it is "embarrassing". Would you care to be more explicit? I mean, I get that you think NdGT is being unimpressive in some respect, but I don't know what specific thing you think is bad. (For what it's worth, I was more unimpressed by Jaimungal, who seemed to me deeply superficial throughout, but it's hard to be sure of someone's qualities from a 10-minute clip of them talking to someone else.)

Anyway, this is all a bit of a tangent. You seemed to be saying that there's something particularly bad, intellectually, about atheists and scientists, with Dawkins as a typical case, which is why I think it's relevant to ask how he compares to the people he argues with, but it seems to me that nothing of importance really hangs on how smart / rational / deep / ... Richard Dawkins in particular is. It's not like anyone's going to say "OK, you convinced me that Richard Dawkins is really intelligent, so I shall abandon my religion now" or "OK, you convinced me that Richard Dawkins is rather an idiot; see you in church next Sunday".