Richard Dawkins, famed atheist author, has said that even though he believes all religions are "bad", he cannot deny the fact the "most evil religion in the world has to be Islam".
"It's tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it's a worse temptation to say all religions are equally bad because they're not," the 76-year-old God Delusion author said at the Cheltenham Science Festival, according to The Telegraph on Sunday.
"If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world it's quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam."
He noted, however, that it's "terribly important to modify that" because not all Muslims are evil, and many suffer more from Islam than anyone else.
"They suffer from the homophobia, the misogyny, the joylessness which is preached by extreme Islam, Isis and the Iranian regime," he said. "So it is a major evil in the world, we do have to combat it, but we don't do what Trump did and say all Muslims should be shut out of the country. That's draconian, that's illiberal, inhumane and wicked. I am against Islam not least because of the unpleasant effects it has on the lives of Muslims."
The evolutionary biologist also said that he does not believe religious education should be abolished, because he thinks it's an "important part of our culture to know about the Bible."
"After all so much of English literature has allusions to the Bible, if you look up the Oxford English Dictionary you find something like the same number of quotations from the Bible as from Shakespeare," he said.
Dawkins added that children will not be able to understand history unless they know Christianity's role in the development of the continent.
"I would not abolish religious education, I think I would substitute it for comparative religion and Biblical history and religious history," he added while promoting his new book, Science in the Soul.
"Comparative religion is very valuable partly because the child learns that there are lots of different religions not just the one they were brought up with. They learn they are all different and they can't all be right, so maybe none of them are right. Critical thinking is what we need."
This is not the first time Dawkins has issued a stinging criticism of Islam. In 2015, he refused to mince words when calling out leftist apologists of Islamic extremism and accused many in the media of turning a "treacherous" blind eye to the shocking human rights abuses carried out by Muslims around the world.
"Regressive left turns treacherous, blind eye on misogyny & homophobia because they absurdly think Islam must be 'respected' as a 'race,'" he wrote.
Last year, he once again slammed the media for claiming that the atrocities carried out by Islamic extremists have "nothing to do with religion" following the attack that killed 70 Pakistani Christians, mostly women and children, on Easter Sunday in Lahore.
At the time, he took to Twitter to offer a brief commentary on the tragedy: "Pak bomb kills 72," he wrote, and quoted the perpetrators of the attack as stating, "We have carried out this attack to target Christians who were celebrating Easter."
"Ah, nothing to do with religion, then," Dawkins quipped.
He also admitted that, "Christianity may actually be our best defense against aberrant forms of religion that threaten the world."
"There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers," he famously stated. "I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death."
