(Transcript of the above) What a great video! Here is a recent passage that is somewhat saying the same things as part of the above segment has:
One last thing. I have long been fascinated by how many people who hold a religious faith do so because they discovered it in adulthood, not because they were raised in it by their parents. Indeed, claims such as “You’re only a Christian because your parents were!” have always smacked to me of desperation, on a par with “You’re only pessimistic because you’re English.”102 It’s also an ill-tempered Rottweiler of an argument, for it can quickly turn around and bite your own hand; after all, if it were true, it would apply to atheists too. I have no idea what Dawkins’s daughter, Juliet, does or does not believe – but if she is an atheist like her father, I hope she isn’t having to fend off argumentative Anglicans dinging her around the head with sound bites like “You are only an atheist because your daddy is.” Or maybe Dawkins displayed incredible philosophical consistency and raised her as a Mennonite, just so he couldn’t be accused of foisting his beliefs on his child.
[102] As James Branch Cabell quipped, the difference between a pessimist and an optimist is that an optimist believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds; a pessimist fears that this may be true.
Andy Banister, The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: Or, The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (Oxford, England: Monarch Books, 2015), 78-79.