Frankly, he could be exactly the way he is about anything, and no one would accuse him of being anything besides passionate. Be that way about evolution, or especially religion, however, and he must automatically be a bastard, shrill, strident militant dick (this seems to be a ubiquitous law, the origin of the ever-perplexing term "militant atheist". But at least his comrades-in-arms don't find those who should be allies driven against him by the semi-insane rabble riding on his coattails).
I am also continually astonished by the lengths people will go to (seemingly) deliberately misunderstand him, whenever I see people criticising him for having opinions and beliefs in direct opposition to those he has explicitly expressed, and most frequently of all, make criticisms that he already pre-empted and explained in the very article that the criticism is in response to. It's like a curse, and it is to his credit that he is able to shrug it off and meet such repetitive idiocy with an often required response accompanied with nary more than a frustrated tone and exhausted smile. He knows they won't listen anyway.
And to everyone else's credit, most people only ever see him on TV being asked the same moronic questions that always come when the cameras turn on, and the executive meddling by Channel 4 and newspaper editors are equally infuriating. Do you really think he wanted to his TV two-parters to have such provocative names as "The Root of All Evil?" and "The Enemies of Reason"?
To call Richard "much-maligned" is an understatement.
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