according to you they both "mischaracterize" the subject of their critique, yet you designate use of the descriptor "crank" solely for Sheldrake, and never for Dawkins.
That's because Dawkins is not a crank
per se - his problem is that of using objective facts (and ignoring others) to push an agenda based on his personal biases, rather than (as Sheldrake does) blatantly making stuff up. When Dawkins reels off a list of atrocities committed by the ancient Israelites in the name of Yahweh or a list of utterly inane 'transgressions' for which the Book of Leviticus demands the death penalty, he's just quoting what's there in black and white for anyone to read. Likewise, he's correct to point out that the development of Muslim countries is being held back by a widespread suspicion of and hostility to science, with the result that they invest in science research and teaching just a tiny fraction of that spent by non-Muslim countries. (The same point is made by Jim al-Khalili, who is an atheist but clearly not an Islamophobe.) At the same time, while he has grudgingly admits that amazing scientific achievements were made in the Muslim world in the middle ages, he fails to see or refuses to see that someone writing in the 12th century could just as well use this to argue that European culture is inherently 'backwards' compared to Islamic/Arabic-Persian culture, which at the time was true.
I think where RD goes wrong is in his insistence that religion is the root of all evil, because he's confusing cause and effect. Terry Pratchett gets it right, I think, when he says religion doesn't make people act like arseholes to each other; rather, it gives people an excuse to be arseholes, but the latent arseholeish tendency is there already. You only have to look at the history of the USSR or Cambodia for examples of indescribably monstrous regimes that were not merely secular in the way most modern liberal democracies are, but in which religion was officially suppressed and believers brutally persecuted. And while it could be argued that the personality cult that tends to form around the leaders of totalitarian regimes is a form of secular religion in itself, it nonetheless gives the lie to the idea that belief in an imaginary being is a prerequisite for human evil.
