“So a child can learn from fairy stories how to judge plausibility” and “Fairy stories might equip the child to reject supernaturalism when the time comes”.

What’s interesting to me about this is that I was raised as a Catholic but when I was around 11 years old I stopped believing, even though up until that time I had always gone to Catholic schools (replete with veiled nuns, pleated gym tunics, sex education provided by a homosexual paedophile priest and shock, horror – a divorced lay teacher!) and my home was not one where any doubts could ever be expressed. One of the reasons I stopped believing was the hypocrisy I saw everywhere, the other was that I made the connection between religious stories and the fairy tales I had loved at 7 years old.

But I also think Dawkins is wrong. What he said happens to be true in my case, but I would say it is true for very few people. Fairy tales are metaphorical accounts of human nature, not of supernature. They warn us about fools and the fools who follow fools (The Emperors Clothes), that there are bad people wearing masks out there (Little Red Riding Hood) and of the experience of psychological distress and not finding it easy to live in the regular world (The Little Mermaid – Hans Christian Andersen was a pretty screwed-up guy). Perhaps they were always a way of teaching children about these things which are essential truths, rather than fantastical untruths.

Probably a French word to describe the whole phenomenon.