You've missed nothing. Dawkins is clearly still a little boy scarred by frightening tales told of Hell when he was physically younger. This fear taints everything he writes that isn't a scientific paper.
But there's a whole lot of reductionist reactionaries across every skeptic's movement I've encountered. A whole of of "the science says" types who seem to be unaware that science is a constantly evolving field and that things that were "said" in the past have since been unsaid.