I think your implications about what Dawkins wants to happen to believers are wrong and slanderous, and I think you owe the man an apology.

Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong. I feel the proper response to issues like this on the larger network is guaranteed access to the full amount of bandwidth sold at all times.

I disagree completely. Overselling is a very sensible tactic, and in fact about the only thing that allows you to get flatrate lines as cheap as they are are. Of course, it's a matter of degree, and many telcos are overdoing it, but on the other hand, a strict no-overselling policy would, in practice, lead to upstream capacities on part of the ISP that are used at maybe 20 percent at best - at peak times.

Besides, an ISP doesn't have just one big fat line to "The Internet"; they are part of the internet, and they have a number of connections to a number of other networks, with vastly different capacities. (And usually at least on Tier-1 or Tier-2 upstream provider that connects them to all those networks they cannot or don't want to connect to directly.) If you wanted to take this no-overselling rule literally, you'd have to prepare for some extremely unlikely scenarios, like for example, every single one of your 20 million customers wanting to download something from some obscure location in Madagascar at full speed, at the same time.

They are not prepared for this sort of thing for the same reason that traditional telcos aren't prepared for something like every single person in Chicago calling someone in NYC at the same time: That sort of thing doesn't happen.