God is on the Side of the Atheists

Hemant, don’t just tell us, tell Parker. If he’s full of crap just to be cute, he should be called on it. You’re in an excellent position to write and have printed a rebuttal, as a published atheist author who’s not just defending himself because he was mentioned in Parker’s article. Kick his ass in your inimitable friendly way.

You’re right–the article does get much better, and on balance it appears to agree with you on the point that:

The atheist books are a backlash against the Religious Right, Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, irrational thinking, religious indoctrination, and so much more.

Hemant, after looking at his archieve at The Phoenix I’d object to calling James Parker a “reporter”, he’s a features writer at best, an opinion “journalist” at worst. Reporters should be the cream of journalism, the ones who don’t deal in opinion, the ones who go out, find facts, get two independent verifications of those facts and then publishes those facts, no matter what the facts are.

That said, I don’t think his bilge is much worse than the bilge that the recent pop-atheism is made of. I’ve gone on a lot of atheist blogs (yours is the best of those, by the way) and have found that while there is a lot of attitude and some platitudes about reason that you are more likely to find informed viewpoints from people who have some sense of their own limitations on liberal religious blogs. I have yet to find one that is even relatively free of bigotry and nonsense.

Call James Parker out, by all means, it is a service to the truth to call out bigotry where you find it. But a thorough examiniation of conscience should be a part of everyones’ day.

That article made no sense at all. It was as if the author was trying to write in Hitchens’s acerbic style but couldn’t quite pull it off. I never could decide what his point was.

You know, it sounds to me, that this guy has no clue what atheism is about. IF he and others truly believe this, I’m afraid Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris missed their goal. Either that or religious extremists are full of hatred for things that doe not fit in with their ideology.

Of course, the strongly religious people insist I am an atheist and I keep saying, “No, I am a non-theist.” The liberal Christians accept my natural human concept, even though it is non-theistic. Be that as it may, I will admit I can appear to be an atheist, which makes something Harris say to be true about atheism, I guess.

Be that as it may, I’m wondering if the problem is because the three gentlemen did not show an alternative to religious belief, besides atheism. What would happen if they had explained Humanism here and there in their books? I know, Harris didn’t, although I’ve not finished his book yet and I haven’t begun Dawkins’s book yet.

The pastor then threw Dawkins and the camera crew off his land, uttering the classic creationist retort: “You called my children animals!”

Well, humans are animals and Haggard is not god. I have to agree with Harris on the intellectualism, or lack there of, and Dawkins statement of it being the instrument of torture and execution. IMHO, religion is a source of misery no matter how you look at it. It is an attempt to control the masses.

Darryl said,
Things seem to be coming to a head. The pundits are already predicting that 2008 will be a year filled with religious talk surrounding the Presidential campaign. Brace yourselves for a lot of nastiness. The Right and Left will both be vying for the values voters and trying to out-Jesus each other. Throw the atheist rhetoric into the mix and things are going to get crazy. Fear, the war in Iraq, Rudy and 9-11, talk radio, cable TV, fundamentalism, partisan political fighting, Congressional jockeying, wall-to-wall negative TV ads, creationism/evolution, Mormonism, demagoguery, etc. It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.

That actually sounds like a lot of fun, if you ask me!

It makes me sick too. How can they violate the 1st amendment and no one seems to care? It doesn’t seem like much fun to me. 🙁 It sounds like more crap to me.

“So this is how democracy ends… To thunderous applause.”

No, it ends in back room deals with corporate lobbyists. For all the danger of religious demagoguery in the next election, I still think the influence of big business and corporate greed on politics is a far greater threat to democracy right now than anything else we can imagine.

If only this were an issue which only plagued one party. As Emerson said, property will always write the laws for property. There are companies out there that are paying billions and billions of dollars a year in income taxes. Anything that big is obviously a threat to democracy. If the right few people decided it was in their interest, they could probably bankrupt the United States. Of course, somewhat ironically the populist message of low interest rate take-from-the-rich-give-to-the-poor would cause so much inflation that the money would cease to have any real value. Rocking the boat too far in either direction brings disaster. While backroom deals are unquestionably bad for about 85% of the U.S. population, democracy does have one thing in its favor: business values consistency above all else. When populists start suggesting we intentionally cause double-digit inflation in order to “predistribute” wealth, business gets worried. As long as that’s not happening, business is pretty content to work with either party. That said, making things religious is the trick that the corporate types use in order to sneak in their agenda.

Which is why I typically vote third party whenever I can.

A Green and an Alfie Kohn reader – you my soul bruthah!

The atheist books are a backlash against the Religious Right, Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, irrational thinking, religious indoctrination, and so much more.

I agree. Apparently Parker failed to notice that these books started coming out after years of the religious right pushing their radical agenda. They’ve been pushing it with extreme force ever since Bush got “elected” (I still can’t figure out how that happened, no one I know voted for him!)