I know the piece is satire, but if Pastor Terry Jones ever decided to burn copies of The God Delusion, I hope this is the way we would respond:
A spokesman for the Atheist Brotherhood in Australia was quoted as saying: ”We feel strangely unaffected and will seek revenge by raising our eyebrows and shrugging our shoulders. I’ve already sent Pastor Terry a message wishing him good luck with his ecclesiastical grandstanding, and I feel sure he can grab a TV slot on a Baptist network with a weekly conflagration of tomes he hasn’t read and doesn’t agree with.”
…
Salman Rushdie, from a safe-house in Greenland, has called for calm and offered Pastor Jones a truckload of his novel The Satanic Verses to burn in place of the other texts. He said this should just about satisfy all parties, and if he can’t win the Nobel Prize for literature, then he might as well get it for peace. ”My books have been smoked in both hemispheres,” Salman said, ”so I’m not as easy to upset as some of these one-off authors like Mohammed and God.”
Funny and true. There’s nothing to get worked up over. Our ideas matter far more than the paper they’re printed on and there’s no reason to get upset by the thought of some of our favorite books going up in flames.
In fact, if any Christians would like to burn books written by atheists, I’ll be happy to donate some of my own.
(Thanks to @adam_casto for the link!)