The message of Easter must have been 'sink the boot into atheists'

This Easter a bunch of god-botherers in Australia have decided they needed to get out all that angst and tizzy they built up while the Global Atheist Convention was in Melbourne. Besides, there was all that child-raping-coverup stuff they needed to distract people from, and blood-libelling the poor old Jews every time you have a bit of trouble is out of fashion now.

So the atheists have copped some of the vile crap we're used to seeing from the crazy christian rump. And tha Australian media have done their usual sterling job of reporting these things in a balanced, reasonable way (i.e. very badly indeed - that last was supposedly the "balancing" article describing the atheist response, but largely consists of far more theist quotes).

Yesterday I pointed out to my partner that as galling as it was, it was actually kind of good for us, because the more reasonable believers who have come to know a few atheists and discovered we just aren't the baby-eating nihilists we have been painted as will only be driven away even faster by this sort of rhetoric - it will hasten the demise of religion among the broader community, and become ever harder to claim any kind of moral authority when all that comes out of their mouths is hatred and lies.

If the Nielsen poll I pointed to late last year is accurate, and we combine with some information from the last census, the two largest religious denominations in Australia have recently become outnumbered by those that can't say they believe in god (20% and 26% for Anglicans and Catholics, compared with 30% who don't state a belief in god - and most of those - 24% are explicitly atheistic, choosing the option "don't believe in god".)

If anything, I expect these sort of attacks to become even more common for a while. And of course, the smaller the religions denominations become, the more radical the remainder must be, so I also expect it to get nastier.

Bruce at Thinker's Podium has a pretty good discussion and an interesting take from a somewhat similar perspective.

Barry Duke's article in the Freethinker is also worth looking at.

Happy Easter! Don't forget Jesus died so you could hate atheists!

Religion in its purest form... is a vast work of bunkum

Dana at En Tequila Es Verdad discusses an interview in Salon with James Carse.

He (Carse) condemns Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris for not being "historians or scholars of religion" and so "it's too easy for them to pass off a quick notion of what religion is."

This is a common argument; PZ called it the "Courtiers Reply". The fact is, when atheists engage with less sophisticated versions of religion, they're doing it because that's what people believe. Was Dawkins' aim to engage with esoteric, sophisticated versions of religious belief? No. Indeed, it's a pointless effort, because the apologist can simply keep moving their goalposts, and refusing to pin down exactly what it is they would expect the atheist to engage with. Carse's difficulty in defining religion in the interview is a case in point.

What these atheists do is argue with veiws on religion that people actually hold.

My first thought on reading this was "he's got a double standard there - he's not asking Christians to study sophisticated versions of other religions, to be historians or scholars of religion before they reject other religions".

But actually, what made me write this is that I realized it's worse than this. There's an even worse double standard.

Carse says:
"To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily."

Apparently, the meaning of atheism is lost on him, since, of course, we lack belief in any gods (unless gods are defined so weakly that the term becomes, essentially, pointless).

That's funny, because Carse is apparently attempting "to find some underlying unity to all religions".

His understanding of atheism is laughable. He also says:

"To be an atheist is not to be stunned by the mystery of things or to walk around in wonder about the universe."

So while he berates atheists for failing to have the sophisticated understanding that would come from being an historian and religious scholar, he can't even do us the courtesy of engaging with an everyday relatively unsophisticated version of atheism. Instead, he makes up his version of atheism out of whole straw.

That's an astounding double standard.