Holy crap, we were all played!


There once was a gigantic blow-up of accusations that fed into Chris Mooney’s self-righteous crusade against atheists as harming the cause of science education. Remember “Tom Johnson”, the mysterious scientist who told stories of outrageous bias against Christians in academia, driven by people like me and Richard Dawkins? Mooney was very grateful for his brave willingness to speak up.

Well, the fallout from the collapse of the ‘You’re Not Helping’ blog continues. “Tom Johnson” was the same sockpuppeteering undergraduate, “William”. The entire episode was a contrivance built up into a mountain of false accusations fed by one little liar making stuff up that Mooney wanted to hear.

Mooney’s frequent claim of a “New Atheist hate machine” suddenly sounds extraordinarily ironic. The fact that he claimed to have checked on the identity of his source is either an instance of incompetence or dishonesty.

I do believe that Mr Mooney owes us all an apology. I’d also suggest that he needs to do something about his site management; he’s been quick to whine at me that New Atheists need to clean up our act because we use rude words, but I find his tolerance and even encouragement of raging dishonesty to be far more offensive. He doesn’t need to patch up his credibility for me, though, because I’d long ago dismissed him as useless, and these recent revelations have just put him deeper in the toilet.