I’m not really fond of the idea of categorizing atheists (you either are or aren’t, and the game of labeling is often a short step away from ranking, and then you’re on the slippery slope to the No True Atheist fallacy), but Hank Fox has an interesting comment that categorizes reasons for being an atheist. It’s relevant to that video of a mother reacting to her son’s ‘coming out’, though — one category is the “Rebel Atheist” who adopts the idea to piss off his mother.

Now let’s all aspire to be Awakened Atheists.

Wilkins is not happy that I jumped down Pagels’ throat for a stupid comment in an interview. He thinks I ought to take Pagels more seriously (as did some of the commenters here), and, unfortunately, also goes on to mischaracterize the uppity atheist arguments, like so:

This is what I reject about the Dawkins/Moran/PZ aggressive atheism – it takes the most stupid version of religion, argues against it, and then claims to have given reasons for not being religious. At best (and here I concur) they have given reasons not to be stupid theists. But a good argument takes on the best of the opposing view, not the worst.

Alas, as is common for criticisms of this kind, the “best” of the religious views are mentioned as a mythic monolith on a far-off mountaintop, rather than actually stated, making them rather difficult to take on. I think it’s because whenever anyone tries to state them, there’s usually a lot of hemming and hawing and admissions that they don’t actually believe in these arguments, they’re just trying to be fair and state that there are good arguments out there. It’s basically a bait-and-switch: They say, “I may believe X, but here’s Y; you can’t refute Y!” Then we pound on Y for a while, and they say, “Why are you wasting my time with arguments against Y? I believe in X!” So you pummel X for a bit, and they announce, “I may believe X, but here’s Z; you can’t refute Z!” And so it goes, endlessly. This is the theme I argued in an essay on Edge.

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It’s not nice to annoy a fellow atheist, but once again we’ve got someone bound and determined to promote himself by dividing atheists into artificial camps and slamming the side with which he doesn’t identify. Greg Epstein, a “humanist chaplain” (whatever the hell that contradictory concatenation means), decided to disavow those horrible people like Dawkins and Harris as “fundamentalist atheists”. Outrage
ensued.

Ho-hum.

Whenever I see someone jabbering about “fundamentalist atheists”, a combination of terms that makes no sense at all and immediately reveals the speaker’s ignorance of both fundamentalism and atheism, I just write them off out of hand. It means we’re dealing with a moron. Maybe Greg Epstein has some great ideas and goals, but pffft, screw him, he’s not worth listening to. Moron.

However, the Friendly Atheist does ask a good question. We clearly have a division, with some of us being more <ahem> vigorous and uncompromising in our striving towards a consistently godless ideal, and others being a bit more laissez faire. What are we going to call those obnoxious loud-mouthed atheists who won’t sit quietly in the corner?

I have a word.

It’s “uppity.”

You can just call us those damned uppity atheists. Really, I won’t mind. I also won’t dismiss you as a moron, Uncle.

We win! In a debate in London pitting Hitchens, Dawkins, and Grayling against a team of theists, Neuberger, Scruton, and Spivey, the audience voted solidly in favor of those obnoxious atheists.

I’m not sure what the consequences are, but it may mean that every Christian in England has to leave the country. Expect mobs of pious Anglicans to start washing up on beaches in Virginia and Pennsylvania any day now.

Terry Gross’s Fresh Air program had an interview with Dawkins yesterday — it’s not too late to listen to it, you can either get it by way of streaming video, or download the Fresh Air podcast. Also, today she’s interviewing Francis Collins, which could be very interesting, in a gruesome, messy, semi-painful way.

Aww, I’m flattered; Richard Dawkins read aloud part of my Courtier’s Reply in his recent debate with Alister McGrath. You can listen to it online—I think I’m going to have to have Dawkins read all of my posts aloud, since he makes them sound so much better.

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If you want to listen to just the section where he reads my article, here’s a 2.1 mp3 file.

Juicy stuff from AC Grayling, who writes on the futility of faith and why we’re all getting a bit peevish:

Religion has lost respectability as a result of the atrocities committed in its name, because of its clamouring for an undue slice of the pie, and for its efforts to impose its views on others.

Where politeness once restrained non-religious folk from expressing their true feelings about religion, both politeness and restraint have been banished by the confrontational face that faith now turns to the modern world.

This, then, is why there is an acerbic quarrel going on between religion and non-religion today, and it does not look as if it will end soon.

It does have a bit of an “it’s all their fault” tone, but I think it’s fair. The religious may have felt threatened first, since secular progress was leaving them behind, but the only side damning the other is that of religion.

Greta Christina has an excellent and lengthy defense of the idea behind the Blasphemy Challenge— that exercise on YouTube that received a lot of criticism from certain quarters because it wasn’t serious or respectful enough. She gets it exactly right: that was the point, to show that religion receives a lot of unwarranted deference. If you’re one of those people who got irate because the challenge mocked and ridiculed religion, thanks for making the case for us: your irritation is what was being pointed to as part of the problem.

The residents of Fargo have had to put up with one of those Ten Commandments monuments for a long time (well, “put up with” may be the wrong phrase—it’s North Dakota, after all). Now in a smart move, the Red River Freethinkers, who have to be especially canny to live in the Dakotas, are proposing a fair alternative to getting rid of the dodgy nonsense of the Ten Commandments: they’re proposing to put up their own monument to secularism.

Once it goes up, we ought to start a betting pool on which one gets vandalized first, and how long it will be.