Oh, to be young again and brave: I’m impressed with these high school students who protested the American loyalty oath to a god:

About 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class Thursday to protest the daily reading of the Pledge of Allegiance and recited their own version, omitting “one nation, under God.”

The students say the phrase violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

Back in my high school days, I simply quietly refused to say the pledge, and didn’t make an issue of it. It’s a sign of progress that now students will make their protests loud and unavoidable.

Dare I hope that more students across the country will take some inspiration from this act?

There’s also a video of the students! There are also the usual suspects: the young Neandertal who thinks that if you won’t recite the pledge, you ought to leave the country, and the blinkered administrator who isn’t going to change his dogma. Otherwise, though, look at the smart students standing up for their rights — those are the ones who matter.

Can we stomach another label? How about “passionate atheists”? An Arkansas minister objects to the very idea.

Not long ago the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published an interesting article entitled “Passionate Atheists.” This caught my attention immediately.

My first thought was, “How do you get passionate about nothing?” If no God exists, what is there to get passionate about? Why do professed atheists find it necessary to convert other people to their unbelief, since there is nothing of substance there to convince them of?

My second thought was, “Isn’t this statement, passionate atheists, close to being an oxymoron ?”

He then rambles on with the usual mindless godbottery — amorality, spiritual decline of the nation, sexual deviancy, fools in their heart, bible quotes, yadda yadda yadda — which Revere has ably pulverized. So I’ll just address the opening gambit.

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You would think Yale would attract a smarter class of stude…oh, wait. I forgot what famous Yalies have risen to power in this country. OK, maybe it’s not surprising that a Yale freshman would raise the tired canard of the “amoral atheist”.

Recent years have seen an influx of anti-religious publications in the Western world, as well as a growing audience for such publications. From Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” to Christopher Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great,” anti-theistic works have poured into bookstores as atheists in the United States and elsewhere have taken on a more strident tone in public discourse. Unfortunately, their approach has been one characterized more by noisy rhetoric than reasoned arguments, and they have particularly failed in their attempt to present a coherent system of morality that in no way rests on a belief in the supernatural.

Of course, Christians and other theists have raised the objection that naturalistic materialism — the notion that only the physical world exists — can provide no foundation for morality. That’s not to say that naturalists cannot behave morally, but merely that they can have no real and consistent reason for behaving morally. As this has been a long-standing and widespread objection to naturalism, it would seem only reasonable to expect atheists to devote careful attention to the question of morality.

This notion that morality is a reason to believe is a common thread to many religious apologetics, as is its complement, that atheism doesn’t provide a moral rationale. In part, I agree: the simple statement that the world exists does not state how we should act within it, and the fact that the universe is godless does not dictate standards of human behavior. But then, neither would the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient god.

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It’s bad enough everyone is using this “New Atheists” label: various critics keep inventing new ones. Some letter writer to the Independent has decided to call us “Naive Atheists” because we are unaware of the implications of atheism.

However, let’s forget about the unfortunate history of atheism for a moment and concentrate instead on its philosophical implications.

Two of the big consequences are that once you ditch belief in God you must also, logically, ditch belief in free will and in objective morality.

What a silly, silly man. If anyone is naive here, it’s someone who thinks atheists must all be amoral robots, and that unpleasant consequences mean you should reject the truth value of a claim. But now he’s going to tell us he’s got evidence for his argument, straight from the mouth of an atheist.

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Aha! Another non-scientific online poll that we can mob. This one asks: Are Dawkins and Hitchens good for humanism? Let’s make the wheels on their poll-o-meter spin for a little while. Wheee!

You really must listen to Bill Maher.

So I’ve been sucked into a live text interview on the Raving Atheists forum — they’ve finished with me and spat my well-chewed carcass out now, so everyone else is welcome to come on over and squabble over the scraps.

I read this headline — “Mary Midgley argues that opponents of intelligent design are driving people to accept it” — and my first thought was that surely some editor had mangled the sense of an interview. No one could be that blatantly nonsensical. And then I read the first paragraph and discover that it was an understatement, and that Midgley is much more extreme.

People are not going to accept scientific fact if they think it is morally pernicious. When people are asked why they are persuaded by intelligent design, they often say that it’s the only alternative to scientific atheism and Darwinism which are pernicious moral doctrines; they see it as the only refuge from this anti-human bloody-mindedness. It’s at the level of attitudes to life that these choices are made. And people will think scientists as a whole believe this. As Professor Winston has said, science becomes discredited by this kind of stuff.

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Paul Kurtz is an intelligent and interesting fellow who has done commendable work in advancing the cause of skepticism and freethought. He can be rightly considered one of the heroes of the atheist movement, and he’s one of the reasons that the sobriquet “New Atheist” grates — Kurtz has been writing this stuff for decades.

Now, suddenly, he’s being trumpeted as an advocate of “silencing the New Atheist Noise Machine.” This is weird on so many levels.

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