Please, please, all you critics of the “New Atheism”: get some new arguments, or at least avoid the ones that are trivially ridiculed. Damon Linker is complaining about those darned New Atheists, prompted by the criticisms of Kevin Drum of a pretentious essay by David Hart (I also wrote a criticism of Hart; I’ve also criticized the dreary Mr Linker before).

Linker seems to be offended that Hart’s superficial and poor argument was rejected; he calls the essay “powerful” — I found it ridiculous — and also claims, to my surprise, that Hart was atempting to show that Christianity was true. We must have read two different essays, because what I saw was a lot of verbiage bitterly complaining about the New Atheists, singling out Dawkins and Hitchens in particular, and not one word in support of any particular faith. The whole essay was about belittling and ridiculing atheists, nothing more…which makes it particularly ironic that Linker then turns around and expresses his irritation at all those rude, ridiculing New Atheists.

Linker’s essay focuses primarily on two issues he has with the New Atheists. They confuse truth with goodness, thinking that we’ll achieve some kind of Utopian society by simply rejecting falsehood, and in a related point, we just aren’t sad enough about the death of god. How dare we be godless and glad of it!

What’s most disappointing is Drum’s failure to grasp the culminating point of Hart’s essay, which, as I take it, is this: the statements “godlessness is true” and “godlessness is good” are distinct propositions. And yet the new atheists invariably conflate them. But a different kind of atheism is possible, legitimate, and (in Hart’s view) more admirable. Let’s call it catastrophic atheism, in tribute to its first and greatest champion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in a head-spinning passage of the Genealogy of Morals that “unconditional, honest atheism is … the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two-thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” For the catastrophic atheist, godlessness is both true and terrible.

Let’s deal with that first point first. Linker is wrong, and he’s eliding his own rather troubling implications about religion. We are saying godlessness is true, sure enough, but we aren’t making the leap he is claiming: we’re next saying that truth is good. Truth is a neccesary but not sufficient prerequisite for goodness. We obviously cannot say that godlessness inevitably leads to an ideal society — there are enough examples to show that is wrong — but that building a society on a false premise is even more disastrous.

Linker avoids that argument, because he knows it will require backing himself into a corner. I presume he doesn’t want to try to argue that truth is irrelevant to Christianity (but you never know…apologists can get very weird), but he also doesn’t even try to justify the validity of his religious beliefs — not when he can just gripe, gripe, gripe about atheists.

His second argument is even worse — it’s pathetic and goofy and wrong. He idolizes “Old Atheists”, what he calls “catastrophic atheists”, because they at least had the manners to grieve a little bit over abandoning the old superstitions. And from the fact that we’re forthright and enthusiastic about embracing secular ideals, he assumes that we must be unthinkingly optimistic.

The point is not that atheism must invariably terminate in a tragic view of the world; another of Hart’s atheistic heroes, David Hume, seems to have thought that it was perfectly possible to live a happy and decent life as a non-believer. Yet the new atheists seem steadfastly opposed even to entertaining the possibility that there might be any trade-offs involved in breaking from a theistic view of the world. Rather than explore the complex and daunting existential challenges involved in attempting to live a life without God, the new atheists rudely insist, usually without argument, that atheism is a glorious, unambiguous benefit to mankind both individually and collectively. There are no disappointments recorded in the pages of their books, no struggles or sense of loss. Are they absent because the authors inhabit an altogether different spiritual world than the catastrophic atheists? Or have they made a strategic choice to downplay the difficulties of godlessness on the perhaps reasonable assumption that in a country hungry for spiritual uplift the only atheism likely to make inroads is one that promises to provide just as much fulfillment as religion? Either way, the studied insouciance of the new atheists can come to seem almost comically superficial and unserious. (Exhibit A: Blogger P.Z. Myers, who takes this kind of thing to truly buffoonish lengths, viciously ridiculing anyone who dares express the slightest ambivalence about her atheism.)

(Awww, he noticed me.)

No, I have no sense of loss in giving up religion, so he’s right there. He seems to regard religion as we would cigarettes — a nasty habit, but one ought to at least have the common decency to suffer when giving them up, because he’s got that monkey on his back, and it’s not fair that others might not. But that’s no argument for keeping the habit, and it’s also fallacious because not everyone is as comfortable as I am.

Everyone has a different story about leaving faith behind. Some suffered greatly; they had this belief dunned into them from an early age, and it was all tangled up in threats of damnation and betrayal of family, and for many, it hurt painfully and even now, they may feel regrets and concerns.

But, you know, once you get past the fears, once you realize that it’s certainly no worse to be free of superstition than to be afflicted with it, and there’s a wonderful clarity once you sweep away those pointless old cobwebs of faith. I can’t go back to the delusions — truth is far more interesting. But Linker gets it all completely wrong.

So by all means, reject God. But please, let’s not pretend that the truth of godlessness necessarily implies its goodness. Because it doesn’t.

You tellin’ me? Of course it doesn’t! What we godless folk know is that the universe is a heartless place, almost entirely inimical to our existence, and that there is no guiding father figure with our best interests in mind who is shaping our destiny. There is no god. There is no absolute good. We’re free to struggle to make a better world for ourselves, with no illusion of an all-powerful superman to help us out.

Mr Linker has obviously confused us with the theists who do believe in an ultimate omnipotent goodness and a set of beliefs that will lead all the faithful in a path of righteousness that will culminate in paradise. It’s almost amusing how much projection there is in these people who despise atheists by accusing them of the sins of the godly.

Lars Vilks, the cartoonist who drew Mohammed as a dog, has been attacked while lecturing on free speech. He was not seriously harmed. There is a video clip showing the attack, the chanting spectators, and the police quelling the mob.

That’s ugly. Muslims everywhere should be embarrassed, and should be repudiating the behavior of those thugs. Peaceful protest is one thing, but there is no offense in a cartoon that justifies leaping up and punching someone.

Here’s something even uglier:

An al-Qaeda front organisation then offered $US100,000 ($A110,730) to anyone who murdered Vilks – with an extra $US50,000 ($A55,365) if his throat was slit – and $US50,000 ($A55,365) for the death of Nerikes Allehanda editor-in-chief Ulf Johansson.

I think it’s only appropriate that Vilks’ sketch of Mohammed as a mangy cur should receive wider circulation because of the vileness of their response.

This is a poster from an Egyptian ad to encourage women to cover themselves to prevent rape.

I don’t know who should feel more offended, the women who are compared to a piece of candy or the men who are compared to flies. I do know who should feel more threatened, though: the women who are seeing men promoted as being unable to resist temptation.

Poland has blasphemy laws, too — and they’re applying them to throw a pop star in prison. Dorota Rabczewska (careful there, she has also posed for Playboy) has said something absolutely unforgivably awful:

In a television interview last year, Doda explained that she found it far easier to believe in dinosaurs than the Bible; “it is hard to believe in something written by people who drank too much wine and smoked herbal cigarettes.”

Polish Catholics weren’t too pleased. Under Poland’s draconian blasphemy law, simply offending someone’s religious sensibilities can earn you hefty fines and even imprisonment.

Wait, that’s it? One sentence that suggests that the authors of the Bible had been doped out of their minds, and zoom, off to prison for two years? Touchy little cowards, aren’t they…

This is a good comment, too:

How can Europeans cry foul when Muslims are offended by a cartoon, when they themselves press charges and demand imprisonment over something as simple as a pop star making negative statements about their religion?

What do you think? Is the Catholic hierarchy cheering or cringing at the words of this Brazilian archbishop^* and his excuses for the child abuse scandals in the church?

Archbishop Grings, a 73-year-old priest with conservative views, said the gradual acceptance of homosexuality by the public was a precursor to a possible broad acceptance of paedophilia.

“When sexuality is banalised it is clear that that can have an effect on all cases. Homosexuality is one case. Before, no one spoke of the homosexual. He was discriminated against,” he said.

“When we start to say that they [homosexuals] have rights, rights to publicly demonstrate, in a short time paedophilia will also have rights.”

Oh, yes, let us return to the good old days, when homosexuals could be discriminated against. That’s all we need to fix up the church scandals!

His central premise is that “society today is paedophile”, and that’s why Catholics are having such problems — it’s not their fault. Unfortunately for his thesis, the only place where there seems to be a broad acceptance of pedophilia is the Catholic church.

^*For some reason, that phrase conjures up images of a wrinkly uncircumcised penis on a waxed crotch. It seems appropriate here.

Chicago has been oppressing the people! They’ve installed some mechanical deviltry called parking meters on the street, forcing people who want to drive their multiton iron chariots (an offense unto god right there) into the city and then park them somewhere to pay for the privilege. Everyone is annoyed by parking meters, but guess who is whining the loudest? The churches, of course.

“I think it’s interfering with my religious activity,” said the Rev. Webb Evans, 96, who keeps an office at Israel Methodist Community Church. “We should have the freedom to go to church without having to pay a meter five or six feet in front of the door.”

Yes? And others should be free to go into a bar without paying a meter. Or into a restaurant. Or into a store. Those at least bring some economic gain into a community. But churches? They already get to squat on valuable property without paying taxes, and now they want the city to subsidize the parking of their flocks? What they’re really complaining about is that the city is fleecing the flock a little bit before the priests can get their hands in their pockets.

And this is hilarious:

“We’re not asking for special privileges,” said the Rev. Philip Blackwell, pastor of First United Methodist Church at Chicago Temple. “We just happen to be religious institutions.”

No, special privileges is precisely what they are asking for: they are insisting that the activity of their precious institution is more valuable or more worthy than that of other businesses and residences in the area, and want a special dispensation so their clientele can use a public resource for free.

I say, charge ’em extra.

I have a special antipathy to this kind of demand from churches. I grew up in a neighborhood where our house was sandwiched between two churches, the Catholic and the Lutheran. We were afflicted constantly by the Lutheran church’s insistence on playing hymns on one of those ghastly electronic carillons every hour and half hour…and since we were right across the street and they played them LOUD, all conversation, music, and TV in our house got regularly drowned out. And then on Sundays, the neighborhood would be choked with cars parked everywhere.

(Which we turned into a bonus, actually: it was amazing how many people would come out of a church service with bills stuffed into their pockets, which would spill unnoticed onto the ground when they pulled out their car keys. We kids would head out right after services to cruise the empty parking spaces, looking for loot.)

Another gripe is that the churches turned our town into a wasteland. Parking was such an issue that they bought up whole blocks, razed everything on them, and paved them over…including my childhood home. If you’re ever in Kent, Washington, go to the corner of 2nd and Titus streets where I lived, and behold what was once a lively neighborhood, now a desert of asphalt — my house was on the northeast corner of what is now the Catholic church’s parking lot. Don’t go on the hour, unless you’re really fond of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Finally, the church is beginning to clean up its act. The Vatican has announced that it is investigating three orders of nuns in Washington state — what perverted and revolting acts have these nuns committed to draw the ire of the Catholic church? I’m sure your imagination is working hard right now.

The Vatican says it’s following up on complaints of feminism and activism.

Oh, my god … heads will roll. They’ll be ostracized, exorcized, and excommunicatized. No mere buggery of children here, but feminism? Jesus is weeping in heaven above, and the angels are grounded with grief.