Jerry Coyne missed one: he lists a few annoying columnists in the Guardian, Andrew Brown and Madeleine Bunting, but I guess he didn’t notice that Michael Ruse just posted a whine about Dawkins and other atheists. Well, a few of us: he mentions Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, and me as the people who bring atheism into disrepute. We’re in a schism, don’t you know; I just wish he’d used the term “Deep Rifts”, since that seems to be the fashionable phrase for everyone who wants to find consolation in the imminent demise of the New Atheist movement (to which we have to reply that we’re very fond of our rifts, and consider our willingness to plunge into battle with even our fellow unbelievers to be part of our plucky, feisty charm).

Now here’s the problem with Ruse. He believes that people who are atheists but are not Michael Ruse are all lacking in rigor and a charitable appreciation of the profundity of theological belief. At the same time, he believes that all those religious people whose beliefs he does not share must have built those ideas on a robust intellectual foundation, and that because they are nice people who invite him to give talks, maybe there could be something to that god-chattering stuff. And you should pat him on the back and congratulate him on his wisdom for seeing worth in even the most absurd proponent of creationism. For example:

I don’t have faith. I really don’t. Rowan Williams does as do many of my fellow philosophers like Alvin Plantinga (a Protestant) and Ernan McMullin (a Catholic). I think they are wrong; they think I am wrong. But they are not stupid or bad or whatever. If I needed advice about everyday matters, I would turn without hesitation to these men. We are caught in opposing Kuhnian paradigms. I can explain their faith claims in terms of psychology; they can explain my lack of faith claims also probably partly through psychology and probably theology also. (Plantinga, a Calvinist, would refer to original sin.) I just keep hearing Cromwell to the Scots. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” I don’t think I am wrong, but the worth and integrity of so many believers makes me modest in my unbelief.

Modest in his unbelief, perhaps, but at the same time remarkably immodest in his self-congratulatory appreciation of his own uncritical, unquestioning acceptance of his fellow human beings’ twisty theological rationales. Of course any and all of us could be mistaken, and certainly are on many matters — but that does not mean that all of our critical faculties must be discarded, that we look wise when we listen to both the bible-thumping bumpkin claiming that god made the earth by magic 6000 years ago, and the geologist rattling off a long list of detailed, technical explanations of the evidence for a 4½ billion year old earth that got to its current state by the long accrual of natural events…and we say to both, “think it possible you may be mistaken”. He looks like a clueless gobshite, instead. Ruse’s game is to suspend judgment when looking at the most appalling foolishness, a body of superstitions which he does not personally find believable, and to dial up the judgmental denial to 11 when he’s looking at atheists who are not Michael Ruse.

Now fortunately, Jerry Coyne also found another good columnist in the Guardian, Marina Hyde, who instead of the phony and peculiarly biased objectivity Ruse demands, actually suggests that looking at all religious claims critically is enlightening. She’s discussing the recent bad PR that scientology has received, and suggests that when you step back and look at other religions, Jehovah isn’t any more sensible than Xenu.

But when I think of Mel Gibson building his $42m church compound in Malibu, blithely telling interviewers at the time of the Passion of the Christ’s release that his then wife would unfortunately be going to hell, because she was Church of England … well, I can’t find it in myself to find him any less barking than Tom Cruise.

Clearly, Scientologists should be forced to justify their doctrinal lunacies – the only sadness is that other religions are apparently exempt from having to do the same. Imagine for a moment a Bashir-type interviewing some senior cardinal. “So,” he might inquire, “you’re saying that by some magic the communion wafer actually becomes the flesh of a man who died 2,000 years ago, a man who – and I don’t want to put words into your mouth here – we might categorise as an imaginary friend who can hear the things you’re thinking in your head? And when you’ve done that, do you mind going over the birth control stuff?”

What a shame that we see rather fewer of these exchanges, however amusing and useful a sideshow Scientology may be.

I am sure, if I stop for a moment and put myself in a Rusian frame of mind, that Tom Cruise is wealthier and better-looking than me, and has achieved a remarkable level of success that suggests that we shouldn’t dismiss his abilities as entirely without worth. I am also sure that McMullin, Plantinga, and Williams have also navigated the shoals of life successfully and acquired personal and professional reputations of which they can be proud. That does not in any way imply, however, that I should regard all of their views as having earned some measure of respect; rather, we should learn from these fellows that some measure of lunacy and belief in groundless, overwrought nonsense is not a barrier to worldly success, and even that a whole-hearted frolic in a superstition shared by an influential community can be a personal benefit.

Could I be wrong in my belief that there is no god? Sure. Cromwell’s cry applies to me and to you and to everyone. But you will not sway me by telling me that the proponents of god belief are not bad men, which was not an issue in question anyway; you will not find me appreciative of an approach that says the first step is to learn to be uncritical of ideas and suspend judgment simply because the other guy is caught in a different “paradigm”. An understanding that we may be mistaken does not mean that everyone is equally mistaken. Some beliefs, such as in Xenu and his fleet of space-faring DC10s, or Jesus performing cheap tricks in Galilee and giving us a ticket to heaven by being tortured to death, are simply patently absurd and demand far more rigor in their defense than lame testimonials to the good character of some theologians.

Someone tell him that that is no status to which one should aspire. He’s just written a brief, cranky complaint about Dawkins’ righteous smackdown of the Catholic church. Here’s the totality of it.

Richard Dawkins’s latest attack on the Catholic Church is worthy of a dribbling loony on the top of a bus. He calls the Church “the greatest force for evil in the world”, “an institution where buggering altar boys pervades the culture” and describes it “dragging its skirts in the dirt and touting for business like a common pimp”. (Pimps in skirts – that’s a new one.) And all in The Washington Post.

The peg for this piece? The Pope’s offer to make special arrangements for Anglicans converting to Rome, a matter I would have thought was none of Prof Dawkins’s business. But I’m not going to bother to argue with any of his points, because these are the ravings of a man who appears to have lost all sense of proportion. Seriously: is there something wrong with him?

Why, no, Damian! What’s wrong with you?

Let’s start with the quote-mining. He did not call the church “the greatest force for evil in the world”. He asked a question, “What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world?”, and gave a general answer, “In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders.” I would have thought that the English could comprehend their own language, but apparently that isn’t necessarily true of religion columnists. Quelle surprise!

Second, Dawkins’ characterization of the Catholic church was spot on, and justified by a recital of its flaws: that bizarre belief in transubstantiation, its misogyny, its deadly opposition to contraception in Africa, its homophobia, its history of pederasty. It’s not simply a matter of administrative reshuffling of priests between the Church of England and the Vatican, as Thompson seems to imply, but an attempted merger brought about by enticing the most reactionary of the Anglican priesthood, something that will not correct the sins of the church, but worsen them.

By the way, Dawkins wasn’t the only person to notice the nasty implications of this merger. So did I. It’s even the subject of some humor.

So what’s wrong with you, Damian? Are you blind to the obvious?

Apparently, the Sunday brunch-after-church crowd has an awful reputation for being bad tippers. Somehow, I’m not surprised. But even fellow Christians have noticed and find fault with them.

Take, for example, how Christians tip and behave in restaurants. If you have ever worked in the restaurant industry you know the reputation of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Millions of Christians go to lunch after church on Sundays and their behavior is abysmal. The single most damaging phenomenon to the witness of Christianity in America today is the collective behavior of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Never has a more well-dressed, entitled, dismissive, haughty or cheap collection of Christians been seen on the face of the earth.

Wait…the “single most damaging phenomenon to the witness of Christianity in America” is poor tipping? I don’t think so — that’s more of a symptom of a shallow, selfish, superstitious philosophy that is in itself an affront to thinking human beings everywhere. I don’t think that if I were bussing tables that getting a 20% tip would convince me that talking snakes, genetics via striped sticks, and getting excused for my sins because a crazy rabbi got executed two millennia ago are rational ideas.

But otherwise, yeah, it’s simple decency to leave a reasonable tip for people who work hard for low pay.

Paul Haggis, a Hollywood bigwig, has publicly renounced and rebuked $cientology. His reasons: they lie, they disregard basic ethical concerns, they smear their critics. Hasn’t everyone known this all along? The anti-reality field at those scientology centers must be very strong.

Now let’s see a few more celebrities ditch the nonsense, and they’ll have nothing left to prop them up.

Karen Armstrong has once again published a pile of meaningless twaddle in defense of religion. In this mess, she takes a series of statements about god that she says need rethinking…but as always, her “rethinking” is merely a reworking of apologetics for maintaining the status quo. It’s almost as if she thinks it is a new and brilliant idea to just keep going to church and accepting Jesus into your heart. It’s not.

Here’s her little list of truisms that she aims to puncture.

“God Is Dead.”

Armstrong says this isn’t true, and points to fundamentalist upheavals as evidence that “God has proven to be alive and well”. I think it means she doesn’t understand Nietzsche.

Nietzsche, of course, wasn’t arguing for a literal death of a deity, nor was he claiming that religion had disappeared from the world. He was making a narrower argument, that in his culture (19th century Europe), the concept of god had lost its material and moral authority. There is no central defining source of absolute truth, and we human beings have to rebuild our values around something new, other than this notion of a celestial monarch (he personally thought the new value was a “will to power”, individual ambition and aspiration).

That’s still true. Fundamentalism is in many ways a desperate reaction to that loss, that deep down even they know God is a powerless answer. That was the striking thing about the “Creation” Museum: it’s a deeply fundamentalist institution, but even there in the heart of Christian literalism, they do nothing but ape the trappings of science and strive to present a “science” to support claims that were once sufficiently endorsed by simply pointing to the Bible. God is dead; he is no longer a vital element in how human beings interact in a meaningful, productive way with the universe. Modern fundamentalism is basically a series of aftershocks as cultures struggle to deal with the fall of gods.

Somehow, though, Armstrong tries to turn her only argument that god isn’t dead — by pointing to strife in the Middle East, Iranian ayatollahs, and Jerry Falwell — into a complaint about the New Atheists. So she commits the same sin that Ken Ham does, finding God insufficient, so turning to an illusion of science and claiming justification in “human nature”.

These writers are wrong — not only about religion, but also about politics — because they are wrong about human nature. Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

See what I mean? God is inadequate. To defend religion, people have to borrow the authority of science, and invent misbeggoten terms like Home religiosus and make grand claims about nature and natural law. This is exactly what Nietzsche meant when he said “God is dead”! Theology is flighty and transient, we have to find truth in reality, or in Armstrong’s case, a pretense of reality.

In some ways, I’m always flattered by this argument that we need to define humans as a species by their religious beliefs, because I don’t have them…which means I get to claim that I, and my fellow atheists, are a new species. Let us go forth, my fellow Homo smartiepantsius, and take over the hominid niche.

This is, of course, complete nonsense. Human beings, whether atheist or believer, have the same cognitive apparatus that seeks to find meaning and pattern in the world. The difference between us isn’t at all biological, but simply that some of us recognize that “god” is a piss-poor answer to any meaningful question, and we’ve moved on to looking for that meaning and pattern in more productive ways.

“God and Politics Shouldn’t Mix.”

Her defense of the inclusion of religion in global politics is even weaker. She points to several examples of aggressive change in other countries — Egypt and Iran — that led to a serious backlash. True enough.

In the West, secularism has been a success, essential to the modern economy and political system, but it was achieved gradually over the course of nearly 300 years, allowing new ideas of governance time to filter down to all levels of society. But in other parts of the world, secularization has occurred far too rapidly and has been resented by large sectors of the population, who are still deeply attached to religion and find Western institutions alien.

Her argument is not a defense of religion, however: it’s an argument that social institutions are not built overnight, that many countries have tied stability and internal support very tightly to religious institutions, and rushing in and breaking them apart in the name of secularism simply because they are religious, and ignoring the material consequences of their destruction, is a bad idea. I agree!

We often get labeled “militant atheists”. It’s a joke. Militant atheists would be the type who argue that we should charge in and deconvert populations at the point of a sword — we don’t (well, maybe Hitchens leans that way, a little bit). We need modern societies to evolve away from religion, and that means education, local adoption and integration of secular motives into existing institutions, and gradually shift to a rational foundation in a way that doesn’t destroy the existing, essential superstructure.

And again, God is dead. Armstrong’s argument does not rest on any theological argument, but entirely on a case that rapid change is disruptive in a material sense…and even admits that secularism works and is essential.

“God Breeds Violence and Intolerance.”

This section was useless and annoying. She again resorts to natural explanations (the cause of violence is human behavior. Duh), and relies on mischaracterizing atheism. This is an egregious lie:

In claiming that God is the source of all human cruelty, Hitchens and Dawkins ignore some of the darker facets of modern secular society, which has been spectacularly violent because our technology has enabled us to kill people on an unprecedented scale. Not surprisingly, religion has absorbed this belligerence, as became hideously clear with the September 11 atrocities.

Look at that first clause. Has either Dawkins or Hitchens, or any other prominent atheist, ever claimed that? It’s so exhausting to watch yet another apologist beating a dead strawman. Dismissed.

“God Is for the Poor and Ignorant.”

Curiously, Armstrong only addresses the first accusation — apparently, you can be rich and godly (no argument there), but she doesn’t have an argument to support the idea that you can be wise and religious. Even there, though, she’s inconsistent: look at her second point, above, where she admits that secularism has been essential to the modern Western economy. And her counterargument is to simply point at the United States and note that religion has compromised its principles to allow for market economics!

But God refuses to be outgrown, even in the United States, the richest country in the world and the most religious country in the developed world. None of the major religions is averse to business; each developed initially in a nascent market economy. The Bible and the Koran may have prohibited usury, but over the centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims all found ways of getting around this restriction and produced thriving economies. It is one of the great ironies of religious history that Christianity, whose founder taught that it was impossible to serve both God and mammon, should have produced the cultural environment that, as Max Weber suggested in his 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was integral to modern capitalism.

The US is an outlier, a weird country that combines wealth and religiosity. Using it as an example is a very bad idea.

It is also no defense of religion to point out that when it gets in the way of practical matters, like making a profit, religion bends to get out of the way (in successful societies, at least). God dies a little, again, when you do that. What she is describing is the fact that Christianity has willingly retreated and rationalized to tolerate economic realities. This is no surprise, nor does it imply that religion is a causal agent in economic success.

All we New Atheists want is for religion to bend some more and get completely out of our way.

She does get in one more lick of the patented Armstrong Dribble™, though. This is amazing, world-class BS, in reference to how we’re going to recover from recent financial crises.

To recover from the ill effects of the last year, we may need exactly that conquest of egotism that has always been essential in the quest for the transcendence we call “God.” Religion is not simply a matter of subscribing to a set of obligatory beliefs; it is hard work, requiring a ceaseless effort to get beyond the selfishness that prevents us from achieving a more humane humanity.

I’ve always been impressed, myself, at the incredible amount of work people put into religion — it’s like watching hamsters in a wheel, running, running, running and getting absolutely nowhere. I would not accuse the devout of being lazy.

However, I do not think that working harder at magical transcendence will cure our financial woes. Could we maybe do something, you know, real? Hard work is not the exclusive domain of the religious, after all. I might argue that productive hard work and religion are mutually exclusive.

“God Is Bad for Women.”

Armstrong and I agree on something. She says yes, I say yes. Well, except for some nuances…

It is unfortunately true that none of the major world religions has been good for women. Even when a tradition began positively for women (as in Christianity and Islam), within a few generations men dragged it back to the old patriarchy. But this is changing. Women in all faiths are challenging their men on the grounds of the egalitarianism that is one of the best characteristics of all these religious traditions.

Egalitarianism is definitely not a characteristic of these religious traditions. All build on a hierarchy, all are patriarchal, almost all religions rely on a separation of the world into “us”, the tribe, the chosen, the people of the one true god, and the “other”, the enemy, the servants of the dark ones, and you simply do not build egalitarian communities on that foundation.

“God Is the Enemy of Science.”

Armstrong’s answer here is no surprise: she says it is not, and further, guess who we can blame for any conflict? Science, of course!

The conflict with science is symptomatic of a reductive idea of God in the modern West. Ironically, it was the empirical emphasis of modern science that encouraged many to regard God and religious language as fact rather than symbol, thus forcing religion into an overly rational, dogmatic, and alien literalism.

When even the moderate, liberal, airy-fairy god-praisin’ spirituality pushers can only resolve the conflict between science and religion by pointing fingers and putting all the fault on evil Science, how can anyone wonder why many scientists find religion to be our enemy? Armstrong keeps supporting my points for me!

But further, she is again pushing a caricature of the atheist position. I don’t oppose religion because I think all of its proponents are literalists or anti-science, even; I know that most are fuzzy thinkers, like Armstrong, or pragmatic opportunists who happily use the products of science and engineering without much concern about the processes used to develop them.

I consider religion the enemy of science because it short-circuits critical thought and gives believers an escape hatch to superstition. As long as religion teaches that the answers to real world issues can be found in revelation and authority and the interpretation of holy texts, belief is inimical to scientific thinking.

“God Is Incompatible with Democracy.”

Wait, what? Who has made that argument?

Samuel Huntington foresaw a “clash of civilizations” between the free world and Islam, which, he maintained, was inherently averse to democracy. But at the beginning of the 20th century, nearly all leading Muslim intellectuals were in love with the West and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. What has alienated many Muslims from the democratic ideal is not their religion but Western governments’ support of autocratic rulers, such as the Iranian shahs, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak, who have denied people basic human and democratic rights.

Huntington did argue that there were serious conflicts between different regions that were generated by religion, and specifically named Islam as a growing problem. However, I can’t quite picture him making the argument that a democracy couldn’t also be religious. Especially since he vigorously insisted that America was a Christian nation.

I also don’t see many atheists demanding that we replace the leadership of Muslim countries with dictatorships. When she talks about Iranian and Iraqi and Egyptian autocrats, she is aware that they were propped up by “the most religious country in the developed world,” right?

So once more I’m lost in the reasoning Armstrong is using here — she is using a strange claim not made by atheists of a principle not implemented by atheists to endorse the compatibility of religion and democracy, a non-conflict that most atheists wouldn’t argue over.

Bleh. What a mess of goo and vapor. I don’t doubt that Armstrong is an intelligent woman, but she’s giving us another reason why religion is bad for people and for nations: it turns good brains to mush. And that’s a condition that can only make toothless zombies happy.