Saturday, April 23, 2011

spiked's Brendan O’Neill gets his undies in a bunch, lashes out.

This Easter, try to avoid the Gospel of Grayling | Brendan O’Neill | spiked:




This bible bonanza tells us a lot about the New Atheists. About their arrogance, their ignorance about where moral meaning comes from, and, most fundamentally, their allergy to, their utter estrangement from, the idea of transcendence.
At the risk of being so derisive as to be cruel, I will make three quick points and be done ...


  1. "[M]ore soul-destroying than anything in the original Good Book."? Really? Now, I haven't read Grayling's yet, but I will be very, very surprised to find anything in his tome that endorses or demands infanticide, homophobia, rape, or genocide. Those things must not be very soul-destroying in O'Neill's view. But, at least he seems to be acknowledging with the "more" that there are soul-destroying passages in his "Good Book."
  2. I'm so sick of atheists being called arrogant, ignorant, immoral and/or amoral when it's the religious that routinely kill for their faith. Routinely. There is nothing so arrogant as imagining a deity will act upon your "wailings and incantantions" and condemns to eternal torment all those who don't subscribe to your denominations peculiar interpretation of some ridiculous old text. One written, by the way, by truly ignorant savages.
  3. Imagine you are given ten slides in a power point presentation to communicate ten injunctions to promote the moral well-being of your audience. If you can't do better than the Ten Commandments, I would posit your morals are so stunted, defective, and useless as to be terrifying to people who actually want to do good in the world and live in peaceful, productive society. Arrogance would be telling people they can't possibly do better. 

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