Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

Charlotte Allen has written a great op-ed piece published in yesterday's LA Times entitled "Atheists - No God, No Reason, Just Whining."  Allen takes note of my Fav Five of pop atheism:  

Richard Dawkins (The Deluded Atheist who likes to recycle 18th and 19th century arguments and act as though he just came up with them)

Christopher Hitchins (The Angry Atheist who likes to drink, smoke, and cuss and thinks religion poisons literally everything)

Sam Harris (The Intolerant Atheist on Drugs who blames religion for killing people and then makes an argument for killing religious people)

Daniel Dennett (The Enlightened Atheist who looks like Santa Claus and loves to mock friends who pray for him when he's deathly sick)

PZ Myers (the Village Idiot of Atheism who likes to autograph communion wafers to make some sort of point).  

If you want to waste a couple of hours and watch the Fab Four minus PZ whine about things over martinis, check out their video "The Four Horsemen of Atheism."  I guess even those guys know better than to invite PZ to the table.

For all the fascination with "evidence" and "reason," atheistic skepticism is largely one big fat begging the God-question.  The skeptic's arguments are basically the following five, take your pick:

1.  The existence of God can't be proven scientifically, therefore there is no God.

2.  Religious people do bad things, therefore there is no God.

3.  No one has yet to convince me there is a God, therefore there is no God.

4.  The world sucks, therefore there is no God.

5.  Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy don't exist, therefore there is no God.

Charlotte Allen rightly suggests that mockery and anger will only get you so far:

The problem with atheists -- and what makes them such excruciating snoozes -- is that few of them are interested in making serious metaphysical or epistemological arguments against God's existence, or in taking on the serious arguments that theologians have made attempting to reconcile, say, God's omniscience with free will or God's goodness with human suffering. Atheists seem to assume that the whole idea of God is a ridiculous absurdity, the "flying spaghetti monster" of atheists' typically lame jokes. They think that lobbing a few Gaza-style rockets accusing God of failing to create a world more to their liking ("If there's a God, why aren't I rich?" "If there's a God, why didn't he give me two heads so I could sleep with one head while I get some work done with the other?") will suffice to knock down the entire edifice of belief.

What primarily seems to motivate atheists isn't rationalism but anger -- anger that the world isn't perfect, that someone forced them to go to church as children, that the Bible contains apparent contradictions, that human beings can be hypocrites and commit crimes in the name of faith. The vitriol is extraordinary. Hitchens thinks that "religion spoils everything." Dawkins contends that raising one's offspring in one's religion constitutes child abuse. Harris argues that it "may be ethical to kill people" on the basis of their beliefs. The perennial atheist litigant Michael Newdow sued (unsuccessfully) to bar President Obama from uttering the words "so help me God" when he took his oath of office.

You can read the rest here.