Somebody’s in for a little surprise:
This is from the Amazon blurb. I am quaking in my boots at the prospect of all my rationally conceived arguments being unravelled by the power of Day’s rigorously documented arguments.
– Mr Embiggen on richarddawkins.net
All of YOUR rationally conceived arguments, Mr Embiggen? And here I thought I was criticizing the arguments of Richard Dawkins and four other gentlemen whilst writing The Irrational Atheist. This leaves us with three reasonable possibilities:
1. Mr Embiggen is a pseudonym for either Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens or Daniel Dennett. (I don’t think Michel Onfray speaks English; in any case, Onfray’s sentence structure is rather Romantic and recognizable even in translation.) Given Mr Embiggen’s demonstrated ability to commit logical incoherence in a single sentence, it could only be Sam Harris.
2. Contrary to their oft-expressed opinion, atheists do not think rationally for themselves, but merely echo the arguments of various authorities selected on an emotional, irrational basis.
3. Despite the astronomical odds against such a massive improbability taking place, Mr Embiggen happens to have independently reasoned his way to precisely the same rational conclusions regarding life, the universes and everything separately reached by Richard Dawkins. Because you know, if there are a billion arguments and a billion billion people, then – check this out – there are BILLION people making the EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS.
Damn, but they make it easy, don’t they?