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Ben Jennings is very amusing indeed:

Man, am I disappointed. Having read the preface and about half of chapter one I think that either all the people telling me you were a cut above D’Souza and McGrath were pulling my leg, or you’re just lulling me into a false sense of security like a common pool hustler. So is the rest of the book this inept, Vox?

Let’s compare Ben’s experience with The Irrational Atheist with my own reading of The God Delusion. By the end of the preface and halfway through chapter one, Richard Dawkins’s attempt to prove that belief in God is a delusion as well as the massive improbability of God’s existence had established:

1. His wife’s inability to talk about things she didn’t like.
2. A definition of delusion courtesy of Penguin, Microsoft Word and the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Which reminds me, is there a logical fallacy known as the Appeal to Inexplicable Authority? Or should that be the Inexplicable Appeal to Non-Authority.
3. The ineffectiveness of atheist political lobbying compared with the Jews. It’s such a pity he didn’t follow this train of thought further, it really could have been hilarious, at least to those of us with a dark sense of humor.
4. His belief in Einstein’s atheism or agnosticism. (With which I concur, by the way.)

Now, that’s one convincing case against God and religious belief right there, isn’t it! Given Ben’s demonstrated handicap when it comes to logical thinking, I have to say that I’m eagerly awaiting the next missteps in his exciting adventure in creative criticism.

But seriously, this really shouldn’t be that hard. First you read THE ENTIRE BOOK. Then you go back and criticize whatever flaws you found. Public note-taking along the way is perfectly fine, just be aware that you may find yourself looking like a complete fool for not realizing that the very things you’re complaining about not being there are, in fact, there in a later chapter.

The Sports Guy’s pick of New England winning big would make me very nervous, except for the fact that there is no possible way he would ever pick against the Patriots here even if Tom Brady was playing in a wheelchair:

That’s the thing about this Patriots team: The players honestly don’t care who gets credit, just about doing their jobs and winning games. And, over everything else, that’s why the Pats are two days away from their chance to finish 19-0. You know who epitomizes this team? Kelley Washington. Signed to compete with Stallworth and Jabar Gaffney for the No. 3 receiver spot, Washington ended up flourishing on special teams and made a gigantic play in the Chargers game when he downed a punt inside the 5-yard line. Here’s how many balls Washington caught this season: Zero. Did he give a crap? No.

I like the Patriots even giving 12. They haven’t cranked it up lately, mostly because they haven’t had to. Not to take anything away from a hard-playing Giants team, but that close game in Week 17 was only close because Belichick kept the dogs leashed until the 4th quarter. NY does have a great defensive line, but Belichick’s had two weeks to prepare for them… and for Eli. And the Patriots don’t just want to win this game, they want to win it decisively.

I’m an NFC man all the way, but I just don’t see anything but a crushing Patriots victory.

The Amazon reviews are now open for your reviewing pleasure. But the book must be pretty doggone good if it managed to get a TWO-STAR rating at Barnes & Noble from an atheist who reviewed the book based solely on WND’s interview with me! I guess I had no idea that I needn’t have bothered reading all those books by Dawkins and Dennett, including a number not directly related to the religion/atheism debate, when it seems I could have simply made do with their Salon interviews.

After reading the article in WorldNewsDaily that introduces the book, it was apparent that all Vox has to offer is more of the same old illogical and thoroughly discredited arguments dressed up in somewhat more florid prose.

Yeah, they’re not irrational. They’re not irrational at all!

I’m not particularly into biology, but I’ve never bought into the “science” that oil is nothing but squished dinosaurs and sufficiently fermented ferns. Like many boys, I was a huge dinosaur enthusiast when I was five, and I didn’t believe it then any more than I do now. (Apparently, I was so disgusted with my kindergarten teacher’s inability to recognize that my nametag was an Allosaurus on my first day that in the evening, I informed my father that I wasn’t going to school anymore, as there was obviously no point trying to learn anything from a woman who couldn’t even tell an Allosaurus from a Tyrannosaurus Rex. He managed to keep a straight face and patiently convinced me that there just might be other, non-dinosaur related subjects worth learning about.)

I don’t pretend to know precisely what oil is or how it is created, but it seems to me that we’ve used a little too much of it over the last century for it to be non-renewable resource that cannot be manufactured as we were always taught it was. Now that abiotic theory is finally beginning to be discussed openly in public, perhaps scientists will deign to actually consider making use of scientody to consider the issue instead of simply relying on their usual appeal to their own authority.

I must get my suspicion of scientific authority from my father. A friend of his told me how he once brought a male professor of biology to angry tears merely by asking intelligent questions about the source of calcium in cow’s milk, then pointing out that the professor’s answers simply didn’t add up.

The supply of suicide bombers appears to be running low:

Two suicide attacks on pet markets in Baghdad today have left approximately 100 killed and twice as many wounded. Both attacks used women “with Down’s syndrome” according the the Daily Mail and less specifically, they were described as “mentally disabled” according to CNN. Both bombs appear to have been remote detonated. These women probably did not know they were carrying explosives at all, and it would probably be fair to include them among the victims….

Today’s attacks also tell us that al Qaeda in Iraq is getting very desperate in seeking the high-casualty attacks that they so value. They were forced to scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel, and use not only women (which they’d prefer to subjugate), but mentally disabled women at that, suggesting that finding willing volunteers is becoming ever more difficult.

When you can’t easily find a few hundred volunteers among a potential pool of 1.2 billion people, I think it’s pretty safe to conclude that religion is not a very powerful motivating factor underlying suicide bombings. Meanwhile, that well-known religious group, the Tamil Tigers, continue their explosive campaign against the Sri Lankan government, sans suicide.

A suspected Tamil Tiger roadside bomb attack on a civilian bus has killed 27 people and wounded dozens more in central Sri Lanka. The attack came as a six-year ceasefire between the state and rebels formally expired.

Suicide bombing is merely a dramatic propaganda statement that anyone who has seen The Godfather II should understand. It’s designed to inspire the very kind of fear that permeates Sam Harris’s ludicrous first book. It’s also militarily negligible, except perhaps in the very limited case of high-level political assassinations. When, like every other military or political tactic, it ceases to become effective for the moment, it’s set aside in favor of other, more effective tactics. The idea that use of this tactic ever said anything significant about religion or religion’s place in the modern world, even a particular religion, was always a particularly stupid argument.

This will become become obvious to even the most skeptical Harris fan once the either the Iraqi and Afghani occupations end and bombings by Muslims slow to a single-digit, Jerusalem-focused trickle again, or Iran is occupied and a new wave of bombing horrors wrack both the Middle East and West.

Everything’s not quite as slick and sophisticated as we would have liked, but both Paid and Free ebook versions of The Irrational Atheist are now available from the TIA downloads page. You can also access the downloads page from the link underneath the picture of the book cover on the right sidebar.

The PDF is the cleanest version; the LIT and PDB versions are functional but will require some polishing over the next few days thanks to the copious footnotes. I appreciate the work done on those versions by Adam and SWW, who jumped in on short notice and made it possible for us to have them available now. If you’d like to create another version in whatever idiosyncratic format you happen to prefer, you can do so from the DOC file; please send it to me when it’s done and we’ll add it to the page. If you run into any technical issues with the downloads or whatever – you know there are bound to be some – let me know.

There is also a new TIA forum for reviews and TIA-related discussions. If anyone is interested in volunteering to moderate them, please let me know here. There’s bound to be a need for it. Thanks very much to Digital Cowboy, who managed to get this together on time despite having a few curveballs thrown at him over the last few weeks.

Dr. Helen casually consigns David Frum’s plan for a Republican comeback to the circular file:

John Hawkins has an interview up with David Frum, author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again. Frankly, after reading the interview, I couldn’t tell many of Frum’s supposedly conservative responses from that of a liberal Democrat–don’t worry about cutting taxes, give even more government handouts to low income groups, etc.

Frum’s comeback plan is merely the blueprint for permanent Republican minority. In their arrogance, George Bush and the neocons have destroyed the Republican party by betraying conservatives at every opportunity. The only thing that will keep Republicans from another multi-decade spell in the political wilderness is if Hillary Clinton approaches governance with the same laid-back reserve that she showed in pushing her socialized health plan on America. As it stands, they’re toast for at least eight years and quite possibly twelve.

The insane thing is that Frum’s approach couldn’t possibly work anyhow. You can’t beat Democrats by competing for the handout vote. They’re not just willing to trump you every single time, they’re delighted that you decided to play their game on their turf.

Joe Carter chronicles, in painstaking detail, why John McCain may not actually be the worst possible Republican nominee, all appearances to the contrary:

The main reason I can’t support Mitt Romney is because of John Kerry. I spent much of the 2004 election bashing Kerry for his political expediency. How then can I defend a candidate that is a bigger flip-flopper than Kerry?

Beelzebub takes a shot that I will readily admit to not expecting:

I’ll shoot the first volley. The Voxster makes a big case about the religious causalities of War. True/false? In the end it doesn’t matter, and in essence, by your comments you know it too. All we really need to prove is whether ONE war, or even one death can be ascribed to religion, and we’ve already condemned it.

True. I certainly do devote two entire chapters to it, mostly because one of the New Atheists primary arguments against religion is because they believe it to be a primary cause of war and military conflict. They make both implicit and explicit arguments for this. Both their implicit and explict arguments are incorrect, as I demonstrate in no little detail. Beelzebub says “Screw the “New Atheists” and claims my successful dissection of their war-related arguments is irrelevant because a single historical death ascribed to religion is enough to condemn religion. While I’m glad to note that he concurs with my assertion that I have effectively refuted Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, I have three questions for him.

1. On what basis does a single death ascribed to anything condemn that thing?

2. Does Beelzebub condemn everything else to which a single historical death can be ascribed?

3. Is that to which more deaths can be ascribed to be more strongly condemned than that to which fewer deaths can be ascribed?