Tag: atheism

The book is sophomoric. The author is inept.

The sad thing is, Richard Dawkins doesn’t know it because he resolutely runs from all substantive criticism in favor of hiding in his hug box:

Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins
The God Delusion accused of being a “sophomoric” book. Well, is there any evidence for God that an intelligent sophomore couldn’t refute?

Vox Day @voxday
Considerable. Your arguments are so inept, some don’t even qualify as arguments.You don’t even know what “evidence” is.

Vox Day @voxday
I blew away your “religion causes war” argument once and for all because you simply don’t know history. 6.98%, not 100%.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Your worst “argument” was the appeal to Alfred Hitchcock. That’s a logical fallacy that doesn’t even have a name.

Vox Day @voxday
Look, atheists, you’re going to need much better champions than inept rhetoricians in over their heads like @RichardDawkins and @SamHarris.

Rationalist naivete

One of my great disappointments this year has been reading JB Bury’s History of Freedom of Thought. Bury was the editor of my much-beloved Cambridge Medieval History series, which is excellent, and so I was looking forward to reading his thoughts on a matter that is of more than a little interest to me.

But while the book is as erudite and well-sourced as one would expect, it is little more than a one-sided anti-Christian rationalist polemic, with little insight and absolutely no foresight whatsoever. It’s High Church Atheist in a manner that is about as proto-“I Fucking Love Science” as it is possible for a book published in 1913 to be.

One wishes one could bring Bury forward in time to see what passes for reason hath wrought; a thought police more authoritarian, more delusional, and more in conflict with reality than any of the religious opponents of the freedom of thought ever were. Bury’s unjustified faith in the power of reason is a fascinating precursor to the complete inability of the modern irreligious to grasp the connection between Christianity and many of the aspects of Western civilization that they value, as well as their willingness to blithely saw off the branches of the tree on which they are sitting.

The struggle of reason against authority has ended in what appears now to be a decisive and permanent victory for liberty. In the most civilized and progressive countries, freedom of discussion is recognized as a fundamental principle. In fact, we may say it is accepted as a test of enlightenment, and the man in the street is forward in acknowledging that countries like Russia and Spain, where opinion is more or less fettered, must on that account be considered less civilized than their neighbours. All intellectual people who count take it for granted that there is no subject in heaven or earth which ought not to be investigated without any deference or reference to theological assumptions. No man of science has any fear of publishing his researches, whatever consequences they may involve for current beliefs. Criticism of religious doctrines and of political and social institutions is free. Hopeful people may feel confident that the victory is permanent; that intellectual freedom is now assured to mankind as a possession for ever; that the future will see the collapse of those forces which still work against it and its gradual diffusion in the more backward parts of the earth. Yet history may suggest that this prospect is not assured. Can we be certain that there may not come a great set-back? For freedom of discussion and speculation was, as we saw, fully realized in the Greek and Roman world, and then an unforeseen force, in the shape of Christianity, came in and laid chains upon the human mind and suppressed freedom and imposed upon man a weary struggle to recover the freedom which he had lost. Is it not conceivable that something of the same kind may occur again? that some new force, emerging from the unknown, may surprise the world and cause a similar set-back?

The possibility cannot be denied, but there are some considerations which render it improbable (apart from a catastrophe sweeping away European culture). There are certain radical differences between the intellectual situation now and in antiquity. The facts known to the Greeks about the nature of the physical universe were few. Much that was taught was not proved. Compare what they knew and what we know about astronomy and geography—to take the two branches in which (besides mathematics) they made most progress. When there were so few demonstrated facts to work upon, there was the widest room for speculation. Now to suppress a number of rival theories in favour of one is a very different thing from suppressing whole systems of established facts. If one school of astronomers holds that the earth goes round the sun, another that the sun goes round the earth, but neither is able to demonstrate its proposition, it is easy for an authority, which has coercive power, to suppress one of them successfully. But once it is agreed by all astronomers that the earth goes round the sun, it is a hopeless task for any authority to compel men to accept a false view. In short, because she is in possession of a vast mass of ascertained facts about the nature of the universe, reason holds a much stronger position now than at the time when Christian theology led her captive.

All these facts are her fortifications. Again, it is difficult to see what can arrest the continuous progress of knowledge in the future. In ancient times this progress depended on a few; nowadays, many nations take part in the work. A general conviction of the importance of science prevails to-day, which did not prevail in Greece. And the circumstance that the advance of material civilization depends on science is perhaps a practical guarantee that scientific research will not come to an abrupt halt. In fact science is now a social institution, as much as religion.

I wonder if Bury would revise his conclusions in light of the “social construct” school of denial, which has produced everything from the “science” of anthropogenic global warming to multiplying sexes. Considering how ready the SJWs are to deny that a man is, in fact, a man, it is not at all hard to imagine that they would be every bit as willing to compel men to accept a false view of the sun rotating around the earth.

SJWism is the revival of the blasphemy concept, but it is far more dangerous than the religious laws ever were because it lacks a textual anchor. At least with religion, you always knew what blasphemy was and could readily avoid committing it. With the current thought police, they will inform you of your offenses after you have committed them, and neither ignorance of the law nor its previous nonexistence will provide you with any defense.

In praise of Sam Harris

In case you’re interested, I was a guest on the first podcast of Challenging Opinions Episode One – Education, Religion and Liberty. Give it a listen if you’re so inclined. A brief selection from the transcript:

Vox argues that Sam Harris is the worst Atheist debater around, but he is willing to give him a little praise:

William: You can very easily accuse people on the liberal wing, on the left, of being too tolerant of fundamentalist Islam, and Sam Harris stands up to the intellectual inconsistencies of some people on the left such as noted philosopher Ben Affleck;  that tendency does exist and he does challenge it, isn’t that true?

Vox: That’s absolutely true, and I would go even further and praise Sam Harris for biting the bullet, for addressing one of the most important flaws of the atheist secular humanist perspective, which is their discomfort with the obvious difference between “what is” and “what could be”.”

That’s what I find fascinating about Sam Harris. On the one hand, he is intellectually careless and the most intrinsically incompetent debater I have ever observed. His idea of defending his ideas is to make an assertion with obvious flaws, then attempt to deal with the straightforward criticism of those flaws by claiming that what he very clearly wrote or said isn’t what he really meant. He does this in every single debate!

On the other hand, he doesn’t hesitate to take the giant conceptual bull by the horns and wrestle with it. In The Moral Landscape, Harris recognized that the Humean distinction between “is” and “ought” is a tremendous problem for secular humanism. The fact that he utterly failed in his attempt to use science to equate the two doesn’t mean that we should not praise him for embracing the philosophical challenge and giving it his best shot.

Post-Christian morality

Or rather, the complete lack thereof:

In The Future of an Illusion (1927) Freud refers to religion as an illusion which is “perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization”. In his estimation, religion provides for defense against “the crushingly superior force of nature” and “the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt”. He concludes that all religious beliefs are “illusions and insusceptible of proof.
 
Freud then examines the issue of whether, without religion, people will feel “exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization”. He notes that “civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers” in whom secular motives for morality replace religious ones; but he acknowledges the existence of “the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed” who may commit murder if not told that God forbids it, and who must be “held down most severely” unless “the relationship between civilization and religion” undergoes “a fundamental revision”

Freud, like many 19th century men were so steeped in custom they could never conceive of the possibility that “educated men and brain-workers” would free themselves, not only of God, but all fixed taboos — of everything. He himself never imagined the Nazis were possible. At the end of his life, sick and old in Vienna — a Vienna he never thought could come to pass —  he was saved, as David Cohen writes, not by the harsh logic of supermen, but by bourgeois sentimentality: the kindness of friends, the intervention of admirers and the secret intervention of a Nazi admirer.

The trouble with 19th century atheism is that it had not completely freed itself from the sentiments of Christianity: in many subtle ways they assumed that man after God would still have limits. They failed to understand until the middle 20th century that man’s need for power did not necessarily contain limits. They  learned, too late, that like the Bill of Rights understands, it is in the “won’ts” on men’s actions that earthly freedom lives.

Freud made the same mistake that the irrational atheists of today still make. They think that because they are influenced by centuries of Christendom’s social inertia, that they possess a variant morality that is, if not necessarily better than Christian morality, at least equally valid.

They don’t. They possess the increasingly tattered remnants of Christian morality, that is all, and as it fades with each post-Christian generation, the Men of the West devolve into paganism, and not the high paganism that was so virtuous as to compete with early Christianity, but the low paganism of the Celt, the Viking, the Mongol, the Aztec, and the African cannibal.

A young Basongo chief came to our Commandant while at dinner in his tent and asked for the loan of his knife, which, without thinking, the Commandant gave him. He immediately disappeared behind the tent and cut the throat of a little slave-girl belonging to him, and was in the act of cooking her when one of our soldiers saw him. This cannibal was immediately put in irons, but almost immediately after his liberation he was brought in by some of our soldiers who said he was eating children in and about our cantonment. He had a bag slung round his neck which, on examining it, we found contained an arm and leg of a young child.

We’re not eating little girls yet, but we’re already parting them out and selling them for profit. The post-Christian trend is clear. The abomination of Planned Parenthood is the sin and the horror of American society. It is the proof that God has turned His face away from the once-Christian America and ceased to bless her.

Noam Chomsky bitchslaps Sam Harris

I told you Sam Harris wasn’t more than a high midwit. It should have been readily apparent to everyone after my dissection of his reliable sloppiness in The Irrational Atheist. But if it wasn’t then, it certainly is now, as Noam Chomsky demonstrates the difference between a wannabe and an actual intellectual:

April 27, 2015
From: Noam Chomsky
To: Sam Harris

I am sorry you are unwilling to retract your false claim that I “ignore the moral significance of intentions.” Of course I did, as you know.  Also, I gave the appropriate answer, which applies accurately to you in the al-Shifa case, the very case in question.

If you had read further before launching your accusations, the usual procedure in work intended to be serious, you would have discovered that I also reviewed the substantial evidence about the very sincere intentions of Japanese fascists while they were devastating China, Hitler in the Sudetenland and Poland, etc.  There is at least as much reason to suppose that they were sincere as Clinton was when he bombed al-Shifa.  Much more so in fact.  Therefore, if you believe what you are saying, you should be justifying their actions as well.  I also reviewed other cases, pointing out that professing benign intentions is the norm for those who carry out atrocities and crimes, perhaps sincerely – and surely more plausibly than in this case.  And that only the most abject apologists justify the actions on the grounds that perpetrators are adopting the normal stance of criminals.

I am also sorry that you evade the fact that your charge of “moral equivalence” was flatly false, as you know.

And in particular, I am sorry to see your total refusal to respond to the question raised at the outset of the piece you quoted.  The scenario you describe here is, I’m afraid, so ludicrous as to be embarrassing.  It hasn’t even the remotest relation to Clinton’s decision to bomb al-Shifa – not because they had suddenly discovered anything remotely like what you fantasize here, or for that matter any credible evidence at all, and by sheer coincidence, immediately after the Embassy bombings for which it was retaliation, as widely acknowledged.  That is truly scandalous.

And of course they knew that there would be major casualties.  They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares?

In fact, as you would know if you deigned to read before launching accusations, they were informed at once by Kenneth Roth of HRW about the impending humanitarian catastrophe, already underway.  And of course they had far more information available than HRW did.

Your own moral stance is revealed even further by your complete lack of concern about the apparently huge casualties and the refusal even to investigate them.

As for Clinton and associates being “genuine humanitarians,” perhaps that explains why they were imposing sanctions on Iraq so murderous that both of the highly respected international diplomats who administered the “Oil for food” program resigned in protest because they regarded them as “genocidal,” condemning Clinton for blocking testimony at the UN Security Council.  Or why he poured arms into Turkey as it was carrying out a horrendous attack on its Kurdish population, one of the worst crimes of the ‘90s.  Or why he shifted Turkey from leading recipient of arms worldwide (Israel-Egypt excepted) to Colombia, as soon as the Turkish atrocities achieved their goal and while Colombia was leading the hemisphere by far in atrocious human rights violations.  Or why he authorized the Texaco Oil Company to provide oil to the murderous Haitian junta in violation of sanctions.  And on, and on, as you could learn if you bothered to read before launching accusations and professing to talk about “ethics” and “morality.”

I’ve seen apologetics for atrocities before, but rarely at this level – not to speak of the refusal to withdraw false charges, a minor fault in comparison.

Since you profess to be concerned about “God-intoxicated sociopaths,” perhaps you can refer me to your condemnation of the perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium because God had instructed him that he must smite the enemy.

No point wasting time on your unwillingness to respond to my request that you “reciprocate by referring me to what I have written citing your published views.  If there is anything I’ve written that is remotely as erroneous as this – putting aside moral judgments – I’ll be happy to correct it.”

Plainly there is no point pretending to have a rational discussion.  But I do think you would do your readers a favor if you presented your tale about why Clinton bombed al-Shifa and his grand humanitarianism.  That is surely the least you can do, given your refusal to withdraw what you know to be completely false charges and a display of moral and ethical righteousness.

Harris is a completely inept debater. This is a bit more drawn-out than the norm, but it completely fits the way his debates almost invariably proceed

  1. Harris states something.
  2. Opponent presents obvious problem with Harris’s statement.
  3. Harris claims that is not the correct way to read his statement.
  4. Opponent presents historical quote from Harris proving that it is the correct way to read his statement.
  5. Harris claims that the quote is not being interpreted properly.

Either Sam Harris is the worst and most unclear writer in the history of the written word or he is an inept and intellectually dishonest interlocutor. I leave it to the reader to decide which of these two possibilities is, in fact, the case. But it should come as no surprise than an Irrational Atheist should be unable to have a rational discussion.

Kicked out of the warren

The atheists in Ireland found that PZ Myers’s relentlessly odious and bullying style was finally too much for them to take any longer:

Atheist Ireland is publicly dissociating itself from the hurtful and
dehumanising, hateful and violent, unjust and defamatory rhetoric of the
atheist blogger PZ Myers. The final of many, many straws were his
latest smear that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is ‘happily exploiting atrocities’,
and his subsequent description of Atheist Ireland’s chairperson as ‘the
Irish wanker’…

Some examples of his hurtful and dehumanising rhetoric
 

He said that ‘the scum rose to the top of the atheist movement’, that
it is ‘burdened by cretinous reactionaries’, that ‘sexist and
misogynistic scumbags’ are ‘not a fringe phenomenon’, and that if you
don’t agree with Atheism Plus, you are an ‘Asshole Atheist’. He agreed
that science fetishism reproduces the ‘white supremacist logic of the
New Atheist Movement.’ He said ‘I officially divorce myself from the
skeptic movement,’ which ‘has attracted way too many thuggish jerks,
especially in the leadership’.

He said Richard Dawkins ‘seems to have developed a callous
indifference to the sexual abuse of children’ and ‘has been eaten by
brain parasites’, Michael Nugent is ‘the Irish wanker’ and a ‘demented
fuckwit’, Ann Marie Waters is a ‘nutter’, Russell Blackford is a ‘lying
fuckhead’, Bill Maher’s date at an event was ‘candy to decorate [her
sugar daddy’s] arm in public’, Ben Radford is a ‘revolting narcissistic
scumbag’ and his lawyer is ‘J Noble Dogshit’, Rosetta scientist Matt
Taylor and Bill Maher are ‘assholes’, and Abbie Smith and her ‘coterie
of slimy acolytes’ are ‘virtual non-entities’. He called Irish blogger
ZenBuffy a ‘narcissistic wanker,’ after she said she has experienced
mental illness….

He also employs hate speech against Christians (‘I left the theatre
filled with contempt and loathing for Christians’), apocalypse-mongers
(‘they make me furious and fill me with an angry contempt’), ‘your
average, run-of-the-mill Christian’ (‘I despise Karen Armstrong almost
as much as I do Fred Phelps’), and several people who were organising a
prayer initiative (‘Jesus Christ but I hate these slimebags’ who are
‘demented fuckwits every one.’)

He uses violent rhetoric. He said ‘I’ve got to start carrying a knife
now’ to kill Christians if they pray instead of helping him while he is
dying. He said about a meal: ‘Don’t show up to pick a fight or we’ll
pitch you off a pier.’ When a Brazilian priest died in a charity
ballooning accident, he said ‘my new dream’ will be shooting priests out
of the sky from an aircraft. When a Christian shopkeeper apologised for
offending atheists, he refused to accept the apology, saying ‘No. Fuck
him to the ground.’ He would rather debate William Lane Craig in writing
‘where I can pin him down, stick a knife in the bastard, and twist it
for a good long while’. He praised a blog post that ‘shanks Thunderf00t
in the kidneys and mocks him cruelly’.

He has encouraged his blog commenters to ‘rhetorically hand [critics]
a rotting porcupine and tell you to stuff it up your nether orifice’.
They in turn have told people to ‘put a three week old decaying
porcupine dipped in tar and broken glass up your arse sideways’, to
‘fuck yourself sideways’ with a ‘rusty chainsaw’, ‘red-hot pokers’ or a
‘rusty coat hanger’, and to ‘go die in a fire. slowly. seriously’. More
recently he said of ‘faux-Vulcan shit’ that he encourages his
commentariat to ‘draw their knives and flense it so thoroughly the
dispassionate ass is feeling the pain in every nerve ending’.

You know PZ spiraled completely out of control when not a single example of his regular hate-on for me didn’t even make the Top 40 list. I quit paying attention to him years ago, and I’m a little sorry about that because it appears we missed some quality antics during that time.

On the plus side, at least he didn’t end up selling his corpulent body in a Las Vegas brothel. It could have been worse.

There is one interesting thing here. You’ve probably noticed that all the various calls for Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, and others to disavow me are based on a very small number of cropped and ungrammatical quotes; they don’t even dare to quote a single complete sentence. And yet, there are no calls from public figures for Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris to disavow PZ Myers despite there being considerably more examples of considerably more objectionable public statements.

Why might that be?

No vows to a nonexistent God

Oklahoma quite sensibly bans atheist marriages:

A bill that would restrict the right to marry to people of faith and require all marriage licenses to be approved by a member of clergy was approved by the Oklahoma state House on Tuuesday.

House Bill 1125, which would effectively ban all secular marriages in the state, was passed by a Republican majority and will now go to the state Senate for consideration.

“Marriage was not instituted by government. It was instituted by God. There is no reason for Oklahoma or any state to be involved in marriage,” said one of the bill’s Republican supporters Rep. Dennis Johnson, though marriage is a legal contract.

You cannot legitimately take a vow before a God in whom you don’t believe. Whether it succeeds or fails, this vote is good news; it is long past time that American traditionalists and conservatives stop trying to be reasonable with the progressives. They should be relentlessly opposed on all fronts, with measures both symbolic and practical, and excluded from the civilization on which they are nothing but parasites. If they want to go elsewhere to set up another of their failed utopias, good luck to them, but there is no place in Western civilization for them. They know this, which is why they keep trying to destroy it.

Marriage existed before the U.S. government. It will exist after the U.S. government collapses. If the government wants to offer legal contracts to which two or more parties want to subscribe, that’s fine, but never forget that neither state nor federal government ever had anything to do with creating marriage. And ideally, they would have nothing to say about it at all.

A portrait in petty atheism

I had to laugh when Richard Carrier, a fourth-rate atheist who has aspired to the dubious mantle of Richard Dawkins, came out with the news that he is every bit as immoral and untrustworthy as one would expect a cartoon atheist to be:

Two big items of news in my personal life. Which both entail a very public change to my relationship status. After twenty years of marriage Jen and I have decided to get a divorce. Breakups are always painful, but we still love each other and remain friends, and there are few contentions between us. We wish each other all happiness. But we are no longer a good fit for each other.

Everyone always asks why, and the answer is important to my life development, so I want to relate at least the core of it, and a caveat.

Several years ago, after about seventeen years of marriage, I had a few brief affairs, because I found myself unequipped to handle certain unusual circumstances in our marriage, which I won’t discuss here because they intrude on my wife’s privacy. In the process of that I also came to realize I can’t do monogamy and be happy. Since this was going to come to light eventually, about two years ago I confessed all of this to Jen and told her I still love her but I would certainly understand if she wanted a divorce. Despite all the ways we work together and were happy together, this one piece didn’t fit anymore.

Had I known several years ago that polyamory was an actual option that works for people, I might have realized this sooner, and dealt with it better. But I labored instead to meet the cultural expectation that you are supposed to make monogamy work, and it wasn’t working. Discovering that other ways of life are possible helped me understand I shouldn’t be doing this.

Rather than divorce right away, Jen offered to try an alternative for a while to see if that would work for us. So we agreed on some rules and have had an open marriage for almost two years now, and it’s helped us work through a lot of things, and has helped us both in very different ways. But one of those things is the mutual understanding that we aren’t compatible with each other. So we have decided to amicably divorce–using a facilitator rather than lawyers, since we’re in agreement about all the material things, and have no interest in hurting each other.

The part about being open hasn’t been entirely a secret these last years (quite a few people were informed or aware, just not the general public), but Jen hadn’t come out to her family, so out of respect for her privacy I hadn’t blogged about it or discussed it publicly. But she has informed everyone close to her now, and we are no longer together. So I can make it official:

I am polyamorous.

What amuses me is all the pseudo-intellectual justifications. Even now, he can’t just come out and admit it. He wants to have sex with whomever he wants, whenever he wants, without any constraints or commitments. He can’t admit that he has done anything wrong, much less sinned by breaking his vows.

Considering that men like this, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris are supposedly the best the atheists have to offer, no wonder so few people are buying into their bullshit.

Men are fallen. Marriages fail. Mistakes are made. But it takes a truly deceitful pseudo-intellectual to try to change the narrative in this sort of ridiculous manner.

UPDATE: Carrier, who apparently has found atheism to be considerably less lucrative than Dawkins and Harris, as he only makes $15,000/year and lived off his ex-wife, has some entirely unsurprising news about atheist conferences:

Indeed, many of my friends in the atheist community are polyamorous or actively participate in the BDSM or swinging communities, some even have orgies and sex parties… at atheist conferences!

I don’t mean to short-circuit your brain, but it suddenly strikes me that PZ Myers travels to a lot of atheist conferences…. Carrier readily confirms one’s assumption that he is a nasty, disingenuous little prick in the comments, a pure Gamma male with delusions of Alpha. He’s almost exactly the sort of atheist that most atheists are desperate to convince theists they themselves are not.

I never had any regard for him or his arguments. A few atheists had recommended him as a more worthy foe than Dawkins or Harris a few years ago, but it was very clear to me that he was just another wannabe who was in well over his head. He’s an intellectual nothing who isn’t even worthy of contempt.

Anti-theist murders Muslims

Isn’t it amazing how often the actual news is contra the atheist narrative? Consider this comment from Brett when the news first broke of the shootings in North Carolina:

“white terrosrist Christian executes three Muslim students in cold blood. I cant help but think he was a fan of voxday…”

Now, Mr. Hicks may be a fan, but it seems unlikely:

A suspected radical atheist is in police custody after allegedly murdering three young Muslims in the North Carolina college town of Chapel Hill, media reports indicate. According to the British newspaper the Independent, the three Muslims, who were all from the same family, were in their home when a 46-year-old man identified by police as Craig Stephen Hicks gunned them down.

That being said, it will not be terribly surprising if Christians in the West are eventually observed killing Muslims. There certainly hasn’t been any shortage of Muslims killing Westerners, both Christian and non-Christian, to say nothing of the Muslim slaughter of Christians in Africa and the Middle East.

Perhaps it was just a parking dispute. Or perhaps it is another step towards the Clash of Civilizations war that so many experts have been expecting for decades.

UPDATE: Apparently Mr. Hicks was not merely an atheist, but an aggressive anti-theist. “Included in his many Facebook ‘likes’ are the Huffington Post, Rachel
Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion
Foundation, Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy,’ Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gay
Marriage groups, and a host of anti-conservative/Tea Party pages.”

Mailvox: atheist theology or the ignorance therein

The self-aware  Trimegistus seems to share my incredulity:

I ‘m an unbeliever (I stopped using the term “atheist” when it became a
synonym for “self-righteous asshole”) and the staggering ignorance of
other unbelievers always shocks me. I know I’m not an expert on
theology; I know history, I’ve read Lewis and Sayers and St. Augustine
but that’s about it — and yet I’m like the frickin’ Vatican Curia
compared to the general run of atheists.

One thing I’ve noticed about many atheists of the general run variety is that they cannot follow simple if/then statements. Consider these facepalm-inspiring tweets inspired by this morning’s post:

Milo Yiannopoulos ‏@Nero
Perhaps the neatest skewering of @stephenfry ever, from @voxday

#OttawaStrong ‏@Canadastani
Summary: God is real because the bible says god is real! LALALALLALAKALALALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!! #bacon

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Your summary is false. I merely pointed out the God-concept he is attacking is not the Christian God.

Dan Sereduick ‏@Globalizer360
Your summary of the Christian god is one that exists in advanced theology, not in ordinary religion.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings are NOT advanced Christian theology.

#OttawaStrong ‏@Canadastani
Your imagination is not a real place either, but that doesn’t stop your imaginary friend Yahweh.

Vox Day ‏@voxday now
Look, you can’t criticize fiction for things that are not there. Sauron is not in Narnia.

It’s not that hard. My critique of Fry holds whether God exists or not. Christian theology is very well-defined. It is explained on multiple levels, from Tertullian and Thomas Aquinas all the way down to children’s novels like the Chronicles of Narnia. And yet, Stephen Fry quite clearly doesn’t know ANY of it.

You don’t have to believe in something to know what it is. I don’t believe in the Labor Theory of Value, but I can explain it to you. I don’t believe in Keynesian Economics, but I can explain multiple variants of it to you. I am skeptical of the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow, but I can explain how it is supposed to work.

The Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ are the core of the Christian faith. And that core is absolutely and utterly predicated on the EVIL OF A FALLEN WORLD. So for Fry to claim that the observable existence of evil somehow condemns the Creator God requires either a) perverted quasi-Calvinism or b) stupendous ignorance.