When Atheists Attack (Each Other)

The squabble between Darwin lobbyists who openly hate religion and those who only quietly disdain it grows ever more personal, bitter and pathetic. On one side, evangelizing New or "Gnu" (ha ha) Atheists like Jerry Coyne and his acolytes at Why Evolution Is True. Dr. Coyne is a biologist who teaches and ostensibly researches at the University of Chicago but has a heck of a lot of free time on his hands for blogging and posting pictures of cute cats.

On the other side, so-called accommodationists like the crowd at the National Center for Science Education, who attack the New Atheists for the political offense of being rude to religious believers and supposedly messing up the alliance between religious and irreligious Darwinists.

I say "supposedly" because there's no evidence any substantial body of opinion is actually being changed on religion or evolution by anything the open haters or the quiet disdainers say. Everyone seems to seriously think they're either going to defeat religion, or merely "creationism," or both by blogging for an audience of fellow Darwinists.

Want to see what I mean? This is all pretty strictly a battle of stinkbugs in a bottle. Try to follow it without getting a headache.

Coyne recently drew excited applause from fellow biologist-atheist-blogger PZ Myers for Coyne's "open letter" (published on his blog) to the NCSE and its British equivalent, the British Centre for Science Education. In the letter, Coyne took umbrage at criticism of the New Atheists, mostly on blogs, emanating from the two accommodationist organizations. He vowed that,

We will continue to answer the misguided attacks [on the New Atheists] by people like Josh Rosenau, Roger Stanyard, and Nick Matzke so long as they keep mounting those attacks.

Like the NCSE, the BCSE seeks to pump up Darwin in the public mind without scaring religious people. This guy called Stanyard at the BCSE complains of losing a night's sleep over the nastiness of the rhetoric on Coyne's blog. Coyne in turn complained that Stanyard complained that a blog commenter complained that Nick Matzke, formerly of the NCSE, is like "vermin." Coyne also hit out at blogger Jason Rosenhouse for an "epic"-length blog post complaining of New Atheist "incivility." In the blog, Rosenhouse, who teaches math at James Madison University, wrote an update about how he had revised an insulting comment about the NCSE's Josh Rosenau that he, Rosenhouse, made in a previous version of the post.

That last bit briefly confused me. In occasionally skimming the writings of Jason Rosenhouse and Josh Rosenau in the past, I realized now I had been assuming they were the same person. They are not!

It goes on and on. In the course of his own blog post, Professor Coyne disavowed name-calling and berated Stanyard (remember him? The British guy) for "glomming onto" the Matzke-vermin insult like "white on rice, or Kwok on a Leica." What's a Kwok? Not a what but a who -- John Kwok, presumably a pseudonym, one of the most tirelessly obsessive commenters on Darwinist blog sites. Besides lashing at intelligent design, he often writes of his interest in photographic gear such as a camera by Leica. I have the impression that Kwok irritates even fellow Darwinists.

There's no need to keep all the names straight in your head. I certainly can't. I'm only taking your time, recounting just a small part of one confused exchange, to illustrate the culture of these Darwinists who write so impassionedly about religion, whether for abolishing it or befriending it. Writes Coyne in reply to Stanyard,

I'd suggest, then, that you lay off telling us what to do until you've read about our goals. The fact is that we'll always be fighting creationism until religion goes away, and when it does the fight will be over, as it is in Scandinavia.

A skeptic might suggest that turning America into Scandinavia, as far as religion goes, is an outsized goal, more like a delusion, for this group as they sit hunched over their computers shooting intemperate comments back and forth at each other all day. Or in poor Stanyard's case, all night.

There's a feverish, terrarium-like and oxygen-starved quality to this world of online Darwinists and atheists. It could only be sustained by the isolation of the Internet. They don't seem to realize that the public accepts Darwinism to the extent it does -- which is not much -- primarily because of what William James would call the sheer, simple "prestige" that the opinion grants. Arguments and evidence have little to do with it.

The prestige of Darwinism is not going to be affected by how the battle between Jerry Coyne and the NCSE turns out. New Atheist arguments are hobbled by the same isolation from what people think and feel. I have not yet read anything by any of these gentlemen or ladies, whether the open haters or the quiet disdainers, that conveys anything like a real comprehension of religious feeling or thought.

Even as they fight over the most effective way to relate to "religion," the open atheists and the accomodationists speak of an abstraction, a cartoon, that no actual religious person would recognize. No one is going to be persuaded if he doesn't already wish to be persuaded for other personal reasons. No faith is under threat from the likes of Jerry Coyne.

Apparently you have zero understanding of the Principles and Foundations of our Country.

Oh really?

How do you know this: "Our founding fathers were deists and a few Unitarians. They didn't believe in the Bible or the God of the Bible"?

This is definitely news to me. Why should they not believe in the God of the Bible, since the God of the Bible is the self-same Creator acknowledged in the DoI as the source of man's unalienable rights?

You can cherry pick the literature to your heart's content, tearing items out of context as it suits you.

But what you cannot do is rewrite American history to fit your reimagined, "culturally-updated" version of it. America is what it is, unique among nations. And what it is, is a Christian nation philosophically, i.e., without taking the doctrines of sectarian religious belief into effect.

The Framers to a man — whatever their sectarian differences — believed that we are a nation under God.

If you don't understand that, you do not understand America.

JMHO, FWIW

Hey metmom, this little atheist commie Daily"KOS-turd50" thinks we even care what he thinks!

He doesn't care about Bachmann anymore than he despises Palin.

He's not a conservative because he's an agnostic/atheist, simple as that.

It's not just because he doesn't like Palin. Plenty of people have yet to be convinced that Palin could be president, but I guess she'd have to announce that she intended to run for President first, wouldn't she?

These libs around here just play right into her hands. She's got them in an ooda loop, and they're just firing into their own fuselages. Fact is, like the MSM, Sarah Palin lives in the minds of liberals here on FR rent free, even as they do out in all their other liberal enclaves.

Fact is too that liberals are most scared of Palin and atheist jerk-offs who infest Religion Forum threads on FR continue to prove this every time.

He says he doesn't kiss any one's "a$$," but that's probably because his lips are so firmly planted on his own, that by doing so it is likely that he may have encountered his only true ally on the forum.

Atheists are such pathological liars.

You know, metmom, "kosta-booty50" called Sarah Palin a "redneck." What color do you suppose his neck is in that picture?

Remember the old Wisk laundry soap ad? You try soaking it out, you try scrubbing it out and you still get -- ring around the collar ----- ring around the collar!!!

Imagine what it must be like for him to try to puff on his bong up there. I mean, sure, we've all heard the barb, "Aw, c'mon, ya know he's just blowing smoke out his a$$," but this takes it to an entirely new level. Have you noticed that he still tries to balance that doobie on his booger finger when he types and he still wonders why the keys stick!

Can you believe a thread like this has gone on for almost 3000 postings already?

Way too much fun playing with the Darwinist atheists today!

FReegards!

Precisely. In the end you believe, I think, that it will be his will no matter what you or I think. So, don't preoccupy yourself much with his business.

Get behind us Satan.

Of course God wants us to be involved with His business. That's what He gave us Scripture for. That's why He sent the Holy Spirit to empower us for. That's why He chose to use man as the primary medium for spreading the Gospel to the world so that all men might be saved.

Just what business do you think that God has that we shouldn't preoccupy ourselves with anyway?

It's all about the redemption of mankind, using men as the means.

No wonder you reject what you think religion is. It is so screwed up as to be meaningless gibberish. I'd reject what you believe as true also.

So get over it and let it go and find the real God instead of hanging onto your delusions and nursing your grievances against God.

Honestly, all you atheists remind me of characters out of CS Lewis's "The Great Divorce*. You're like the dwarves in *The Last Battle*, so afraid of being taken in that they can't be taken out of the prison of their own making that is all of their minds. Nobody is going to fool them again. The dwarves are for the dwarves and bah humbug on anyone who tries to tell them differently.

One must question the questioner...on the matter of good and evil.

If there’s such a thing as evil, you assume there’s such a thing as good.

If you assume there’s such a thing as good, you assume there’s such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil.

If you assume there’s such a thing as a moral law, you must posit a moral law giver,..

..... ‘but that’s whom they are trying to disprove and not prove’.....

Because if there’s not a moral law giver, there’s no moral law.

If there’s no moral law, there’s no good.

If there’s no good, there’s no evil...... What is their question?

Why do you actually need a moral law giver if you have a moral law?

The answer is because the questioner and the issue he or she questions always involve the essential value of a person..... That is, you can never talk of morality in abstraction..... Persons are implicit to the question and the object of the question.

In a nutshell, positing a moral law without a moral law giver would be equivalent to raising the question of evil without a questioner......

So you cannot have a moral law unless the moral law itself is intrinsically woven into person-hood,.... which means it demands an intrinsically worthy person if the moral law itself is valued....... And that person can only be God......( speaker..Apologetics...Ravi Zachariah's)

“I am that I am”..saith the Lord.

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