Sometimes, reading the shrill words of theists trying to interpret atheists is a real trip to Bizarro World. What you see, generally, is freakishly far off the mark and often more a case of projection than understanding. It would be hard to get more overt than this: someone named Kathryn Lofton has written an essay titled “So you want to be a new atheist“, which, presumably, is about describing some common set of properties, a dogma and doctrine, that anyone can follow to be one of the New Atheists.

Unfortunately, she falls off the rails from the very beginning, since we’re all a diverse bunch with different backgrounds and different politics and different nationalities…and worse, she imposes some strange beliefs on us. We’re apparently totalitarian capitalists, for instance, and mostly libertarians (she does graciously admit that not every New Atheist is one, at least). It’s a very right-wing American picture she paints of us, which as you might guess, I find discombobulating.

However, here’s the most glaring part, the clearest example of projection I’ve seen yet:

The New Atheists reply, with clarion diagnostic consistency: Religion is something that sells you something invisible so you may feel that which you cannot find elsewhere. It is something for which there is insufficient evidence. It is something people do because they have always done it, not because they know how to think about it. Religion is irrational, it is emotional, and it is instinctual. Religion enslaves you with its wiles, then forgets to remove the handcuffs. It is the fortune teller reading entrails, not the captain consulting his compass. It massages and preys and toys and plays and screws you over, time and again, with a promise it won’t keep because of its irrationality and its whimsy. Religion is a know-at-all with no knowledge. It makes “a virtue out of not thinking.” Religion is cutting the hedge repeatedly around an erection. Religion is, it turns out, a lot like a girl. (My highlighting)

I daresay you won’t find any New Atheist declaring that religion is “like a girl”. You especially won’t see it framed in derogatory terms like that: so girls are irrational, emotional, instinctual, whimsical, having no knowledge, and into bondage? She seems to be projecting her own prejudices about women on atheists, which is a bit odd.

The Accidental Blogger has an excellent demolition of Lofton’s puffery.

Unless the New Atheists have categorically called religion a girlish pursuit or religious males girly men, (Lofton does not say that they have) it is plausible that it is Lofton herself who conflates irrationality and emotionalism with feminine traits and critical thinking and reason with manly characteristics. She may have again confused style with substance. After all, the majority of the high profile and vocal atheists in the public square are all males. Most of them also assume a combative stance while arguing their points of view. Even if Lofton considers the New Atheists arrogant, self absorbed and boorish, based on her opinion of their discursive temperaments, where did she get misogyny? Perhaps in her eagerness to condemn, Lofton uses the red herring of misogyny without any supporting evidence because it fits the rest of her perception of the atheists. Are some atheists women haters? Of course. Could there be a few among the ones she names? Possible. But it has nothing to do with critical thinking which does not bar women from becoming practitioners. And what is the score in the department of misogyny on the religious side? Start your count with the priestly class and the orthodox.

Whom does Lofton think she is kidding with her innuendo about misogyny and atheism? It is particularly galling coming from someone who is presumably a spokesperson for religion. The sacred bastion of virility, organized religion, is thickly populated by misogynistic power hungry males and at least in the Abrahamic tradition, god too is a masculine deity whose behavior is akin to that of an old fashioned patriarch – one who protects, smites and slays at whim. Whereas misogyny can often be a product of politics, commerce and other secular cultural traditions, I doubt that women have been more systematically and ritually degraded within the realm of any other human enterprise than that of organized religion. Only religion explicitly sanctions misogyny. Think Adam’s Rib, eater of the forbidden fruit, the temptress, the virgin who is to be alternately worshiped and sacrificed, the ideal of the Sati, stoning to death of an adulteress, the unclean half of the population which menstruates and undergoes messy child birth… on and on ad nauseum. Now Lofton tells us that the source of misogyny actually lies in empiricism and scientific enquiry. Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather!

Previously, I enviously mentioned this fabulous godless variety show going on in England this year. It’s Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, organized by Robin Ince, and featuring a host of secular personages of note.

They had a similar show last year, with many requests for recordings. The great godless minds cogitated, and realizing that Deep Thoughts alone do not pay the utility bills or generate pints of beer, they have come up with an idea: you can now buy a DVD of the 2008 Nine Lessons show, proceeds of which will go to the Rationalist Association. You should get it. It’ll help keep some atheists warm.

Although…what’s this? PAL? Hmmm. Don’t know how well that will go over in the US. This might just be an opportunity for lucky Europeans.

I was reading this condescending article by Stephen Prothero that, as usual, chastises the New Atheists for being so danged rude, and I thought I’d have to take time to slap him around a bit. His point is that the reason we’re so rude is that we’re all arrogant white men, and if only we had more women around, we’d be more sensitive and sweet and nice and gentle, and although he doesn’t say it directly, we’d probably also have more lace doilies and wouldn’t cuss so much.

I’m spared the effort, since Amanda Marcotte, godless firebrand and possessor of two X chromosomes in every cell, has rudely pointed out that a) it’s insulting to insinuate that women are going to be more tolerant of nonsense, and b) niceness isn’t a factor in resolving truth claims, anyway.

There are a fair number of outspoken women active in atheism, and none of them are the kind of genteel belles Prothero seems to be imagining he can push around. Ophelia Benson? Greta Christina? Maybe I should introduce him to my daughter for a good disemboweling.

We are the New Atheists. We do not, however, like the name — ask any of us, and we’ll tell you that there’s nothing new about our atheism — all we’re doing is speaking out about godlessness. I’ve talked to a lot of the so-called New Atheists, including some of the biggest big shots in this movement, and what do they do when they hear the term? Roll their eyes and shrug. We only grudgingly accept the term, not because we find it agreeable, but because it is imposed on us by a clueless media and an even more ignorant body of theists.

Weirdly, I’m now hearing more and more about something called Atheism 3.0, and unbelievably, they are using the term unironically, as if they really think they have something new to offer, some advance over the “Old Atheism,” whatever that was, and the “New Atheism,” misnomer that it is, and deserve a moniker that implies a new bump in the version number. I would like to remind the proponents of Atheism 3.0 of two things: they’re offering nothing new, either, and a version increment isn’t always a good thing. I remember Mac Word 5.0, which was a clean and simple thing of beauty, and Mac Word 6.0, which was an abomination, a hideous slug of a program that should have been aborted and the mewling, squirming undead fetus incinerated. I kind of feel the same way about this New New Atheism.

Atheism 3.0 is, as I said, nothing new. It’s been around as long as atheism has, and there’s a much better and far more descriptive term for it: “Atheism But.” As in, “I’m an atheist, but I think religion is a wonderful institution (usually for someone else, just not me.)” It’s atheism for people who don’t like atheism, or who want to neuter atheism so it doesn’t challenge a pious status quo, or have this condescending idea that the rest of society is dumber than they are, and needs the palliative of unreasoning faith. The New Atheists, as much as we detest the title, at least offer an honest, open integrity about their ideas; these guys seem to be more interested in hiding the significance of the nonexistence of gods so they can hide behind a façade of superficial religiosity, and appeal to a waffly, wishy-washy middle ground.

Greg Epstein, one of the most conciliatory members of the Atheist But brigade, even goes so far as to praise Rick Warren’s awful little book.

Epstein argues in his forthcoming book, “Good without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe,” that morality does not depend on a judgmental deity and that nonbelievers can lead meaningful, even purpose-driven, lives. But they can also learn from people of faith, such as California megachurch pastor and “Purpose Driven Life” author Rick Warren, Epstein says.

Warren’s best-selling book basically says that “you have to have a purpose in life bigger than yourself, and that not everything is all about you,” said Epstein. “And he’s absolutely right about that. But he’s wrong in saying that you have to believe in Jesus Christ and if you don’t you’re going to hell for eternity.”

Have you ever read The Purpose Driven Life? (You can read the first seven chapters for free, not that I recommend this drivel). It’s ghastly. It is Rick Warren stating with absolute certainty the intent and needs of an omnipotent being, which just happens to be that the most important mission you have in life is to be his personal slave. Oh, and the unwritten subtext is that since Rick Warren has such clarity of understanding of this ineffable and inconsistent being, you’d best listen carefully to Rick Warren. It is a wretchedly evil little book that represents all the misbegotten inanity of religion: the claims of divine knowledge, the demands that followers be subservient to the deity, and the charlatanry of making promises of strength, prosperity, happiness, and immortality to everyone who obeys the words of the prophet.

Atheists should not respect this book, and they should not encourage others to appreciate its message…except in the sense of acknowledging the effectiveness of propaganda and the adept sleight of hand of the professional con artist. An Atheist But can babble about learning from Rick Warren, but an atheist will simply tell you that all you can learn is what not to do.

What the Atheist Buts are trying to do is occupy a middle ground, compromising with religion to find an illusory magic mean. They’re all but indistinguishable from another group, the God Buts. These are people who don’t use the word atheism at all, but instead preach a nebulous version of religion that has no relationship to any established religion — instead, they want you to accept the virtues of simply believing in…something. Anything. If you told them you worshipped the transcendant god personified by the earthly presence of Mickey Mouse, they wouldn’t question you in the slightest. Deny god, though, and suddenly you’re treated as shrill, militant, and strident.

One of the eminent God Buts is Karen Armstrong, who I’ve laughed at before. Another is Robert Wright, who is becoming increasingly shrill, militant, and strident himself in his criticisms of New Atheists. This is a telling point, too: these defenders of religion never seem to get as riled up about the ranting fundamentalists as they do a few outspoken atheists. Wright’s latest is full of fury and claims that the atheists are doomed, also citing a familiar complain: atheists are hurting the cause!

And this year doubts about that mission have taken root among the New Atheists’ key demographic: intellectuals who aren’t religious and aren’t conservative. Even on the secular left, the alarming implications of the “crusade against religion” are becoming apparent: Though the New Atheists claim to be a progressive force, they often abet fundamentalists and reactionaries, from the heartland of America to the Middle East.

If you’re a Midwestern American, fighting to keep Darwin in the public schools and intelligent design out, the case you make to conservative Christians is that teaching evolution won’t turn their children into atheists. So the last thing you need is for the world’s most famous teacher of evolution, Richard Dawkins, to be among the world’s most zealously proselytizing atheists. These atmospherics only empower your enemies.

So, we have a rising tide of liberal secularists who dislike atheists…wait, no we don’t. These are the same old conciliatory apologists who have been around for ages, the Atheist Buts. A chorus of whining from the nags and scolds who are ashamed of atheism isn’t going to dissuade anyone, although Wright may find comfort in it.

That last paragraph, though, is the crux of the problem. Children might leave the faith of their fathers, and this is a horrible, evil, scary possibility, since, after all, atheists are monsters. What we should do is ask all those scary atheists to go hide their scary faces so the God Buts and the God Firsts and even the Atheist Buts can continue to freely demonize them. Only Good Christians should be promoting evolution. That Dawkins can be both an atheist and a scientist, and even worse, explains that science led to his atheism, is going to empower creationists.

Bullshit.

Evolution has implications about how the world works. If you deny them, if you pretend evolution is cheerily compatible with the god-is-a-loving-creator nonsense religions peddle, you aren’t teaching evolution. You are pouring more mush into the brains of young people. If you are a conservative Christian, it’s entirely understandable that you would fight evolution, because the truth does not favor your position. If you are a moderate Christian, you are not helping science education by enabling fear of atheism by continuing to lie to people, assuring them that science isn’t going to challenge their religious beliefs. It will, or the teachers are doing it wrong.

Unfortunately, Wright’s message is that we can’t challenge religion.

All the great religions have shown time and again that they’re capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don’t feel threatened or disrespected. At the same time, as some New Atheists have now shown, you don’t have to believe in God to exhibit intolerance and incivility.

Flip it around; that’s an admission that the religions feel intolerance is justified when they’re not coddled and respected. That’s part of the problem, too. I don’t respond well to extortion from god-bothering zealots, sorry. What the New Atheists (who are the same as the old atheists) have shown, though, is that they can be subjected to generations of intolerance and to continued denigration by people like Wright, who think their call for atheists to be silent and modest is a liberal attitude, and yet we manage to cope without resorting to violence or threats to shut up our critics. That’s something the apologists for faith need to learn, too: religion should be strong enough to stand against academic rudeness and mockery without this pathetic bleating for shelter from skepticism. It’s easy to be tolerant and civil when you’ve compelled everyone to be agreeable with you; the challenge is to do the same when you’re being denounced.

All the Atheist Buts and God Buts are missing the key point, too. We don’t care if you think religion is good for you, or if you love your faith, or if you think rituals are lovely, or if believers have done good in history, or if a lack of praise for Jesus irritates the Baptists. That’s not the issue. The central, fundamental question is whether anyone has any reasonable evidence for the existence of any gods, especially the gods that everyone is so busy propitiating. You haven’t got any? Then we’ll continue pointing out that you’re chasing leprechauns, no matter how annoying you find it. It’s the truth. Argue against that with evidence — anything else is fluff and noise.

They can’t do that, though. They’ve decided that they can’t compete on that ground, and instead have rushed to occupy a meaningless middle…an intellectually empty wasteland with no approximation to the truth, only a comforting distance from the real crazies of the devout. They’re nothing but the lords of vapor, the kings and queens of the æther, too frightened by the retreating ghosts of old myths to join us in reality.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation is having a big fundraiser…and what better way to treat this traditionally religious season than to use it as an excuse to direct all your charitable giving to a bunch of atheists promoting science and reason?

Got a few hours to spare? Here’s another recent debate, this time between Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens vs. Boteach, D’Souza, and Taleb in Mexico, with Robert Wright stuck in the middle. The sound quality is OK, but very low…so crank it up to hear it.

Don’t want to listen? Here’s a quick summary.

Shmuley Boteach: Yeesh. What an awful, screechy person. There is a god because evolution is impossible, and god is the only reason people are moral. Oh, and Hitler. Tiresome and cliched.

Sam Harris (about 9 minutes in): There are only 3 ways to defend god: 1) argue that your specific religion is true; 2) or you argue that religion is useful; or 3) you attack atheism. Only (1) is valid. He brings up a beautiful metaphor: what would you think of a friend who announced that he was so happy because he was destined to marry Angeline Jolie? The usefulness of this belief, or the idea that it makes him happy, is irrelevant against the falsity of the claim, yet this is the kind of argument defenders of religion always make.

Dinesh D’Souza (20 min): Claims to rise to Harris’s challenge to speak about the truth of religion in a 21st century way…so he chooses to talk about life after death. Tries to argue that believers in an afterlife and those who don’t believe are in exactly the same state of ignorance. Then he says there is empirical evidence for life after death, which I anxiously await.

Wait…he says that the Big Bang proves the existence of other realms, therefore there is a heaven? Dark matter and dark energy could be where are immortal post-death souls are stored? This guy is nuts. Oh, and Pascal’s Wager.

Christopher Hitchens (29 min): What matters is not what you think, but how you think, and discovery has come from non-religious thinking. Religious arguments are useless and unverifiable. Refutes the fine-tuning argument by pointing out the fate or our planet, our sun, and our galaxy is destruction. D’Souza’s argument of equivalence is false: we don’t claim absolute knowledge, we say that the theists have failed to provide any evidence.

Robert Wright (39 min): Doesn’t want to be on either side. Muddled as always.

Nassim Taleb (47 min): Can’t track reality with science and equations. Religion is not about belief. We were wiser before the Enlightenment, because we knew how to take knowledge from incomplete information, and now we live in a world of epistemic arrogance. Religious people have a way of dealing with ignorance, by saying “God knows”. At least he’s making a novel argument, but he’s still full of bullshit.

Daniel Dennett (54 min): This is familiar, from his talk at AAI. He discusses his study of priests who have become atheists, but remain in the pulpit. Theology evolved as a way to accommodate theologians’ personal integrity with what society told them they had to believe in their religion. The idea that you can’t be good without god is the biggest lie spread by religion.

Second round!

Shmuley Boteach (60 min): Hitler. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Evolution can’t have love. Evolution leads to racism. All morality comes from religion. Man, this guy is a scumbag.

Sam Harris (64 min): Points out that the other side hasn’t provided any evidence for their position — they’re using the arrogance of their iron age faith, only. The real issue is the veracity of the textual narrative of the Bible, which is clearly a clumsy pastiche.

Dinesh D’Souza (69 min): Why is there a universe? Why are we here? Where are we going? Science doesn’t have an answer to any of them. Has this fathead ever considered the possibility that they’re bad questions? See Harris’s first discussion: D’Souza is arguing his point 3. Finally resorts to misstating scientific claims about life on other planets. Total moron.

Christopher Hitchens (73 min): Call’s D’Souza’s argument “piffle”, and that he’s misleading people about science. Science can say what will make us stop accepting an idea; theists do not have anything equivalent to ‘rabbits in the precambrian’. Theists make positive and entirely implausible claims about what god is telling us to do. A wager: Name a moral action that a believer will take that he can’t.

Nassim Taleb (77 min): Until about 70 years ago, visiting a doctor would reduce your chance of living. From this, he leaps to the conclusion that science hasn’t been good at dealing with evidence. Even now, doctors kill us — fewer people die when hospitals go on strike. WTF? This guy is a real crank. If you remove religion, what will you replace it with?

Daniel Dennett (82 min): We are going to replace religion with secular morality, without the dogma of religion. How has religion proceeded? Not one person in this room would choose to live by old testament morality. We’ve worked together to adjust our morality, we make these adjustments.

Robert Wright (86 min): Argues with everyone. Accomplishes nothing. Oh, and the New Atheists are fundamentalists. FU too, Wright.

The rest of the event seems to be commentary in Spanish…I turned it off. I hung in there long enough, and should have bailed out the instant Boteach opened his mouth.

A live debate is coming up at 6:45 GMT…I think that means in about half an hour. The topic is one that irritates me greatly: “Atheism is the New Fundamentalism”. Arguing for the motion is Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, and Charles Moore. former editor of the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. I know nothing about either of them. Against the motion, the godless have once again fielded their A team: Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling.

I forecast another rout in favor of the heathenish barbarians with prestigious academic appointments.

It will be streamed live at the intelligence² site.

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People are live-twittering the debate, too — look for the hashtag #iq2atheism.

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The final vote in this debate was against the motion, “Atheism is the new fundamentalism,” by 1070 votes to 363. That’s just the audience in attendance; the online vote was even more lopsided, 877 to 35.

My overall opinion was that Grayling was humane, gentle, and thoughtful, and spoke well for humanism. Dawkins provided a good sharp edge with cogent criticisms of the ideas of the theists. He did not stoop to the kinds of ad hominem the theists engaged in in this debate.

On the theist side, Harries was dithering and only brought up tired old claims about atheism…he also got slapped down good when he claimed Dawkins never admitted to any doubt in any of his books, and Dawkins simply cited the title of chapter 4 of The God Delusion: “Why there almost certainly is no god.” Moore was awful, simply a rabid little shitstain. I think he lost the debate right right at the beginning when he made up that analogy of science being like a narrow beam spotlight in a prison camp, with Dawkins as the commandant ordering the prisoners to be shot. He was a genuinely despicable little freak.