1. The joining of church and state

Comment #88832 by RoryCalhone on November 19, 2007 at 3:38 am

Isn't anyone going to take this article to task for its inaccuracies and faulty reasoning? Or do we only do that to articles which reach a conclusion we don't agree with?

2. Can we at least demand 'Secular Communion'?

Comment #86869 by RoryCalhone on November 10, 2007 at 10:57 am

PZ makes a good point. An anti-creationist homophobe is not going to stop being an anti-creationist because an atheist calls him out on his Christianity inspired homophobia.

In Dawkins's terminology, that means working with the "moderates" to counter the "extremists", but it's actually more complicated than that...

...Some of the best people working to combat global poverty may be Catholic anti-abortionists.

3. Are the 'New Atheists' avoiding the 'real arguments'?

Comment #86741 by RoryCalhone on November 10, 2007 at 3:38 am

ADH has criticized Edmund Standing for studying a subject which he had already thought worthless. Leaving aside the fact that we don't know whether maybe Mr Standing did not think it was worthless to begin with and only found this out after studying all this pointless drivel, it seems you completely miss the point of the article.

Standing was arguing against the point that some theists try to use the "that's not my religion" and "study some theology" defences against the new atheists. Here's a man who studied theology and says that actually, the new atheists got it right in what they were criticizing. Yet ADH says that this means nothing because he's an anti-theist. This just shows the poverty of theology when Standing is criticized for his anti-theist bias yet others can be encouraged for their pro-theist bias. Isn't this just another way of saying you can't criticize my religion? Theists can no longer hide behind the automatic respect they once got so they now say "you can only criticize my religion when you learn some theology", yet when you do learn some theology they say "you can only understand theology if you believe". If that is truly the case then Dawkins et al are right, Theology is bullshit.

EDIT: Oh and great article by the way

4. I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist

Comment #82478 by RoryCalhone on October 26, 2007 at 12:25 pm

So you need faith to disbelieve in an unproven claim as you do to believe in that same unproven claim? What about when that claim is based on unreliable evidence like anecdotal revelation, circular reasoning and unfalsifiable explanations and when the belief itself can be explained away as a purely evolutionary, psychological and sociological phenomenon. This claim that is an explanation for everything and yet no scientific theory has thus far needed it. Only by twisting the meaning of the word "faith" can you say it is needed in not believing in this claim.

It is pointless to group atheists and theists together by the amount they practise faith, when the amount they practice is the attribute that marks the difference between them.