Atheist Inanity

TigerofRobare — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 02:12:00 GMT

What do Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Gore Vidal all have in common? They're all atheists and I've never never seen anything by them in print where they say a nice thing about anyone. Bizarely enough, all the atheists I've ever personally met are rather nice and tolerant. However, judging from a limited viewing of the blogosphere a nice atheist is the exception not the rule. Most explicitly atheist postings tend to remind me of Bill O'Reilly and other Fox News "personalities:" they insult all religions and believers, calling them "wackos" and "ridiculous." A growing movement is even seeking to get religious education listed by the United Nations as a form of child abuse.

The atheists like to call themselves rational, but they are not. Rational arguement does not consist of insults, but of premises and conclusions. It is not surprising that most atheist invective is directed against the Christian fundementalists of the United States--the heirs of the postmillenial evangelical pietism that gave us Prohibition in all its forms and other instances of morality enforced with coercion--because they are even less rational with Creationism and Intelligent Design. Little invective is directed the Catholic Church because the Church has an ancient tradition of logicians--St. Thomas Aquinas, the Society of Jesus, St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Peter Abelard, and William of Occam. Not to mention devout Catholic scientists like Gallileo, Gregor Mendel (discoverer of Genetics), Fr. Georges LaMaitre (proposer of the Big Bang), and Teilhard de Chardin to name but a few.

Catholic logicians are not going to be stopped by Richard Dawkins calling them idiots and arbitrarily declaring "there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God." Please. I'm sure the few people who have been healed at Lourdes or the thousands who witnessed the "Miracle of the Sun" at Fatima and Medugorje are suffering from "left-brain temporal lobe epilepsy" all at the same time, at the same place, describing the exact same thing, and experiencing it for the first and only time. Yeah, real plausible explanation.

I think the main problem is that atheists don't even try to understand the first thing about religion and many believers (especially the creationists or intelligent designers) get the bulk of their science education from quacks like Emmanuel Velikovsky.

Furthermore: if there is no God, where do the laws of physics come from, why is the universe rational, and where do natural rights come from? There's your trilemma.

The Spirit of Liberty : religion, Catholicism

Atheist Inanity