Melanie Phillips has an excellent article on the recent Australian atheist convention:
Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the divine.
LIKE revivalists from an alternative universe, 2500 hardcore believers in the absence of religion packed into the Global Atheists Convention in Melbourne last weekend to give a hero’s welcome to the high priest of belief in unbelief, Richard Dawkins.
The bestselling author of The God Delusion was similarly fawned over by the Australian media, which uncritically lapped up everything he said.
This was even after (or perhaps because) he referred to the Pope as a Nazi, which managed to combine defamation of the pontiff with implicit Holocaust denial.
By comparison, Family First senator Steve Fielding may feel he got off lightly when Dawkins described him merely as more stupid than an earthworm.
For someone who has made a career out of telling everyone how much more tolerant the world would be if only religion were obliterated from the human psyche, Dawkins manages to appear remarkably intolerant towards anyone who disagrees with him.
Today’s anti-theists resort to insulting their opponents, are sanctimoniously self-righteous about atheistic morality, are irrational, fundamentalist, angry, untruthful, bigoted, arrogant and intolerant. And, according to Melanie Phillips, insecure.
Other than that they are a lovely bunch.
At an atheist convention in Melbourne yesterday Richard Dawkins compared the awarding of sainthood to Australian nun Mary MacKillop to a Monty Python skit.
Stuart, yes, another strident Dawkins diatribe.
Mellanie Phillips is an idiot. Atheists do not ‘believe in the absence of religion’ – that would be absurd. And implicit Holocaust denial? Was her editor sedated or something?
I find it hard to believe that this is anywhere close to being the best response non-atheists can give to an atheist convention. Fighting Dawkins’ ‘intolerance’ with vacuous nonsense hardly seems like a productive tactic.
Sad thing is that Dawkins et al are the shining child of the press and are lauded and the “Promised One”. Soon all religions will be banned. Twenty years should do it.
Seanwillsalt (#3), why don’t you read the article and grapple with what it actually says instead of grabbing a quote from the byline (which the author likely didn’t even write)? If I may slightly modify something you said in the “branch sawing” thread:
Actually, I do agree with some of her points – Dawkins is not the brightest when it comes to anything outside of science. It’s just that her own idiotic statements far outweigh any of those she attributes to him, and they can’t all have been written by somebody else.
Seansillsalt (#6), if I can convince you to abandon hyperbole for a moment, what do you disagree with in particular? And why? Although you’re perfectly happy to lob adjectives around lambasting the beliefs and opinions of others, you’ve been very coy about your own beliefs. What do you stand for, and what are you willing to defend? And, by the way, if you keep tossing around words like idiotic, wierd, etc., I’m going to start ignoring you. It might have been fun in high school, but I have no time for it now.