By JERRY COYNE - WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
Added: Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Crapsquire for the link to the original article.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/jul/31/religion-atheism-harris-collins-witchcraft

Commentary from Jerry Coyne
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/andrew-brown-cant-stop-whingeing/
If the word “faitheist” were in the dictionary, its illustration would be the smug mug of Andrew Brown, the goddycoddling columnist at The Guardian. As we’ve seen before (see here and here), Brown likes to blame the “new atheists” for a lot of things, including the prevalance of creationism in the U.S. (sound familiar?).

In his latest column, Brown goes after Sam Harris for his New York Times op-ed piece questioning the wisdom of appointing Francis Collins as head of the NIH. But before he misquotes Harris, Brown can’t resist taking a few gratuitous slaps at him, just to show that atheists are full of “intolerance and hatred”:

Shallow, narrow, and self-righteous, he [Harris] defends and embodies all of the traits that have made organised religion repulsive; and he does so in the name of atheism and rationality. He has, for example, defended torture, (”restraint in the use of torture cannot be reconciled with our willingness to wage war in the first place”) attacked religious toleration in ways that would make Pio Nono blush: “We can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene” ; he has claimed that there are some ideas so terrible that we may be justified in killing people just for believing them. Naturally, he also believes that the Nazis were really mere catspaws of the Christians. (”Knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion”).

TAGGED: RELIGION