Why don't you tell us what you really think Bill?

Looks like Bill Muehlenberg's Culturewatch website is going to well and truly deserve its place under Blog Fodder on my sidebar. His latest entry is titled thusly:

Atheism Kills

You read that title and you just know what's coming:

"Sure, some religious people (mostly Muslims) have done bad things but the atheists Hitler, Stalin and Mao killed way more people."

Yawn.

Bill's source of inspiration for this post is an article from Dinesh D'Souza in the Christian Science Monitor. Yes, that's the same Dinesh D'Souza who argues in his latest book that we should be more like the Taliban so that terrorists will stop attacking us: "They hate our freedoms, so if we take away those freedoms we won't be tempted to exercise them and make the terrorists mad."

Anyway, here's Bill's first paragraph:

In these secular times, religion regularly gets a bad rap. And anti-Christian bigotry especially accelerates, with most of the world’s ills, from burnt toast to global warming, somehow pinned on the Christian faith.

We know the "burnt toast" quip is sarcasm (or is it?), but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he really believes that people are blaming Christianity for global warming. Bill always portrays himself and his fellow Christians as being persecuted. Someone found The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a Microsoft Word document, plugged "Jew" and "Christian" into Find and Replace..., and started selling the revised publication worldwide. For more on Bill's delusions of victimhood, see Brian's Blog at unBelief.

The secularists are especially happy to lay the blame for the wars of the world on the shoulders of religion. They argue that if we just get rid of religion, most conflict would cease, and we could all live together in peace and harmony.

Complete and utter strawman. Atheists may see religion as a source of conflict in the world, but they most certainly do not believe that if all religion suddenly vanished that everything in this world would be fine and dandy.

It's also worth noting that Bill uses the terms "atheism" and "secularism" interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. Bill, the main feature of atheism is a disbelief in a deity, while secularism is the notion that religion should be separated from the state (and vice versa), meaning that governments cannot make laws based solely on appeals to religion. It's possible to be a secularist and a theist at the same time.

Yet the secularists not only blame religion, they seek to whitewash the crimes of secularism. Indeed, a common trick is to claim that Hitler, et. al., were somehow actually religious! The atheists speak of ‘political religion’ and the like, attempting to defuse the secularism of last century’s great mass murderers.

The crimes of secularism? Bill, we live in a secular society right now. Why aren't people dying by the thousands? As for Hitler being religious, refer to Lenny Flank's comments about ridiculous attempts to link evolution with the Nazis and what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

White Aryans, Hitler writes, are the special creations of God, the "highest image of the Lord", put here specifically to rule over the "subhuman" races: "Human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe. The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise."

So, does this mean religion is to blame for the Holocaust Bill? No, and atheists (to my knowledge) aren't making such a claim.

In my opinion, blaming the crimes of Hitler and Stalin on atheism is not only absurd, it's immature. People like Bill are much more interested in throwing mud and spouting fallacy after fallacy. Muehlenberg claims his website "offers reflective and incisive commentary ", yet the most cursory glance at his article titles alone indicates it will offer nothing but more of the same childish rhetoric we've come to expect of the religious far-right.

Update: Andrew Bolt is excited about Dinesh D'Souza's article too.

Dauth, AWB and Iraq

Colour me amazed.

Diversion

This is one of those posts where the blogger feels guilty about not posting in a while and, in an effort to lessen that guilt, posts a bunch of links to other blogs hoping that readers won't notice that the blogger himself hasn't really said anything of substance...

At Five Public Opinions AV slams a collection of strawman arguments used against athiests by Pastor Steve at Millersville Bible Church.

James Wheeldon gave Andrew Bolt a smack on the wrist for yet another ridiculous attempt to put Nazis and the Left in the same basket. Tim Dunlop picked up on it at his new blog Blogocracy, and Andrew didn't like it, calling Tim a "goose with a conspirational mindset". For Andrew, throwing insults is much easier than addressing the criticism made against him, and James Wheeldon gives him a smack on the other wrist for his childish behaviour.

PZ Meyers was one of many who've commented on a New Jersey high school teacher who used his classroom to inform his students that if they didn't accept Jesus they "belong in hell", lied about it, and then looked like a complete spoon when confronted with recordings of his classroom sermons. As it turns out some of his students are sticking up for him, with calm and well considered reasoning of course.

Democrats in tha House y'all

I know I'm late getting to this:

THE Democratic Party today took control of the US House of Representatives for the first time in 12 years as it rode a wave of anger against President George W. Bush.

The White House conceded that Democrats had won after US media predicted major gains by the opposition party.

...but I thought I'd put in my two cents worth anyway.

I look forward to hearing the spin the right-wing pundits put on this result. No doubt we'll be informed that the result is courtesy of Democrat dirty tactics, with them mentioning the state of affairs in Iraq and all. Perhaps we'll learn that the U.S. and The West have been weakened, with a "soft-on-terrorism" party gaining more power than is warranted. We'll hear that the Republicans have suffered a truly undeserving defeat, thanks to a hostile anti-Bush media.

In fact, it's already started:

Andrew Bolt: But the Democrats will wonder if they should have done better with so much going for them - not least Iraq and the media.

That almost sounded like a concession that things aren't as well in Iraq as Bolt has previously suggested. Anyway, I imagine alot of the commentary will follow a similar line...

Sure, the Republicans lost the House. But given that the America-hating communist socialist elitist marxist leftist latte-sipping media was cheering so hard for the Democrats, it could have been much worse. So in fact, this is sort of a victory.