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When Religion's Apologists Attack!

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As religion and its sycophants continue to crumble under the weight of science and reason, its exponents have dialed up the polemics and the deceit.


Jacqueline Maley's editorial, "Atheism's true believers gather"
[1], published in The Sydney Morning Herald is one of the most disingenuous, inaccurate portrayals of atheists--replete with some of the most outlandish faulty logic arguments I have ever encountered--and an outright utter screed of tripe. In predictable fashion for any faithful toady, Maley piles on the demagoguery of fear in a world without religion, sated with everything from "social darwinism" to atheists are "fundamentalists". I winced in intellectual pain as I read her deluded diatribe against atheists (particularly the inane barbs hurled at Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), quickly realizing her unreserved prejudice for religion, and her absolute ignorance to even the basic understanding of the term "atheist."

Further, and even more maddening is her incessant psychological projecting and ceaseless, yet groundless accusations that atheism is itself, incredulously, somehow a "religion." Of course, "if" atheism were a religion (how it could possibly be, considering the "atheist" only rejects the "theist's" claims, due to absent or insufficient evidence makes the sane mind reel) perhaps then, Maley should not have a problem with an "atheistic religion," being the fierce defender of religious freedom she purports to be. But, as is always the case with religionists and their apologists, her anathema and tirade against non-theists is a Gordian knot of illogic--based on her own inner doubts projected onto others, chiefly those who manage to sleep soundly at night without the hollow crutch of superstition and empty promises made by religion.

While the tendentious Maley draws no quarter for the preeminent scientist, Richard Dawkins, labeling him with the snarky and absurd title of the "movement's supreme deity," fellow Australian, author and philosopher Russell Blackford, also an outspoken critic of religion, is oddly spared the invective of Maley's bile. Conceivably, in an act of kindred loyalty--and the only deed of beneficence found among her prejudicial rant, Maley allows Blackford to escape tainted commentary. Ergo, writes Maley on Blackford, "A lot of people who don't believe have got fed up with the political role of religion."

However, "civil libertarian, liberals and gay rights activists," are all part and parcel, at least in Maley's demented mind and spurious ramblings, to the "loose global coalition" of the "new age of activist atheism." Yes, you deduced it correctly--it is self-evident to the fatuous Jacqueline Maley that all atheists are secretly a conspiracy of liberals, gays, and other equally fetid political partisans, to rid the world of religion. After such a fallacious, bigoted set of accusations, aimed chiefly at those who advocate for equality, liberty, and church-state separation issues, is there any wonder left to what is truly wrong with religion and its truculent courtiers?

Finally, as an ethologist and evolutionary biologist, I ask of Jacqueline Maley, since he (Richard Dawkins) cannot "disprove the existence of God," should Dawkins also be pressed on the evidence of disproving the non-existence of unicorns? And if he fails, as disproving a negative is impossible--and the burden of proof always falls to the person making the extraordinary claim; therefore, under Maley's burden of proof, syllogism of logic, Dawkins should simply renounce all of his estimable work and pronounce Biology as a science, a total, abject failure. (Hence, the sacred atheist ritual of burning heretical books, such as
Darwin's, On The Origin of Species, would naturally commence immediately after the burnt offering at the altar of reason.)

Maley's tortured writings and tautological reasoning is as sound as her beliefs in an untenable divine superintendent who cannot reveal itself except through ancient texts of dubious origin. Nothing fails like prayer and nothing fails like the defense of the indefensible, in this case, religion and its preposterous claims. In a word, Jacqueline Maley, at least in this instance of unadulterated specious drivel, is a "hack."

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Links:

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/national/atheisms-true-believers-gather-20100212-nxm5.html

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Frank J. Ranelli is an independent scholar, skeptic and critic, author and essayist. His erudite and iconoclastic style of provocative writing has been extensively published in a variety of news outlets and across (more...)
 
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