You know, I’m getting really tired of taking apart atheist-bashing articles. The assertions about the flaws of atheism never change, the apologists won’t ever change their minds, and the articles will just keep on coming—perhaps even more frequently as the world becomes less religious and believers and faitheists get more defensive. And does anybody here really need to see another atheist-basher taken apart? So I’m going to ratchet back on these analyses; besides, Jeffrey Tayler does them so much better than I (see his latest attack on David Brooks in Salon). I’m doing this today to appease my Canadian readers.

Several incensed Canadian atheists sent me a link to a truly execrable piece by Conrad Black in the National Post, “The shabby, shallow world of the militant atheist.” I didn’t really know who Conrad Black was, but many Canadians seem to, for all the readers mentioned his criminal past. Born in Montreal, Black rose to control a chain of newspapers, acquiring titles and huge wealth along the way, but was then extradited to the U.S. to stand charges of fraud and obstruction of justice. He served three years in Federal prison, was deported back to Canada (and can’t re-enter the U.S. for 30 years), but still retains his enormous wealth and his title: “Baron Black of Crossharbour, of Crossharbour in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.”

I believe Black turned Catholic in prison, and for some reason the National Post gave him a lot of space in this piece to affirm his faith and bash atheists. I don’t have the heart to take apart his shopworn arguments in detail—beginning with the title, since almost no atheists are “militant”. Here are a few tropes, probably lifted from his readings:

1. The old atheists were so much better than the new ones—wittier, better writers, more cogent, and less militant. This argument can be made only by those who have never really read Russell, Mencken, Ingersoll, and Mill; the claim is based on pure ignorance. But Black makes it anyway.

. . . it has come back to me what a shabby level of mockery and sophistical evasion many of the militant atheists are reduced to, in comparison even with the famous skeptics of earlier times. People like Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Sigmund Freud, wrote and spoke well, and were more able than is rigorously admissible now to cloak themselves in the inexorable march of science and reason. Their witty if gratuitous disparagements of Christianity were much more effective than the coarse blunderbuss of my late quasi-friendly and frequent adversary, Christopher Hitchens.

Seriously: Shaw, Russell, and Freud cloaked themselves more heavily in science than, say, Dawkins and Sam Harris? That’s just crazy, for many of the developments of science that have further whittled away at faith, like cosmology and new findings of evolution, were not known to the earlier atheists. And, as far as I remember, Freud never availed himself of science in his arguments against God, but simply fobbed off religion as a collective neurosis (correct) and a longing for a father figure (dubious).

2. Without religion we wouldn’t have a good source of morality.  Seriously? Is Black ignorant of the long tradition of secular ethics beginning with the ancient Greeks? Or does he think that that morality is dubious if it doesn’t come from God? If that’s the case, does he know about Plato’s Euthyphro argument—to my mind one of the great triumphs of philosophy? Black says this:

 . . . without some notion of a divine intelligence and its influence on the culture of the world through the various religions (though the principal religions are not interchangeably benign or influential) there would be no serious ethical conceptions. Communities untouched by religious influences have been unalloyed barbarism, whatever the ethical shortcomings of some of those who carried the evangelizing mission among them. Without God, “good” and “evil” are just pallid formulations of like and dislike. As Professor Lennox reminded me, Dostoyevsky, scarcely a naive and superstitiously credulous adherent to ecclesiastical flimflam, said “without God, everything is permissible.”

That’s palpably wrong. Atheists are no more immoral than religionists, and we don’t engage in killing other people in the name of our nonbelief, nor do we try to force ridiculous strictures about sex, diet, and genital-cutting on everyone else.  The more atheistic countries like those in Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe are, if anything, more “moral” (and less socially dysfunctional) than highly religious nations like America, Saudi Arabia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa.

3. Atheism is a “faith.” You can’t get much more wrong than the following, in which Black dissects a debate between Richard Dawkins and mathematician and Christian apologist John Lennox:

[Dawkins] entertained, until he became unbearably repetitive, but no one with an IQ in triple figures was shocked by him. Dawkins almost raves about the extremes that “faith” can drive people to, but was struck dumb like Zachariah in the temple when Lennox pointed out, in a very lengthy debate at the University of Alabama in 2009, that atheism is a faith — clearly one that Dawkins holds and tries to propagate with considerable fervour. In general, something a person believes and can’t prove is supported by some measure of faith.

I refuse to believe that Dawkins was “dumbstruck” at Lennox’s claim that atheism is based on “faith”—unless “dumbstruck” refers to Dawkins’s incredulity at such stupidity. How can not believing in something for which there’s no evidence be a faith, given that faith means “belief in something without substantial (or any) evidence”? Is it “faith” to argue that there’s no evidence that humans have two hearts, or that Nessie swims in the deep waters of her Loch? As Black should know, no claim about reality is ever “proven” in the purely scientific sense, so if that’s his take, it must be a “faith” that humans have but one heart, since there might be some organ that we’ve missed! What most atheists “believe” is that “there is no good reason to believe in God”. If that’s a “faith,” then so are the claims that “There is no good reason to believe that Barack Obama was born in Yemen” or “There is no evidence that humans have been abducted by aliens in flying saucers.” To Black, any well-founded doubt is a “faith”!

And then Black claims that there is indeed some evidence for God, to wit:

The atheists purport to disprove the theistic case, but they have never got past their inability to dispute that spiritual forces and perceptions exist or that unexplained developments that are in fact miraculous sometimes occur, and they are reduced to imputing falsely to believers the view that anything they can’t explain is in the “gap”: God’s secret work. Of course no serious person espouses anything of the kind. . .

What? We can’t dispute that spiritual forces exist? Of course we can: we’ve no evidence for them.  And yes, of course perceptions of those forces exist, but perceptions are not realities: if that were true, then there would be a plethora of Napoleons and Jesuses (Jesi?) in today’s world.  It’s certainly true that we haven’t explained everything, but we have discovered that a lot of miracles turn out to be bogus. The fact is that if God wanted us to know of His existence (if he existed), he could do it ways far more convincing ways than making the “blood” of saints liquify when a Pope touches a vial of it, or making water appear on the face of a Jesus statue.

As for no serious people arguing for Gods of the gaps, has Black, perchance, heard of intelligent design? I guess not, for that whole area rests on the god-of-the-gaps arguments. Even scientists like Francis Collins make those arguments—in Collins’s case, he argues that because we can’t explain the origin of human moral sentiments, they must be a product of God. I have a huge section in Faith versus Fact about what I call “The New Natural Theology,” the claim that some phenomena—like consciousness and “fine tuning” of physical law—can’t be explained by science and therefore require invoking God. If that’s not a god-of-the-gaps tactic, I don’t know what is.

4. Science isn’t leading to progress, just to more mysteries. This is a really, really dumb argument, but has gained surprising traction. It’s a way of religionists to denigrate science in a futile attempt to elevate religion, which truly does fail to progress. John Gray is one of those “anti-progressives” for both science and religion (see one of his pieces here, and Steve Pinker’s rebuttal here). Here’s what Black says, continuing directly from his previous quote:

. . .much more frequent is the swift recourse of atheistic scientists to the worm-eaten chestnut that there is a finite amount of knowledge in the world and that every day the lights of pioneering science are leading us closer to a plenitude of knowledge.

In fact, that is not our experience: All great scientific discoveries demonstrate man’s genius, but also reveal that the extent of the unknown was greater than had been realized. Freud’s discovery that man could not control his subconscious; the discovery of the potential of the atom including for human self-destruction; Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler’s discovery that the world revolved around the sun; all expanded the vastness of the unknown still to be explored.

I don’t want to think that Black is here contending that we actually know less about the Universe than we did 500 years ago, but that seems to be his implication. But does he take antibiotics, perchance, or use a cellphone? Does he know that we’ve unravelled the mysteries of heredity: we now know that genes in most species are made of double-helical DNA, and that this DNA specifies the sequence of proteins? Does he realize that Einstein explained the bending of light by gravity, something completely unknown in the 19th century? Of course new mysteries arise regularly, like the existence of dark matter and energy, but to claim that science isn’t advancing our understanding of nature is to claim that “I am a moron.” And Black really is. He reveals that even more nakedly when he says this:

5. The idea of a multiverse is “diaphanous piffle.”:

Nor can the atheists ever grapple plausibly with the limits of anything, or with the infinite. They rail against “creation” — but something was created somehow at some point to get us all started. They claim evolution debunks Christianity  (though all educated Christians, including Darwin, acknowledge evolution) — but evolution began somewhere. When taxed with the extent of the universe and what is beyond it, most atheists now immerse themselves in diaphanous piffle about a multiverse — but the possible existence of other universes has nothing to do with whether God exists.

Clearly Black knows nothing of physics, for the idea of a multiverse falls naturally out of certain theories of physics, and is certainly not diaphanous piffle. Many physicists take it seriously, and not because they want to get rid of the notion of God. It may well be true that the laws of physics in our universe don’t hold in other universes, so if those laws permitted evolution in our cosmos, then we’re just holders of a lucky cosmic lottery ticket. And of course the multiverse idea does have something to do with whether God exists, because, whether Black likes it or not, the idea of the “fine tuning” of the physics of our universe constitutes strong evidence for God to many sophisticated believers. If there’s a natural explanation, then the evidence for God recedes yet further.

6.  Religion is the repository of right and wrong, and that, rather than the truth of scripture, is its value.

Religious practice can certainly be targeted as a pursuit of the hopeful, the faith-based and the uncertain. But they badly overreach when they attack the intellectual underpinnings of Judeo-Christianity, from the ancient Judaic scholars and the Apostles to Augustine to Aquinas to Newman; deny the existence of any spiritual phenomena at all; debunk the good works and cultural creativity and conservation of the major religion; and deny that the general religious message of trying conscientiously to distinguish right from wrong as a matter of duty and social desirability is the supreme criterion of civilization. The theists defend their basic position fairly easily and only get into heavy weather when they over-invest in the literal truth of all the scriptures — though the evidence for veracity of the New Testament is stronger than the skeptics admit, including of Christ’s citations of God himself: “And God said …” [Black’s ellipses]

This is coming from a Catholic! Has he never run into “heavy weather” when investing in ideas of Jesus as God’s son/God, of the Resurrection, the return of Jesus, the transubstantiation, the notion of a soul, the miracles of the Bible—or anything of that ilk? And it’s dubious about whether the general religious message of his Christianity is “to distinguish right from wrong”, at least not in the way Black means. The general message of Christianity, “How should we behave so we can win God’s approval and have a comfy afterlife?” The Big Answer is, of course, simple: just accept Jesus as savior, no matter how many bad things you’ve done in your life.

I can write no more; my brain hurts. You Canadians who forced me to spend 1.5 hours writing this—you go spread this message on the Post website and to Blackophiles. I can barely stand to write this same rebuttal over and over, and I’m loath to do it any more.

Jeffrey Tayler, a corresponding editor for The Atlantic stationed in Moscow, is really on a roll, publishing one “strident” atheist article after another—and in Salon, of all places.  And he’s developing quite a nice style—sort of a hybrid between Hitchens and Mencken—in which his overt scorn for religion is combined with a delicious sarcasm.

Tayler’s latest piece, published two days ago, has the lovely title of “David Brooks, religious clown: Debunking phony Godsplaining from the New York Times’s laziest columnist“. Believe me, it will do your heart good to read it. I love the “Godsplaining” neologism, which could equally apply to those Sophisticated Theologists™ who try to tell the rest of us what God is really like.

On February 3, Brooks wrote a column for the Times called “Building better secularists.” It was a smarmy, goddycoddling, and patronizing attempt to instruct nonbelievers about what lessons we need to take from religion. It’s the usual tripe: we have to work hard at building our own morality (because, you know, without God it’s really hard!), we have to form communities, we have to have Sabbath-equivalents (maybe lighting candles for Camus?), and so on.  Anyway, I was too dispirited to analyze Brooks’s lame effort in detail, but did a short dissection on this site (I also reproduced some letters to the Times by Dan Dennett and others who groused about Brooks’s piece).

But Tayler has done the hard work of really taking Brooks to the woodshed. I’m not going to repeat what you can read on Salon, but I want to reproduce three paragraphs of his article, just so you can see Tayler’s emerging style, which, to me, presages the birth of a powerful new voice of atheism. Now if Tayler could get this stuff into The Atlantic, or other places besides the normal goddycoddling Salon, it would be wonderful.

Voilà:

One might deem it almost shameful to publish one’s musings on the New York Times’ opinion page, the same page that continues to print, and quite shamelessly, the unapologetic scribbles of Iraq War cheerleader Thomas Friedman or the earnest yet befuddled lucubrations of useful Islamist idiot Nicholas Kristof.  The first of these two columnists will probably never be called to account for the bloodshed and mayhem he has sanctioned in the Middle East.  The second, I believe, means well, but by denouncing “Islamophobia” he shows he has accepted as sound a nonsense term that conflates faith and race and equates (well-founded) objections to Islam with prejudice against Muslims as people.  And we should never forget that he, like Friedman, supported the Iraq War.

But what to make of Friedman and Kristof’s seemingly milquetoast colleague, David Brooks?  No shame attaches to him, though by publishing his pro-faith columns, he validates a stupendously (if surreptitiously) baleful Weltanschauung that should long ago have disappeared from our world.  Brooks, in the face of mounting evidence, has striven tirelessly to bequeath credence to the dangerous notion, ever more antiquated and morally untenable, that believing in something asserted without evidence – religion — constitutes a virtue.  That valuing faith above reason makes one a better person. That those who have shrugged off – or laughed away – the comically outlandish claims advanced by the Abrahamic creeds about our world and origins as a species are the ones with the explaining to do.  Should he not be called to account?

I believe so.  Moreover, Brooks’ recent Op-Ed, “Building Better Secularists,” leaves me no choice, or, better said, offers me an opportunity I cannot pass up for commentary.  “Building Better Secularists” is nothing less than an anti-religion writer’s dream come true, an essay remarkable for its utter and complete susceptibility to refutation and repudiation.  The title hints that Brooks intends to teach us godless folks a thing or two.  The result?  He succeeds only in beclowning himself by authoring a sanctimoniously gaseous tract that befits not America’s august Paper of Record, but a highbrow version of Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ End-is-Nigh rag once handed out for free by blue-haired little old ladies in tennis shoes in front of speakeasies and liquor shops (and is now available online).

One can hear echoes of Mencken in there. There are no punches pulled, and useful idiots are called useful idiots. What a pity that the New York Times has so many of these UIs (Tanya Luhrmann is another)!

This is less than 20% of Tayler’s piece. Go read it, even if you’re already in the choir, for it’s lovely to see the sanctimonious Brooks taken down several pegs by one of his journalist colleagues.

When I printed out this Al-Jazeera America article two days ago, the title was “Atheism’s astonishing hypocrisy toward Islam.” Today the title has changed to “New Atheism’s astonishing hypocrisy toward Islam,” so I guess they want to zero in especially on Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, who take the brunt of this piece (Sam’s picture is at the top of the article).

The piece is by Usaid Siddiqui, a Canadian freelance writer, and at the end there’s a disclaimer: “The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America’s editorial policy.” Perhaps, but I can’t help but think that someone in management approves of the article’s sentiments, because the piece is so dumb that no reputable news organization would print it.  Here are Siddiqui’s claims:

1. “New atheists single out Muslims for criticism”.  Siddiqui mentions Craig Stephen Hicks, the murderer of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and claims that while Sam won’t condemn atheism for spurring the killings, he routinely condemns Islam for inducing murder:

The Feb. 10 killing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, of three Arab-American students, allegedly by atheist Craig Stephen Hicks has led some to compare militant atheism to Islamic militancy. Atheists are not happy with the comparison.

. . . [Harris] denied any link between atheism and Hicks’ actions. Harris insists that the comparison was unwarranted and atheists’ crimes have nothing to do with their beliefs, not least because there exists “no atheist scripture or doctrine.” Hicks said he was a fan of New Atheists such as Harris and Cambridge University professor Richard Dawkins.

Harris’ efforts to distance atheism from violent acts committed by individual atheists exposes his hypocrisy toward Muslims and Islam, which he routinely portrays as being distinctively violent.

. . . By defending atheism after the actions of an ideological fanatic such as Hicks, even when they treat Islam as the key factor behind the actions of Muslim extremists, atheists such as Dawkins and Harris expose their biases.

First of all, Dawkins is not a “Cambridge University professor”, which bespeaks the level of fact-checking in Siddiqui’s piece. As everyone knows, Dawkins was at Oxford but is now retired. He was never affiliated with Cambridge.

More important, Sam Harris said, after decrying the murders, that we didn’t know what caused Hicks to commit them. And we still don’t. If we find out that Hicks was motivated by New Atheists to do the murder, then I’m sure Sam will have something to say about it. Until then, all sane people have reserved judgment. In fact, Hicks expressed sympathy on his Facebook page for Muslims facing American bigotry. Siddiqui ignores all that.

But it’s plainly true that, at present, Muslims are distinctively violent among religionists. Members of which religion routinely kill more people than members of any other? It isn’t Christians, it isn’t Buddhists, and it isn’t Quakers. Adherents of extremist Islam pose more dangers to life and to democracy than members of any other faith, extremist or not, and it’s a falsehood for Siddiqui to claim otherwise. And to imply that Harris has never criticized other faiths is simply wrong. Remember that one of his best-selling books was Letter to a Christian Nation.

In a truly ludicrous comparison, Siddiqui tries to portray the violence inherent in atheism by citing the actions of a drunk Frenchman who went after an empty mosque with plaster grenades and a rifle. What he says is this: “For example, in February a court in France sentenced a 69-year-old man to prison for throwing plaster grenades and shooting at a mosque in western France. ‘I am a republican, an atheist, and what happened at Charlie Hebdo infuriated me,’ the attacker told authorities.”

But Siddiqui doesn’t mention the bit of the report from France24 that precedes that quote:

Chaillou launched four plaster grenades and fired a rifle at the mosque in the city of Le Mans on the night of January 7, hours after two gunmen killed 12 people in a deadly rampage at Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices. There were no casualties in the mosque attack.

Chaillou, who has been detained since his arrest in mid-January, told investigators he “doubted” there would have been anyone at the mosque at the time of the attack.

On Tuesday he told the court “he was not proud” and described being upset by the death of the Charlie Hebdo journalists. The pensioner said he had been drinking and his action was “spontaneous”.

Challious’s  actions were unconscionable, and he was sentenced to three years in jail for what he did. But how on earth can you pin this on the New Atheists? Here we have a drunken Frenchman motivated by an attack on Charlie Hebdo to make a gesture that he was sure wouldn’t hurt anybody. He could just as well have been motivated by liquor, jingoism, pure bigotry, or a misguided attempt to make a statement about extremist Muslims wrecking his country.  Whatever his motivation, it’s hard to see how Harris, Dawkins, or New Atheism bears a scintilla of responsibility. Had the guy even read any New Atheist works? And to claim that this action is the moral equivalent of ISIS’s brutality, mass slaughter, and genocide is simply ridiculous.

2. China persecutes people in the name of atheism.  Siddiqui cites China’s policy of suppressing and jailing members of Falun Gong and tearing down Christian Churches. He quotes a Chinese official as showing that this is all motivated by atheism:

Don’t tell me that our Marxist doctrine of atheism cannot overcome something like Falun Gong,” then-President Jiang Zemin wrote to senior members of his party, demanding action. “If it can’t, it will become a big joke all over the world!”

Well, of course atheist regimes have committed brutalities, but what does this have to do with New Atheism? Did Sam Harris or Dawkins inspired the Communist Chinese, or do they approve of what they do? Hell, no. Maoism started well before these guys said anything about atheism, and before Harris was even born.  Further, they’ve both discussed how totalitarian regimes, sometimes atheist ones, can suppress religion as a challenge to its authority, or even behave as if they were religions, with leaders like Mao and Kim Jong-Il imbued with god-like status. New Atheists are neither responsible for nor approve of the actions of such regimes, and whatever perfidy is committed in the name of “old” atheism is detestable.

3. New Atheists don’t recognize that “Islamic” terrorism isn’t really Islamic at all, and they’re hypocrites for concentrating on the religion.

New Atheists could rightly argue that CPC’s [Communist Party of China’s] atheist rhetoric is a cover for maintaining the party’s grip on power and for buying influence within the ruling elite. Yet their failure to recognize similar external and political influences behind acts of terrorism committed by individual Muslims is hypocritical. For example, Chérif Kouachi and Saïd Kouachi, the brothers who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices, came from the lower classes of French society, had little education and worked menial jobs. They were recruited and radicalized by a congregation member, Farid Benyettou, who, among other things, showed them videos of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The images included photos showing the notorious Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, which was a catalyst for anger among Muslims around the world. “It was everything I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, that motivated me,” Chérif Kouachi told his lawyer.

So clearly it was poverty and dispossesion that led to the Charlie Hebdo attack. Never mind that the killers were “radicalized” and shouted Islamic slogans during their deed—that’s simply irrelevant. (And was this true of the un-oppressed Tsarnaev brothers? Siddiqui is silent on that issue.) And of course part of their radicalization involved Abu Ghraib, which no longer exists and was seen in the U.S. as shameful, with some of the participants prosecuted for their brutality. Nope, nothing to do with Islam at all.

Not only that, but some other Muslims condemn the terrorism of extremist jihadis, so it’s not Islam!

By contrast, prominent Muslim leaders and organizations routinely condemn terrorist activities carried out in the name of Islam. Several Muslim organizations expressed outrage over the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. But this did not stop Harris or Dawkins from blaming Islam for the attacks. After the Paris shootings, Dawkins steered clear of any rational analysis and shared a series of defamatory, anti-Islam tweets. Similarly, he was quick to emphasize the faux explanation that the Chapel Hill killings concerned a parking dispute. [JAC: We still don’t know if this played a role. Unlike everyone else, Siddiqui apparently can see directly into the mind of Hicks.]

Harris has blamed the Quran for the horror of the ISIL. “Belief in martyrdom, a hatred of infidels and a commitment to violent jihad are not fringe phenomena in the Muslim world,” Harris wrote in September. “These preoccupations are supported by the Koran and numerous hadith.”

An account from a former ISIL captive contradicts this claim. French journalist Didier François, who spent more than 10 months in ISIL’s hands, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last month that he never saw an ISIL fighter read a Quran or talk about religion. The group was rather obsessed with more secular matters and apparently never forced any of its hostages to convert to Islam.

This is what I call the Argument from Distraction. Simply avoid all the annoying counterevidence—the interviews of pro-ISIS extremists by Graeme Wood, the statements of the terrorists themselves that they’re carrying out the dictates of the Qur’an and the hadith, the murder of apostates and forced conversion of captives to Islam—and simply cite some Muslims who condemn the terrorism. That surely shows that religion isn’t behind the terrorism—doesn’t it? And by all means quote a French captive of ISIS and ignore Graeme Wood’s powerful and convincing argument that ISIS is acting out the Islamic hopes for a caliphate. It’s like arguing that because some Christians condemn the bombing of abortion clinics and shooting of abortion doctors, then Christianity certainly can’t have motivated those acts of terrorism. And which New Atheist ever claimed that ISIS represents all Muslim thought and behavior?

4.  New Atheists in fact help inspire the brutality of extremist Islam, so they’re partly responsible!

In generalizing about and singling out Muslims, Harris and other New Atheists make ISIL’s work easier. “When Westerners start talking about Islam as a uniquely or inherently violent faith that is fundamentally different from other religions,” wrote Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, “They stumble into the trap laid for them by the fundamentalists, who tell their followers that Muslims are uniquely hated and uniquely persecuted by the West.”

This is the fault of the Islamic fundamentalists, not New Atheists. All of the latter, including me, recognize that there are varieties of Islam, and only some forms breed terrorism. (But we also note that many Muslims who wouldn’t commit that violence nevertheless either overtly or tacitly approve of it.) This is simply the truth. What Siddiqui is doing here is asking New Atheists to simply shut up, for their arguments could be distorted by Islamic fundamentalists to incite more hatred.  This is just one more misguided argument among many. And really, how many members of ISIS have heard of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?

5. Finally, all religions and belief systems are equally bad. This claim is the last resort of the religious apologist:

Neither Muslims nor atheists have a monopoly on violence. People of all backgrounds and faiths engage in violent activities. As such, it is unfair to categorize attacks by Muslims as a reflection of Islam while actions of adherents of other faiths get the lone-wolf label. By defending atheism after the actions of an ideological fanatic such as Hicks, even when they treat Islam as the key factor behind the actions of Muslim extremists, atheists such as Dawkins and Harris expose their biases.

My response is the Argument from Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” It’s foolish to argue that because some Christians engage in violent activities in the name of Christianity, then all religions are equally violent. That’s crazy.

And no New Atheist I know of has tried to exculpate other religions from their bad activities, as anyone would know who read The God Delusion or The End of Faith.  By bringing up Hicks, Siddiqui is dragging a red herring here, for we still don’t know what made Hicks kill—though apparently Siddiqui does!

In the end, Siddiqui proves only this: he knows as little about New Atheism as he knows about how to make a convincing argument. He is motivated by anger, perhaps defense of Islam, or perhaps by other emotionally-conditioned beliefs, and his emotion has not only clouded his judgment, but led him to write an embarrassingly bad article.  Shame on Al-Jazeera.