More Rees Pudding

In an interview with Jonathan Leake in the Sunday Times (behind a paywall, so no link - paywall down? - up again), the new Templeton Prizee Martin Rees continues his apologia against his critics. AC Grayling is quoted as saying:

...I wish Templeton would not bribe scientists into giving them credibility. The Templeton desire to mix religion with science is like trying to mix astrology with astronomy or magic with medicine. A great disservice is done to education and the proper understanding of the world by this and anyone who accepts Templeton money is helping to perpetuate this problem.

Leake puzzles over Rees the atheist's attitude to religion:

What Rees seems to be saying is that he believes religion is valuable and useful - while also believing it is completely untrue. That's a contradiction most of us would find hard to reconcile but for a scientist, whose life has been spent seeking out provable truths, surely it should be impossible.

I think this is what most new atheists complain about when faitheists make their rather vapid apologies for religion. Rees responds:

I think some people even with no belief may see that there is value in the practice of religion...

But that is not the issue; is the value worth the cost?

Let me give you an example: there are lots of Jews who would say they are atheists, but they still light their candles on Friday and participate in some rituals because they think there is some value in maintaining those traditions.

Of course, but some rituals don't end with candles being lit, but fuses.

But to get back to Templeton, Rees cites the rather anodyne version of religion of which he approves while apparently being oblivious of the insidious harm to science caused by the Templeton Foundation, since they took up the 'Science and Religion' meme. As I wrote before, we have them funding scienceandreligion organisations at both Oxford and Cambridge, with such 'scientific' papers as Human genomics and the Image of God. What do Templeton gain from Rees? Bell Pottinger are their PR advisors (Chairman, Tim Bell, who conspired to bring the Iron Lady to power), and Leake ends his report by saying:

Rees was, as ever, reluctant to comment. but for the man from Bell Pottinger discreetly minding Rees throughout his media interviews last week the answer was obvious. "I think the Templeton Foundation have got just what they want out of this year's award," he said, as he whisked Rees off to another interview.

Brilliant. £1,000,000 to be a poodle to the religious lobby. It really is unforgivable that Rees has no response to the problems that Grayling identifies.

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Harris on Divine Morality

This debate, Does Good come from God?,  is an interesting contrast of styles. Some have 'awarded' the debate points to William Lane Craig, since he responds more formally to Sam Harris's points, while Harris sticks, mostly, to his agenda, and doesn't really expose WLC's argument. This may be because he didn't want to spend too much time on WLC's nonsense so as not to legitimise it.

But, while not formally objecting to WLC's particular argument, Harris did rather brilliantly expose the poverty of the divine command theory. In his original statement, Harris sets out his stall: because there is a worst possible state of affairs that we want to avoid, we can therefore safely assume that morality is the attempt to make the world better than that. And so, human flourishing determines morality. This is a pretty controversial position to say the least, and not necessarily true; I'm just putting that up there to set the scene for Harris to address WLC's Christian world view:

Ask yourselves: what is wrong with spending eternity in Hell?

So Lane Craig has laughed at the idea that well being could be a sufficient determinant for morality (which it may well not be), but his philosophy is built on the very same idea. And Harris goes on to show how the nature of Christian consequentialism can logically lead to immoral behaviour, and because of that, *is* an immoral doctrine to hold and preach.

Well I'm told it's rather hot there, for one. Dr Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality.The whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well being of human souls. Now happily, there is absolutely no evidence that the Christian hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this theistic framework in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.

Nine million children die each year before the age of five. Picture an Asian tsunami, of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those every ten days, killing only those under five. 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, seventeen or so a minute, that means before I can get to the end of this sentence some few children will have died in terror and agony. 

Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered.

According to Dr Craig, this is all part of God's plan. 

Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn't care to. Is therefore either impotent or evil. And worse than that, on Dr Craig's view, many of these people will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong God. Think about that. Through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and the missed the revelation. 

There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment, most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. In Dr Craig's universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey god, Hanuman, you are doomed. You'll be tortured in hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No, it just says so in Mark 9, Matthew 13and Revelations 14. Perhaps you'll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says that when the elves die, they go to Valinor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison. 

So God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus; he engineered the circumstances of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire. 

On the other hand, on Dr Craig's account, your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus on Death Row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he's going to spend an eternity in heaven, after death. One thing should be crystal clear to you, this vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.

Please notice the double standard that people like Dr Craig use to exonerate God from all this evil. We're told that God is kind and loving and just and intrinsically good, but when someone like me points out the rather compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that God is mysterious. Who can understand God's will? This merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. If something good happens to a Christian, he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive changes in his life, then we're told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents' arms and drowned, we're told that God is mysterious. This is how you [Christians] play tennis without the net. 

And I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome, when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. This kind of faith is the perfection of narcissism; God loves me, don't you know? He cured me of my eczema. He makes me feel so good while singing in church. And just when we were giving up hope he found a banker who was willing to give my mother a mortgage. Given all that this God of yours doesn't accomplish in the lives of others, given the misery that's being imposed on some helpless child at this instance, this kind of faith is obscene. To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently for the suffering of other human beings. 

And if God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery; why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft? Now, of course, there are ways of not taking these questions to heart. According to Dr Craig's Divine Command theory, God is not bound by moral duties, God does not have to be good, whatever He commands is good, so whenever He commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behaviour becomes intrinsically good because He commanded it.

Here we're being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude. Psychotic because it's completely delusional, there is no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled over by an invisible monster, Yahweh. But is is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the well-being of human beings, that so easily rationalises the slaughter of children.

I should point out here that the well-being of humans is being ignored by theists in this world, because of the pre-occupation with the afterlife, for which there is absolutely no evidence.

Just think about the Muslims, at this moment, who are blowing themselves up convinced that they are agents of God's will. There is absolutely nothing that Dr Craig can say against their behaviour in moral terms apart from his own faith based claim that they're praying to the wrong God.

If they had the right God what they were doing would be good, on Divine Command theory.

Now, I'm obviously not saying that Dr Craig or religious people are all psychopaths and psychotic, but this to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own. if you wake up tomorrow morning, thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you've lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you're just a Catholic.

A good demonstration of how religion legitimises ridiculous beliefs.

And I'm not the first person to notice that it's a very strange loving God that would make salvation depend on believing in him on bad evidence. If you lived two thousand years ago, there was evidence galore and he was just performing miracles but apparently he got tired of being so helpful. And so now we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrine's implausibility, and the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and what we know about the all too human origins of scripture, it becomes more and more difficult. It's not just the generic God that Dr Craig is recommending, it's God the Father and Jesus the Son. Christianity, on Dr Craig's account, is the true moral wealth of the world.

I hate to break it to you here at Notre Dame: Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion that repudiates human sacrifice, it is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son - John 3:16. The idea is that Jesus suffered crucifixion so none may suffer hell. Except those billions in India. And billions like them throughout history.

This doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. We come from people who used to bury children in the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods. Just think about that. In vast numbers of societies, people would bury children in postholes, people like ourselves thinking that this would prevent an invisible being from knocking down their buildings. These are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible.

If there is a less moral framework than the one Dr Craig is proposing, I haven't heard of it.

Well said, Sam, imho.

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A Compliant Quisling?

So the Astronomer Royal has won this year's Templeton Prize, worth a cool £1,000,000.

Sir Martin Rees has given this interview to The Guardian, and it contains some interesting quotes. He says he doesn't have a view on what the Templeton Prize achieves. When pushed, he says:

They are very nice people who are doing things which are within their agenda, but their agenda is really very broad. I should say that I was reassured by the rather good piece in Nature a few weeks ago, which talked about the Foundation and I found that reassuring. Certainly Cambridge University, I know, has received grants from Templeton for editing Darwin's correspondence, which is a big Cambridge project, and also for some mathematical conferences. They support a range of purely scientific issues.

This is a rather disappointing comment. It suggests that because people are nice, their agenda doesn't matter. Certainly Templeton's agenda is broad, in the sense that it tries to affect a wide range of disciplines, but it's not broad in its world view. It looks to encourage theism and spirituality, and, more worryingly, it looks to insert faith into scientific work. That should worry Rees. For example, he also says:

...I think doing science makes me realise that even the simplest things are pretty hard to understand and that makes me suspicious of people who believe they've got anything more than an incomplete and metaphorical understanding of any deep aspect of reality. And also I see human beings as not the culmination, but only a stage in the marvellous unfolding of evolution, because the timeline ahead is as long as the time that has lapsed up to now. Those are respects in which my professional interests affect my response to dogmatic religion.

That's well said, and works against faith and the idea that we can have a divine access to the truth, a heavenly broadband connection. Indeed, dogmatic religion is something of a tautology, certainly in the Western tradition. He goes on:

I won't comment on him [Dawkins!], but I'm not allergic to religion. I would say two things. One is that I think all of us are concerned about fanaticism and fundamentalism and we need all the allies we can muster against it. And I would see Rowan Williams et al as being on our side. I admire them more than want to rubbish them. 

Rowan Williams on our side? What about the Pope? These people preach misogynistic and homophobic lies for dogmatic reasons, so it's difficult to see how they could be on the side of any right-thinking person. But, of course, they may be nice people for a cup of tea and a sit down, so that's all right then. I'm happy to say that I'm allergic to misogyny and homophobia.

Another point is if you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school and you tell them they can't have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science. So those are two respects where I would disagree with the emphasis of the professional atheists, as it were.

'Professional' atheists don't say that people cannot believe in God and Darwin; plainly they can. They say that the science is incompatible with most of the claims of the major religions. which is a fact unless one is prepared to indulge in the sort of epistemological relativism that leaves us impotent to move forward. I wonder if Rees can think of a downside to saying that they can have God and Darwin?

Rees does betray some militant tendencies:

Science teachers have to address them [Creationism and ID]  if they are brought up, but I am rather opposed to faith schools in general.

That strikes me as quite strident. But he says further:

Interviewer: If there is a clear and obvious boundary between science and religion, how does religion come to be used in these contexts?

MR: I try to avoid getting into these science and religion debates.

He's avoided these debates to the tune of £1,000,000!

But, of course, he hasn't avoided them; he's accommodated, as you can see from the replies immediately before this one. Now, I don't see that there is anything he's done other than a little light accommodation to warrant the prize, so there's no corruption of science here. He's just a good scientist who believes a little in belief, and I dare say always has, regardless of Templeton. Before talking about the science he says:

I am sorry you focused on science and religion rather than what I think are the interesting things I do. 

A rather naive thing to say when you've just banked a large sum of money for accommodating religion. It would be a shame indeed if this overshadowed his science.

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Cross Purposes

The European court of Human Rights has allowed an appeal by Italy to allow the display of crucifixes in public schools. The judgement can be read here.

I think this is about where the line is drawn for member states to reinforce their cultural worldview. Religion should be disallowed, because a plurality of beliefs is inevitable in a modern Europe, so a religious component would be an unacceptable infringement of minority rights. This is the secular way, and these European organs are supposed to be secular. Sadly, the court here has ruled to allow such an infringement. Here are paras 67 and 68:

67. The Government, for their part, explained that the presence of crucifixes in State-school classrooms, being the result of Italy's historical development, a fact which gave it not only a religious connotation but also an identity-linked one, now corresponded to a tradition which they considered it important to perpetuate. They added that, beyond its religious meaning, the crucifix symbolised the principles and values which formed the foundation of democracy and western civilisation, and that its presence in classrooms was justifiable on that account.
68. The Court takes the view that the decision whether or not to perpetuate a tradition falls in principle within the margin of appreciation of the respondent State. The Court must moreover take into account the fact that Europe is marked by a great diversity between the States of which it is composed, particularly in the sphere of cultural and historical development. It emphasises, however, that the reference to a tradition cannot relieve a Contracting State of its obligation to respect the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Convention and its Protocols.

So Italy point out that the crucifix is an 'identity-linked' symbol, clearly trying to get round the secular problem. The next para rules that it's within Italy's 'margin of appreciation'. In other words, it's something that the member state can rule on, presumably because they accept that it is not a purely religious symbol, and, in any case, they see no evidence it has any (religious?) effect.

Look at the crucifix above, at St James Academy, Lenexa, Kansas. It's designed to make an impact:

When asked to describe her first reaction to the new crucifix at St. James Academy, Mrs. Nearmyer said, “Wow. How would I explain it? Sadness, I had a hard time breathing, it took my breath away.” She felt like she couldn’t leave Him alone with his suffering, and was overcome with sadness.

No kidding.

The dissenting opinion starts at page 47, observing:

5. The crucifix is undeniably a religious symbol. The respondent Government argued that, in the context of the school environment, the crucifix symbolised the religious origin of values that had now become secular, such as tolerance and mutual respect. It thus fulfilled a highly educational symbolic function, irrespective of the religion professed by the pupils, because it was the expression of an entire civilisation and universal values. In my view, the presence of the crucifix in classrooms goes well beyond the use of symbols in particular historical contexts. The Court has moreover held that the traditional nature, in the social and historical sense, of a text used by members of parliament when swearing loyalty did not deprive the oath to be sworn of its religious nature. As observed by the Chamber, negative freedom of religion is not restricted to the absence of religious services or religious education. It also extends to symbols expressing a belief or a religion. That negative right deserves special protection if it is the State which displays a religious symbol and dissenters are placed in a situation from which they cannot extract themselves. Even if it is accepted that the crucifix can have multiple meanings, the religious meaning still remains the predominant one. In the context of state education it is necessarily perceived as an integral part of the school environment and may even be considered as a powerful external symbol. I note, moreover, that even the Italian Court of Cassation rejected the argument that the crucifix symbolised values independent of a particular religious belief (see paragraph 67). 

...and concludes:

8. To conclude, effective protection of the rights guaranteed by Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 and Article 9 of the Convention requires States to observe the strictest denominational neutrality. This is not limited to the school curriculum, but also extends to “the school environment”. As primary and secondary schooling are compulsory, the State should not impose on pupils, against their will and without their being able to extract themselves, the symbol of a religion with which they do not identify. In doing so, the respondent Government have violated Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 and Article 9 of the Convention.

I agree with the dissenting opinion. On the plus side, for Eurosceptics, it shows that European institutions are quite happy to leave such things to the discretion of its members. It's a shame that it's secularism that suffers from such discretion. And of course, for that reason, this isn't good news for the religious, since it means that majority religious institutions will trump minority ones. Evangelicals in Italy have spotted this:

Their coreligionists – evangelicals who actually live in Italy – aren’t so pleased with the outcome. The Italian Federation of Evangelical Churches called the ruling “a decision that does not fully realize a secular state” and “baggage from a society dominated by Catholic culture.”

Perhaps these abuses of secularism will finally convince the religious why secularism is the only way to proceed in our modern pluralist societies.

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There's a Ruse Loose Aboot this Hoose

Michael 'rhymes with goose' Ruse has written a tragic bit of hyperbole over at the Chronicle of Higher Education: New Atheism: A Disaster Comparable to the Tea Party.

What's this? A disaster comparable to the Tea Party?

Do the New Atheists deny science, like Tea Party-ists? Er no.

Do the New Atheists have racist views, like Tea Party-ists? Er, no.

Are they organised in a way designed to achieve political office, like the Tea Party movement, to impose their anti-science, bigoted, libertarian views on the rest of their society? Er, no

So how are they "a disaster comparable to the Tea Party"?

... because they won’t make any effort to think seriously about why they hold their positions about the conflict between science and religion.

That's it? No bodies buried in concrete? No Stalin-like accusations? It seems an oddly esoteric concern with which to brow-beat them. And he backs this assertion up with... nothing; but a vague accusation:

I think if you want to show that science and religion are inherently in contradiction, then you should show why people like Kuhn (and indeed Foucault) are wrong about the nature of science. That I think is morally wrong, namely taking positions with major political and social implications, without doing your serious homework. Just mentioning Galileo’s troubles with the Church or Thomas Henry Huxley’s debate with the Bishop of Oxford is no true substitute for hard thinking.

He doesn't make explicit here his criticism, but perhaps it's that a defining feature of the New Atheists is that they haven't thought through the implications of scientific contingency as it affects the science and religion conflict; that, presumably something rather relativistic must allow that science and religion are ideas competing in the ocean of human ideas, and one cannot be given primacy over the other.

Richard Dawkins has written The God Delusion to counter popular ideas of God and The Greatest Show on Earth to combat creationist misrepresentations of evolution. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Daniel Dennett wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea, examining the implications for religion of the science of Evolution. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Sam Harris has written The Moral Landscape, looking at a scientific approach to morality. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Christopher Hitchens wrote God is Not Great, looking at the problems religion has caused, and its supposed justifications. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Victor Stenger wrote God: The Failed Hypothesis, detailing how science shows that God does not exist. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Jerry Coyne has started many threads on the compatibility of science and religion. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why he holds his position on the conflict between science and religion.

Ophelia Benson has hosted numerous threads and articles on The Conflict Thesis. This doesn't seem like the actions of someone who hasn't thought seriously about why she holds her position on the conflict between science and religion.

Now they all may be wrong (although I agree with them). But it is simply untrue that they haven't 'thought seriously' about the conflict between science and religion.

So first he compares the New Atheists to a genuinely harmful political movement, when they are plainly not causing the same harms as that movement, and then his reason for doing so is a straw man of positively Edward Woodward proportions.

No wonder most atheists consider his views worthless.

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Why Are Jews So Angry?

Rabbi David Wolpe asks Why are Atheists so Angry? Good question. Would it be appropriate to ask why Jews might be angry too?

John's Gospel says:

42 Jesus said unto them [the Jews], If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.
43 Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.
44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do: he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
45 And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.

'Ye are of your father the devil'. Jesus says the Jews are the spawn of the devil.

Justinian Law in the 6th century outlawed non-belief in the resurrection, rendering Jewish belief illegal. St Augustine said:

But the Jews who slew Him, and would not believe in Him, because it behoved Him to die and rise again, were yet more miserably wasted by the Romans, and utterly rooted out from their kingdom, where aliens had already ruled over them, and were dispersed through the lands (so that indeed there is no place where they are not), and are thus by their own Scriptures a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.

Blood libel became commonplace, as Christians persecuted Jewish communities nonsensically. Socrates Scholasticus reported that some Jews in a drunken frolic bound a Christian child on a cross in mockery of the death of Christ and scourged him until he died.

In 1171, Blois was the site of a blood libel accusation against its Jewish community that led to 31 Jews (by some accounts 40) being burned to death.

Thomas of Cantimpré wrote "It is quite certain that the Jews of every province annually decide by lot which congregation or city is to send Christian blood to the other congregations." Thomas also believed that since the time when the Jews called out to Pontius Pilate, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:25), they have been afflicted with hemorrhages." - Bonum Universale de Apibus ii. 29, § 23

In February 1840, at Damascus, a Catholic monk named Father Thomas and his servant were murdered. The accusation of ritual murder was brought against members of the Jewish community of Damascus.

In 1882, the Jews of the village Tiszaeszlár, Hungary were accused with the ritual murder of a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, Eszter Solymosi. The case was one of the main causes of the rise of antisemitism in the country. The accused persons were eventually acquitted.

In 1928, the Jews of Massena, New York, were falsely accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian girl in the Massena blood libel.

During a speech in 2007, Raed Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, accused Jews of using children's blood to bake bread. "We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children's blood," he said. "Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread."

Accusations of host desecration leveled against Jews were a common pretext for massacres and expulsions throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.

Out of these centuries of Jewish persecution, the Holocaust sent 6 million Jews to their untimely deaths.

Yeah, so, on reflection I've a pretty good idea why Jews, and atheists, are angry at these things. The real question is: why doesn't Rabbi David Wolpe understand this?

H/T Sam Harris.

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Lying for Jesus

I wrote before about the "Tom Johnson" affair, wherein a blog was started by a supposed atheist-butter, bizarrely obsessed with the tone and conduct of new atheists. He indulged in passive-aggressive posting and sock puppetry, and targeted one or two gnu atheists, such as Ophelia Benson. Even after his exposure as a fraud, his identity wasn't revealed.

But Ophelia was on the ball and recently noticed a recognisable signature in the postings of a new commenter called 'Hammill'; she followed up her suspicions, and confirmed it was TJ again.

Because of this perfidy she has also revealed his true identity: Wally Smith, a Grad student at the University of Alabama. And now, Oedipus, who was a catalyst for the original exposure, has presented evidence to show that it seems he is a theist, or at least, contra TJ, was brought up Christian, and Ophelia confirms it.

I suppose one shouldn't be surprised at such immoral behaviour from a theist, but it's indicative of the lengths at least one is prepared to go to, if this is true, to attack new atheism. This is subterfuge on a pretty staggering scale. I guess we should be relieved it's just cyber-terrorism, however. I'm afraid I see a logical connection between belief in salvation after death and this sort of behaviour. When a person prioritises eternal happiness over earthly happiness, action dilemmas will be resolved against the best outcome in this world, in favour of the other (non-existent, as it happens) world. We see this in the actions of theists around the world, in support of doctrine over good sense.

I've always assumed a certain number of atheist-butters are in fact theists and I guess it's to be expected. In future, however, I think well known atheist bloggers will be on the lookout for anonymous commenters who seem oh-so-keen to cosy up to the faithful; without provenance, from now on it must be assumed they could well be believers.

In the meantime, file this under 'theism doesn't make theists behave well'.

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