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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