It looks like New Atheism has gone past its "sell by" date.

Mocking and attacking Christianity is one thing, but do that to Islam and you are exiled from the Bonum Gens of Right Thinking Secularity.

//On Friday, it became official: The New Atheists are no longer welcome on the left. Battered, condemned, and disinvited, these godless and once-favored “public intellectuals” are now homeless, spurned by their erstwhile progressive allies.

Richard Dawkins, the famously skeptical evolutionary biologist, was the last shoe to drop. He was disinvited from a speaking engagement at Berkeley because his “comments about Islam” had “offended and hurt . . . so many people,” according to the event’s organizers.

Dawkins is in good company. His New Atheist compatriots, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, had already been expelled from the party. In both cases, insufficient deference to Islam was the proximate cause. Hitchens remained a committed socialist, but felt a war on Islamic terror and autocracy was needed. For this, he was denounced as a “neocon.” Harris is a liberal, straight and true, but drew the ire of Reza Aslan for refusing to except Islam from his broad critique of religion. “Islam is not a religion of peace,” Harris often says. In fact, he thinks it’s just the opposite. For that, everyone from Glen Greenwald to Ben Affleck has cast him as an Islamophobe and a bigot.//

Experimental confirmation.

Speaking hatefully about Christianity results in applause for "daring" and "provocative" thought.

Speaking hatefully about Islam results in speech suppression for "hate" and "bigotry."

Same speaker, same speech, different targets.

Sweet Baby Dawks - 

Super-leftist KPFA cancels Richard Dawkins speech in Berkeley because Dawkins said hateful things about Muslims.

//Richard Dawkins has a new collection of essays coming out next month in a book called Science in the Soul. Naturally, he’ll be visiting the U.S. on a book tour.

One of the stops was going to be in Berkeley, California on August 9. It was sponsored by KPFA, a progressive radio station in the area, in a city known for being the hotbed of liberal activism.

But that talk has now been canceled.

While that website doesn’t offer any reason for the cancellation, Jerry Coyne notes that people who had bought tickets received a more detailed email with this explanation:

We regret to inform you that KPFA has canceled our event with Richard Dawkins. We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt — in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people.

KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech. While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologize for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins views much earlier. We also apologize to all those inconvenienced by this cancellation. Your ticket purchases will automatically be refunded by Brown Paper Tickets.

The world’s most famous atheist criticized Islam and upset people… so he can’t give a talk about science? It’s a ridiculous reason that gets even more absurd when you consider the source.//

Newsflash! Dawkins says hateful things about Catholics, Evangelicals, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, etc., etc., but you don't see any of those getting super-leftists to cancel speeches. The only person Dawkins hasn't said hateful things about is his old teacher who molested him as a child.

So, leftist atheist canceled by leftist media in the interests of diversity.

This is pure insanity.

An "atta boy" for Richard Dawkins...

...but remember it takes five "atta boys" to erase one "don't be a knucklehead" as my father always liked to point out.

This does seem to be against his policy of mercilessly mocking religion rather than engaging it.

//The decision prompted an angry response from the church, which warned of a chilling effect on free speech. Many expressed support for its position including Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist best known for excoriating religions.

He told the Guardian: “My immediate response was to tweet that it was a violation of freedom of speech. But I deleted it when respondents convinced me that it was a matter of commercial judgment on the part of the cinemas, not so much a free speech issue. I still strongly object to suppressing the ads on the grounds that they might ‘offend’ people. If anybody is ‘offended’ by something so trivial as a prayer, they deserve to be offended.”//

A surprising show of free-thinking from a "free-thinker."

Darwinists for Eugenics...

...Eugenics is not only for Social Darwinists any more.

Richard Dawkins advocates "aborting and trying again" with respect to the unborn diagnosed with Down's Syndrome.

Thoughtful.

Atheism - A Belief System for the Comfortable and Unafflicted.

Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those who have done well.

I look back at my 16-year-old self and see Preacher Man and his listeners differently. I look at the fragile women praying and see a mother working a minimum wage custodial job, trying to raise three children alone. Her children’s father off drunk somewhere. I look at the teenager fingering a small cross and see a young woman, abused by a father addicted to whatever, trying to find some moments of peace. I see Preacher Man himself, living in a beat up shack without electricity, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little.

They found hope where they could.

I want to go back to that 16-year-old self and tell him to shut up with the “see how clever I am attitude”. I want to tell him to appreciate how easy he had it, with a path out. A path to riches.

I also see Richard Dawkins differently. I see him as a grown up version of that 16-year-old kid, proud of being smart, unable to understand why anyone would believe or think differently from himself. I see a person so removed from humanity and so removed from the ambiguity of life that he finds himself judging those who think differently.

I see someone doing what he claims to hate in others. Preaching from a selfish vantage point.

When Richard Dawkins has lost Newsweek....

...live by publicity, die the death of a thousand cuts by publicity

Richard Dawkins: Pedophilia’s OK

A little pedophilia is fine, says Richard Dawkins. In an interview with the Times magazine, the English ethologist and famed atheist says past stories of touching children shouldn’t be condemned. Dawkins bases his hideous assertion on his own experience of his headmaster putting “his hands inside my shorts.” The event, Dawkins says, didn't cause “lasting harm,” so it should be dismissed. “I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it,” he said. The Internet is, understandably, in an uproar about the comments—which child welfare specialists have deemed outrageous.

The Daily Beast is Newsweek's internet presence.  Newsweek is a reliably leftist/liberal American media outlet.  The writers for Newsweek are reliably anti-religious secularists.

But they, too, are going after Dawkins.

Clearly, the Dawk has "jump the shark."

Man bites dog...

...Muslim calls atheist a "zealot."

The morning we meet, Richard Dawkins has tweeted a suggestion that Muslims haven’t achieved much of note since the Middle Ages. “I’m not interested in Richard Dawkins,” says Aslan who hadn’t seen the tweet – possibly because he was busy retweeting all the death threats he receives. “I find him to be a buffoon, embarrassing himself every day. This is a guy who said: ‘I’ve never read the Qur’an’, but often says that Islam is the greatest force of evil in the world. He’s the worst kind of zealot.”

I'm disappointed in the Dawk.

Any religious person can be involved in fraud because "it takes religion to make people do evil," but I expected so much better from people who were so much more evolved than 99.9% of humanity.

The Dawkins Foundation collects $1 million for educating people on science, but spends only $10k for that purpose.

Talk about your raw courage!

Dawkins bravely tells muslims that being brought up Catholic is worse than being abused by a Catholic priest:

//In the earlier interview, he claimed  he had been told by a woman that while being abused by a priest was a ‘yucky’ experience, being told as a child that a Protestant friend who died would ‘roast in Hell’ was more distressing. 

In remarks to Qatar-based TV network Al Jazeera, he said: ‘Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.’ 

Interviewer Mehdi Hasan asked: ‘You believe that being bought up as a Catholic is worse than being abused by a priest?’

The only way he could have been any braver was by telling Muslims about the Jewish blood libel.

Dawkins knows how to suck up to an audience.

Socialism is for the little people - 

Leftist professors form elite private university for wealthy folk - 

Dear Professor Grayling, 

I was sorry to hear about your spot of bother at Foyles last night, but can't say I'm surprised. Being shouted down in public by left-wing zealots is the fate of anyone who challenges the educational establishment I'm afraid. Their allegiance to the status quo isn't based on reason, but on tribal loyalty. Public education is the last redoubt of the hard left and their student praetorian guard will stop at nothing to defend their turf. Their aim is not to persuade you of the errors of your ways, but to terrorise you into renouncing your heretical ideas. They are the secular equivalent of the Taliban's goon squads. They see their role as the prevention of vice and the promotion of virtue. 

Your proposal for a new, elite, private university is particularly infuriating for these knee-jerk tribalists because they thought of you as one of them – a "pinko", in your words. You're now an apostate, the lowest of the low. To make matters worse, you've recruited dozens of other lefties to join you in this venture – Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Steve Jones,  Sir Christopher Ricks, Sir David Cannadine … it's a pinkos hall of fame! Then your dazzling coup de grâce: you're going to charge students £18,000 a year, double the maximum allowable at public universities. That's like pulling up in your Bentley in front of a group of anti-cuts protestors, rolling down the window and flipping them the bird.

Richard Dawkins proves, once again, that it is easier - and "brighter" - to criticize religions that don't issue fatwas.

Dawkins tempers his criticism of the God of the Koran:

In a recent Al-Jazeerah interview, Richard Dawkins was asked his views on God. He argued that the god of "the Old Testament" is "hideous" and "a monster", and reiterated his claim from The God Delusion that the God of the Torah is the most unpleasant character "in fiction". Asked if he thought the same of the God of the Koran, Dawkins ducked the question, saying: "Well, um, the God of the Koran I don't know so much about."

How can it be that the world's most fearless atheist, celebrated for his strident opinions on the Christian and Jewish Gods, could profess to know so little about the God of the Koran? Has he not had the time? Or is Professor Dawkins simply demonstrating that most crucial trait of his species: survival instinct.

To answer the question, it is worth considering recent events in Denmark. In Copenhagen, on 5th February, a well-known critic of Islam - in the same way Professor Dawkins is a critic of Judaism and Christianity - narrowly survived an attempted assassination.

Lars Hedegaard is a journalist, historian and founder of the Free Press Society. After the worldwide uproar caused by the Danish Mohammed cartoons in 2005 he became the foremost defender of the rights of Danish writers and artists to express their opinions without fear of intimidation and murder.

Since the cartoons affair there have been numerous plots by Islamist extremists to kill politicians, editors and others. On New Year's Day 2010, one of the cartoonists, Kurt Westergaard, was visited at his home by a Somali-trained Islamist who attempted to ritually decapitate him with an axe. Westergaard escaped to the "panic room" which the security forces had installed in his house.

This month it was Hedegaard's turn. A ring at his front door bell revealed a "Muslim-looking" immigrant dressed as a postman. The young man fired at the 70-year-old's head from less than a yard. The bullet missed. Hedegaard punched his opponent who dropped his gun, picked it up, aimed and fired again at his head. The gun jammed and the man ran off.

The attack was fleetingly mentioned on the BBC's website, by the Associated Press and a few other outlets. But otherwise there was silence. That is, apart from the Scandinavian media who have in substantial parts - especially in Sweden - managed to blame Hedegaard for the attack. Hedegaard was repeatedly described simply as "a critic of Islam". So he brought it on himself, you see. Should have known better. Ought to have learned the cartoonist's lesson. One Swedish paper - sounding more Saudi or Iranian than Swedish - even called Hedegaard "an enemy of Islam". Who knew that this was already a crime?

Professor Dawkins is not an enemy of Jews or Christians. He is a critic of their religions. Lars Hedegaard is not an enemy of Muslims. He is a critic of aspects of the Islamic religion. If Professor Dawkins were murdered tomorrow by an Orthodox Jew the world would be unlikely to ignore the event. And I suspect that they would be unlikely to blame the victim rather than his assailant.

For over a decade, Richard Dawkins has sought out venue after venue to expound on his thesis that there is a straight line between a belief in God and every evil that has best mankind.  Yet when asked about the God of the one religion that has adherents - you know - actually fargin' executing people in His name, he becomes agnostic???????

So, Richard Dawkins doesn't think that religion is the "root of all evil," he just thinks that religions that aren't actually killing people are???

What a poseur.

Our favorite socially autistic, delusional, narcissistic athiest chimes in with his typically socially autistic, tone-deaf, pimple on the ass of humanity, human toothache contribution to the faux-issue of the day.

Richard Dawkins: How dare you ask me to retract my tweet about ‘heckling’ incident?

It's not his fault that the media totally invented yet another story to make the enemies of people like Richard Dawkins look bad. (This time the fatuous lie that a father of a Newtown shooting victim was heckled by gun rights activists while testifying in a legislative proceeding.

It's just really convenient.

Who could possibly hate this pimple on the ass of humanity?

Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist...

...says Peter Higgs, the physicist who predicted the Higgs boson in 1963 about Richard Dawkins.

Higgs also takes on one of Dawkins' other bete noirs:

In the El Mundo interview, Higgs argued that although he was not a believer, he thought science and religion were not incompatible. "The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

"But that doesn't end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past."

He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. "I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there's any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two."

Atheist Morality - a morality suitable for silverback gorillas and tenured professors of the public knowledge of Science.

Richard Dawkins defends the idea of having a mistress and lying about it.

Atheist morality is either utterly confusing as a matter of reason or entirely transparent as a matter of original sin. Thus, sometimes atheists want to explain morality as a matter of evolution and natural selection, such as when people do good things for each other altruistically. In such cases, you see, people have no choice because it is to their evolutionary advantage in some wider sense to lay down their life for a complete stranger.

On the other hand, sometimes atheists want us to "rise above" our evolutionary programming, such as when they advocate atheism when it seems obvious that there is a "religious sense" built into human nature. What it means to rise "above" or to "progress" beyond our nature is unclear because such words of directionality imply, well, a direction, and, of course, atheist materialism denies that their is any metaphysical entities such as "above" to rise to. On the atheist account, "progress" and "above" are just arbitrary words selected to indicate the idea that "I, Richard Dawkins" approve of this."

And, then, there is this account, where Dawkins rails against monogamy and telling the truth as if those ideals were an ingrained feature of human nature, rather than the tenuous result of social conditioning:

From a Darwinian perspective, sexual jealousy is easily understood. Natural selection of our wild ancestors plausibly favored males who guarded their mates for fear of squandering economic resources on other men's children. On the female side, it is harder to make a Darwinian case for the sort of vindictive jealousy displayed by Mrs. Tarrant. No doubt hindsight could do it, but I want to make a different point. Sexual jealousy may in some Darwinian sense accord with nature, but "Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above." Just as we rise above nature when we spend time writing a book or a symphony rather than devoting our time to sowing our selfish genes and fighting our rivals, so mightn't we rise above nature when tempted by the vice of sexual jealousy?

I, for one, feel drawn to the idea that there is something noble and virtuous in rising above nature in this way. I admit that I have, at times in my life, been jealous, but it is one of the things I now regret. Assuming that such practical matters as sexually transmitted diseases and the paternity of children can be sorted out (and nowadays DNA testing will clinch that for you if you are sufficiently suspicious, which I am not), what, actually, is wrong with loving more than one person? Why should you deny your loved one the pleasure of sexual encounters with others, if he or she is that way inclined? The British writer Julie Burchill is not somebody I usually quote (imagine a sort of intelligent Ann Coulter speaking with a British accent in a voice like Minnie Mouse) but I was struck by one of her remarks. I can't find the exact quote, but it was to the effect that, however much you love your mate (of either sex in the case of the bisexual Burchill) sex with a stranger is almost always more exciting, purely because it is a stranger. An exaggeration, no doubt, but the same grain of truth lurks in Woody Allen's "Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best."

So, jealousy, which presumes fidelity, covenant-keeping and integrity, is a evolutionary appendix that has to be "risen above." But cheating and lying somehow are unaccountable by Darwinian selection?

This is nonsense on stilts. G.K. Chesterton once said it is surprising that people have rejected the doctrine of original sin because it is the only doctrine that can be empirically verified. It is an amazing tribute to the autistic worldview of Dawkins that he doesn't see this.

But sin makes you stupid. Perhaps it is not so surprising that a person with celebrity and groupies and fans, such as Dawkins, finds an attraction to a morality that excuses infidelity and lying. We might say that is a convenient morality.

We might also say that is the kind of morality you get when you appoint yourself the arbiter of morality.

There is no escaping "first philosophy."

Francis Beckwith on Dawkins' inevitable reliance on philosophy:

Second, critics often issue normative judgments that depend on the reasoning of first philosophy. Take, for example, Dawkins’ criticism of the career path of paleontologist Kurt Wise. In The God Delusion, Dawkins laments that even after earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. under the renowned Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Wise did not abandon his belief in young-earth creationism, the view that the first chapters of Genesis should be interpreted literally and that the Bible teaches that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

Although, as I have noted elsewhere, I share Dawkins’ puzzlement with Wise’s tenacity, there is something strangely, and delightfully, non-scientific about Dawkins’ lament. He writes: “I find that terribly sad . . . the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic – pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life's happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. . . . I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.”

This is an odd lament for someone of Dawkins’ philosophical leanings, for he denies that nature, which presumably includes Wise, has within it any intrinsic purposes from which we may draw conclusions about our moral obligations to not frustrating those ends. Dawkins claims that Darwin has shown us that natural teleology of any sort, including intrinsic purpose, is an illusion, and thus maintains that belief in teleology is “childish.” (This, by the way, is rhetorical bluster of the worst sort, since as virtually anyone who has studied the subject knows, Darwinism may count against some versions of design but not all, as Ed Feser, Etienne Gilson, and my former professor, James Sadowsky, S. J., have convincingly argued.)

In order to issue his judgment, Dawkins must know something about the nature of the sort of creature Wise is and the obligations that such a creature has to his natural powers and their proper function. But since Dawkins cannot discover the human being’s intrinsic purposes or our obligations to them by the methods and means of the natural sciences, he opines – when he is not lamenting another person’s life choices – that these purposes and obligations must be illusory and to believe in them childish. Yet Dawkins’ brief against Wise depends on these “childish” illusions.

The key to escaping such counter-intuitive dead-ends is to abandon the failed project that the methods of the natural sciences are the model of rationality for all human endeavors. But don’t just take my word for it. Just observe how Richard Dawkins does not practice what he preaches.

First, click on through to the Gilson book and give me a "helpful" vote.

Second, Dawkins' smuggling of teleology into his life occurs constantly. In one interview he explained that "we’re not put here to be comfortable.” [See this video, at 9:30 minutes.]

"Put here"?

By who?

For a purpose?

So, even Dawkins who claims that he can only "dimly" understand the compartmentalization of the mind in the "rational" and "irrational" cannot escape from teleology.

Dawkins v Pell Debate.

Dawkins' unfortunate social autism is on full display.

Richard Dawkins - Just another atheist whiner.

The script has become a cliche Atheist matches up against theist. Atheist looks like an idiot. Atheist whines to atheist fanbase about how the game was rigged and how he will do so much better next time when the audience is less beastly, he is not so jet lagged and the sky is bluer.

I haven't watched the debate but it sounds like Dawkins stunk up the joing in his "debate" with Cardinal Pell because this time it is Richard Dawkins' turn to explain away his disappointing performance in his "debate" with Cardinal Pell of Australia over at Pharyngula:

richarddawkins

10 April 2012 at 12:48 am

I too was disappointed in this so-called debate. I don’t want to put all the blame on my jet lag (I had spent the whole night on the plane from Los Angeles and, incidentally, missed the whole of Easter Day crossing the Date Line). The two things that really threw me were, first, the astonishing bias of the audience and, second, the interfering chairman.

Right from the start when we were introduced, it was clear that the studio audience was dominated by a Catholic cheer squad. The cheered whenever the Cardinal said anything, however stupid and ignorant. To be fair to the ABC, I am confident that they were not responsible for stacking the audience. I believe it was genuinely first-come-first-served, and I can only think that the Catholics must have got off the mark very swiftly and rallied the troops. Our side just isn’t very good at doing that: perhaps it is one of our more endearing qualities. It was encouraging that the vote of viewers at large came down heavily on our side, to the evident surprise and discomfort of the studio audience.

Such an extreme audience bias was a little off-putting, but it wouldn’t have mattered so much if the chairman had allowed us to have a proper debate instead of continually racing ahead to get in another dopey question. There were times when the Cardinal had doled out more than enough rope to hang himself but then, in the nick of time, the chairman blundered in and rescued him with yet another samey question from the audience. The only time the chairman did a good job was when he pressed the Cardinal on what seemed perilously close to anti-Semitism.

More and more, I am thinking that discussions of this kind are positively ruined by an interfering chairman. That was also true of my encounter with the Archbishop of Canterbury, which could have developed into an interesting conversation but for the meddling chairman who, to make matters worse, was a ‘philosopher’ with special training in obscurantism.

Cardinal Pell had evidently been well prepped, formally briefed (for example with his alleged fact that Darwin called himself a theist on page 92 of his autobiography). I knew it wasn’t true that Darwin was a theist and said so, but I obviously couldn’t counter the “Page 92″, which duly got a cheer from the touchline. I’ve since had a chance to look it up and, as expected, it refers to the way Darwin felt earlier in his life, not his maturity when he said he preferred to call himself ‘agnostic’ because the people “are not yet ripe for atheism”.

Another missed opportunity on my part was when the Cardinal nastily insinuated that I had not read to the end of Lawrence Krauss’s book having written the Foreword. Actually I didn’t write the Foreword, I wrote the Afterword, which suggests that the Cardinal hadn’t read the book. Indeed, the content of what he said suggests that he (or whoever briefed him) had read only the infamous review in the New York Times, again by a philosopher not a scientist.

Altogether an unsatisfactory evening. Much better was the radio interview the following morning, after I had had a night’s sleep and had my wits more properly about me:
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2012/04/bst_20120410_0815.mp3

Richard

I don't doubt that Dawkins was thrown off by adverse audience reaction; his constant need for pandering adoration from his fan-base is palpable, and it's clear that he has been running from William Lane Craig because he knows that Craig will not treat his foolish metaphysical arguments with deference.

Richards Dawkins - jumping the shark.

It sounds like the Great Man has a terminal fear of William Lane Craig.

Patrick Coffin - host of Catholic Answers - invited Dawkins to be a guest of his show. Listen to Coffin's description of the Great Rational One's inoherent response:

I was next.

The video footage may be available at some point, but my main goal was to ask him a yes or no question: would he appear on a top-rated Catholic radio show before an international audience to talk about his atheistic worldview? No debate, no questions about why he refuses to debate his nemesis, Dr. William Lane Craig, no gotcha ambushes.

The crowd went silent and turned from me to Dawkins. After a beat, he began a filibuster about why he would not share the platform with a man who supports genocide (Dawkins has a favorite Bible passage that he thinks proves God is a moral monster — Saul’s commandment to wipe out the Amaleks in 1 Samuel 15), and a longish discourse on the fact that he only debates archbishops and cardinals — including his upcoming Easter Monday debate with George Cardinal Pell. He pointed to the next questioner, but I wanted to make sure his adoring supporters plainly saw that his answer to my public invitation was to refuse the challenge. I went on (I may be misremembering the actual words), “I’m neither a cardinal nor a trained philosopher; just a lowly radio host. And I’m inviting you to have a civil, respectful conversation that gets at the specifics of your atheism. You would have a large audience around the world in which to do so. Yes, or no?”

“I have answered your question sufficiently,” he huffed, to the satisfaction of the crowd. As I was walking back to my seat, someone thought it best to share with me his belief that I am an asshole. In foyer as we were leaving, two T-shirted atheists gave me the eeeevil eye. One announced, CHRISTIANS ARE ASSHOLES, the other ARREST THE POPE, complete with a rat-like caricature of Pope Benedict XVI.

A lot of lerv in that room!

Coffin adds this report about life among Our Intellectual Betters:

The main event enjoyed a decent-sized crowd, in the low 2000s in my layman’s estimate of the size of the ballroom and balcony. It was sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, US Branch and a handful of local secular humanist clubs. Dr. Elisabeth Cornwell and Maine-based politician Sean Faircloth of the above-mentioned Foundation, spoke first. I mentioned the atheist tendency toward angry reactions. Rudeness was in the air from the get-go. Halfway through Mr. Faircloth’s earnest demagoguery, one attendee had had enough and shouted, “We came to hear Richard Dawkins, not Sean Faircloth!” He was promptly booed and hissed until silent. All in all — and I know this may be my pro-theism bias — but the crowd didn’t seem to be having a great time. Apart from the standing O when Dawkins strode center stage, the applause was polite, even tepid. Further, the laughter at the sarcastic digs against religious people and their foolish belief systems seemed pinched, not the rapturous, freely embraced laughter you’d expect when a revered figure talks to his fans. Odd.

The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (aka, the RDFRS-US, and I thought our side had dumb acronyms) is “to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.” Sounds fine to me. But defining terms was not on the agenda last night, nor was making key distinctions. We got instead a marathon of half-truths, classic misrepresentations of theism, standard conflations of Islamic terror with “Christian jihad,” cliched fears of a theocracy that lurks just around the corner — causing what specific damages to atheists was not clear. (I mean, the worst fate that would befall a meeting of Richard Dawkins fans is that a Catholic might show up and ask a question that didn’t begin with, “Doctor Dawkins, you are a real inspiration to me.”) Robert and John Kennedy, along with Martin Luther King, JR, were repeatedly held up as models of secularist leadership. That two were Catholics and one an ordained Christian minister didn’t get in the way of the fiery rhetoric.

Let's have a conversation about religion, spirituality and ethics...

...unless you actually believe that crap.

The USA Today offers a warm and friendly report on the "Reason Rally."

Apparently Richard Dawkins was in typical form:

Dawkins didn't appear until five hours into the event, but few seemed discouraged by the near-constant rain or drizzle. They whistled and cheered for his familiar lines such as:

I don't despise religious people. I despise what they stand for ...

Evolution is not just true, it's beautiful ...

Then Dawkins got to the part where he calls on the crowd not only to challenge religious people but to "ridicule and show contempt" for their doctrines and sacraments, including the Eucharist, which Catholics believe becomes the body of Christ during Mass.

So, even though the USA Today's columnist Cathy Lynn Grossman claims her column is about having a "conversation about religion, spirituality and ethics," she is willing to write a puff piece about people who don't want to have a conversation - they want to show contempt and yell and do anything that communicates their feelings. They certainly weren't willing to debate.

Notice also the anti-Catholic animus of Dawkins - he doesn't single out the Lutherans or the Anglicans, much less Jews or Muslims.

Why is that? Is it because he knows that it is rhetorically acceptable to pick on that one religion out of all the others.

Certainly, in light of the Obama administration's - along with the mainstream press's - jumping on the contraception issue, which can only have been designed to direct public antipathy against Catholics alone, as part of Obama's strategy of division, Dawkins must have gotten the message that it is permissible to target Catholics.

Tolerance is the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

New Atheists - just another fascist political program.