Spirit of benevolence undermined

There’s a review of 50 Great Myths About Atheism at the MIT newspaper The Tech. The author, Roberto Perez-Franco, is oddly unsympathetic to the whole idea – or maybe I’m the one who’s odd. I like the enterprise of collecting misconceptions and then saying what’s wrong with them, but Perez-Franco seems not to.

The authors deserve recognition for their exhaustive efforts of documentation. Personally, I feel for them. They dug through piles of writings and utterances from the likes of Dinesh D’Souza, acting as if such nonsense was worthy of a serious response, and then went point by point through the material to provide a thoughtful and rational response. This undertaking must have been masochistic, but it was necessary. Blackford and Schüklenk were compelled to catalog and refute these claims in order to “encourage more fairness to atheists,” which, as they report, “constitute the most disliked among marginalized groups” in the U.S.

Just in the US? They surely didn’t restrict themselves to the US; Udo is in Canada (and from Germany) while Russell is in Australia. Anyway I doubt that the undertaking was masochistic. It can be interesting digging through piles of nonsense.

But then he goes right off the rails.

I do think, however, that the spirit of benevolence toward atheists that the book presumably pursues is undermined by the unfortunate inclusion in the book of a series of comics from “Jesus & Mo” peppered throughout the text. These cartoons depict the founding figures of Abrahamic religions having tongue-in-cheek philosophical and religious conversations in what I only care to describe as less than kosher settings, and with not necessarily pious intentions. Regardless of whether the cartoons are funny or clever, a book that seeks to combat prejudices against atheists should, in my opinion, be more careful in its choice of tone, lest they undo some of their hard work for the sake of cheap laughs.

I have been an atheist for a long time, and criticizing a particular choice of a particular book does not make me a closet deist While I praise the authors’ efforts to bring greater understanding to the general public about what atheism is and is not, I regret they lacked the good judgment to do so through a book that showed to others the same respect and benevolence they are hoping to inspire in the general public’s perception of atheists.