Well, Templeton got its money’s worth out of overpaid Ron Rosenbaum. He’s already hard at work saying how horrible “new” atheists are. Man, $15,000 and two weeks in Cambridge all expenses paid and a library’s worth of new books, all to kick the “new” atheists, when so many people are willing to do it for fifty bucks! Templeton is nothing if not generous.

I think it’s time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they

I was looking for something else, and stumbled on a blog post commenting on my post on atheism and reasons.

It’s one thing to have reasons to be an atheist (I do) and a Jew (I do), another thing altogether to adopt some level of “observance.” You can have good reasons to be an atheist, and other good reasons not to be observant–i.e. not to focus on it, talk about it a lot, promote it.

Yes but I wasn’t talking about being observant, I was talking about not pretending not to have reasons. I was talking about treating one’s atheism as if it were accidental, for the purpose of othering atheists. I wasn’t saying or suggesting that one … Read the rest

More Vatican rage at being treated like people as opposed to quasi-gods.

On the same day that Belgian police raided church offices to seize documents in a sex abuse probe, the Vatican found itself in the courts of another country, this time the United States, trying to fend off attempts to interrogate the pope and other senior Vatican officials in another case involving clerical sexual abuse.

Vatican attorneys filed a brief on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Kentucky in the case of O’Bryan v. Holy See, opposing requests from lawyers representing three sex abuse victims for depositions of four figures at the very top of the church’s power structure…

Ratzinger, “the Vatican’s Secretary of State” (whatever the … Read the rest

Remember that post about anonymous blogging? Now it can be told – the blog in question was called You’re Not Helping, and it has now flamed out – though that of course does not mean that the blogger is not still blogging somewhere else, and in fact I think it is. But it has at least admitted that it was one person and not several, and that many of its “commenters” were sock puppets. It has admitted that much of what it claimed was flatly untrue, which means it has informed us that everything it claimed could be untrue. I know from personal knowledge that a lot of it is – much of what it claimed about me is … Read the rest

The Telegraph tells us

In a move designed to stress a commitment to the Catholic Church, the Coalition has decided that the former Conservative MP would represent a suitably high-profile appointment.

Why does the Coalition want to stress a commitment to the Catholic Church? Seriously – why? The Lib-Dems have no particular love for religion in general or the Catholic church in particular, that I know of, and the Tories are more likely to be friendly to the Church Established, aren’t they? And right at this current immediate now point in time, the Catholic church is not looking like a particularly respectable institution, so why does the Coalition want to stress a commitment to it? It’s a nasty child-raping law-avoiding … Read the rest

The pope and the Vatican are trying even harder to get the whole world outside “the Holy See” to loathe and despise them for their passionate selfishness and territorialism and their shocking, persistent, hardened inability to take the real and horrendous damage done to Other People more seriously than minor inconveniences to themselves.

Pope Benedict has joined mounting Vatican criticism of raids by Belgian police investigating alleged child sex abuse, calling them “deplorable”…Pope Benedict’s criticism of the raids came in a message of support to Brussels Archbishop Andre Joseph Leonard, the head of the Belgian bishops’ conference. “I want to express, dear brother in the Episcopate, as well as to all the Bishops of Belgium, my closeness and solidarity in