Author: Ophelia Benson

Doesn’t Scientology sound attractive. All you have to do if you want to be a scientologist is sign away all your rights, including the right to earn the minimum wage. Then if you leave or they kick you out – you have to give them some money.

7. BREACH OF COVENANT. If a staff member . . . breaks his agreement either by leaving staff before completing his commitment [either 2 1/2 or 5 years] or by violating his good standing as a Scientology staff member so that he is dismissed in accordance with policy, he or she shall remit forthwith to the Church a penance for violation of this covenant in accordance with the ecclesiastical policy of the Church…

Heads they win tails you lose. They don’t have to pay you the legal minimum, but you have to pay them if you want to leave (like for instance in order to get a job that pays the legal minimum). Take take take on their side, give give give on yours.

I can’t see what could possibly go wrong, can you?

The Economist has more sense than some people I could mention

It’s hardly a new charge against atheists, but it has come up again several times recently in the blogosphere: that today’s secularists, atheists, anti-theists and whatnot, including the publicly active ones, are “just as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists”…This trope needs to be laughed out of existence, immediately.

I’ve been working on it. Backup is welcome.

On one hand you have faith that makes people fly planes into buildings, genitally mutilate young girls, murder abortion doctors (in church), stone adultresses, outlaw certain forms of consensual sex or even just make it impossible to buy beer on Sunday in some states. On the other hand there is the atheist “faith” that makes people write smug op-eds, put ads on buses, file frivolous lawsuits against nativity scenes on public property, and the like. Show me what harm in the world a prominent atheist intellectual has done.

They make all the normal non-intellectual non-atheist people hate science! That’s what. Atheists make people hate science. It’s the new discovery of the year, which was revealed by…by…well I don’t know what it was revealed by, but revealed it was, so that answers that question. That’s what harm in the world a prominent atheist intellectual has done. Ask anyone.

Until god does prove the atheists wrong with an indisputable miracle and Messrs Harris, Dawkins and Dennett still cling to their atheism, fundamentalist religion and “fundamentalist” atheism cannot be put on the same footing. And until those al-Darwinia brigades arrive and start beheading people, “fundamentalist” is a slander against atheist journalists and academics whose sharpest weapon is a pen.

Thank you.