Atheist good, believer bad? Lots of books on the best-seller lists would have you think so of late. But it’s never as clear cut as that – especially when some atheists are becoming as shrill as the fundamentalists they decry.
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The new breed of atheist writers will present the same tired old arguments, again and again. They will pick the same easy targets – the Catholic Church's chequered past, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the most repressive of Islamic states, fundamentalist-driven (or rationalised, rather) terrorism, priests' sexual abuse of choirboys, those silly televangelists, and, of course, George W. Bush getting his orders to invade another country from his conversations with God.
Guardian Online blogger Theo Hobson put it best: “I consider the atheist's desire to generalise about religion to be a case of intellectual cowardice. The intellectual coward is one who chooses simplicity over complexity and difficulty. The militant atheist chooses to uphold a worldview of Animal Farm crudity: atheist good, believer bad. He has to believe this; it is his claim to the moral high ground.”
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Author and journalist Hitchens writes that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
Can't imagine why someone would describe Wiccans as being “contemptuous of women”. (Wicca is a religion many describe as witchcraft and its followers are considered to be very women-centric.)
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