Rabbi Wolpe impugns Dawkins’s status as “world’s leading intellectual”

Liberal Rabbi David Wolpe, who with fellow rabbi Bradley Artson was roundly trounced in a debate with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens over the existence of an afterlife, is butthurt at Prospect Magazine‘s naming of Richard Dawkins as the “world’ leading intellectual.”  To redress his grievance, Wolpe has a piece in this week’s PuffHo questioning […]

Charlotte, North Carolina proclaims “Day of Reason”

In honor of my visit*—I’m flying into Charlotte today (see post above)—the mayor of that city has officially proclaimed a “Day of Reason.” Anthony Foxx, current mayor but nominated by President Obama to be the next Secretary of Transportation, issued the following decree: Read that thing! A more secular document you couldn’t find! There’s no reference […]

PuffHo: Richard Dawkins may not be a racist, but he’s xenophobic

When you see an article called, “Is Richard Dawkins a racist?“, you’ll know by now to expect an affirmative answer. But not in this case!  The article in question is in Huffington Post, and is by Usaama al-Azami, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. al-Azami uses the Oxford English Dictionary definition […]

Why are we atheists so angry?

The latest cartoon at The Atheist Pig (click on the link, too, so the cartoonist gets some hits): h/t: Michael

Atheist Peter Higgs decries the name “God particle”

It’s time for everyone to stop calling the Higgs boson the “God Particle”. For one thing, it seems to have been publisher’s trick to boost sales of a physics book by Leon Lederman (here at UC) and Dick Teresi. As the Telegraph reports, Lederman wrote in the book “God particle”: “This boson is so central […]

The ultimate dumb atheist-bashing article

As you know if you’ve followed this site for the past two months or so, the media have taken it upon themselves to declare the end of the Era of New Atheism. The time of the Four Horseman is gone, they say. Dawkins is now irrelevant, and New Atheism is giving sway to a kinder, […]

Big fun today!

UPDATE:  P. Hitchens’s post is up, “The leagee of the militant godless strikes back” (LOL!). It’s more or less as expected, and I have nothing to say about it except this:  this man should learn the first lesson of being a literary figure, which is to avoid responding to criticism unless you have a very […]

The bad seed: Peter Hitchens blames atheism for Stalin and Hitler

We needn’t go over this dumb anti-atheist argument again, except to note in passing that Peter Hitchens, the One Who Went Wrong, has an extremely MILITANT column in the Mail Online called “Atheism kills, persecutes, and destroys. Wicked things are done in its name.“  This man obviously has no sense of nuance. That’s also evident […]

New attacks on New Atheists (and one defense)

I have neither the heart nor the time to reprise or analyze the latest salvo of attacks on New Atheists, so I’ll just list them here (with a brief quote from each) if you’re interested. These have, in fact, all appeared in the last few days, so something is afoot. As a palliative, there’s one […]

Playing the “Islamophobia” card

Sam Harris is peeved, and rightly so.  Two recent articles, one in Salon by Nathan Lean and the other in Al-Jazeera online by Murtaza Hussain, have mounted nasty (and misguided) attacks on New Atheism because of its perceived “Islamophobia.” I’ve previously dissected Lean’s piece (see the first link), and Hussain’s is just as bad. Here’s […]