The danger of being an atheist blogger writing about Islam is that someone will mistake you for a far-right blogger, like some hyper-aggressive LGF jerk with a berserk preputial gland. So, in advance, let me explain that I’m equally against all religions, and that any anti-Islam rantings of mine are not intended to advance the Glorious Conservative Cause of the Bush Dynasty for World Domination, nor as a thin mask for any xenophobic sentiment. For the record.

I have to get that out of the way, because the Keyboard Konservatives are all over this story:

A Roman Catholic Bishop in the Netherlands has proposed people of all faiths refer to God as Allah to foster understanding, stoking an already heated debate on religious tolerance in a country with one million Muslims.
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“Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn’t we all say that from now on we will name God Allah? … What does God care what we call him? It is our problem.”

From the comments around the web (e.g.), it would appear that people do care what to call their favourite sky buddy. Never mind that this hits people’s always-touchy language buttons. It would be like calling your best friend some new name. I have a friend who changed his name his first year of uni, twenty years ago. (Hello, O’Neil!) But I still want to call him Steve. You could see how people would worry that their prayers would get misdirected, even to an omniscient being.

Naturally, for an atheist, what to call an imaginary being is rather a moot question. Theists have believed in many gods in human history. Here is a most impressive list of gods, all once believed in by many people, most now extinct. Time to add more to the list of Gods past. Let’s just call him (or her) nothing at all.