Militant atheists

Is there anything more tedious or lazy than journalists complaining that atheists are ‘just as bad’ as religionists? Especially when they write as badly as Emma Jane.

FANATICAL Christians and fundamentalist atheists are like a couple of kids bickering in the back seat during a long car drive.

As US presidential candidates make shrill demands for the teaching of creationism in schools, British pit bull atheist Richard Dawkins accuses non-evolutionists of being stupid, insane or wicked.

As US evangelical Rebecca Hagelin says there is no greater evil than gay marriage, a schoolteacher is sued for ridiculing a student’s belief in Jesus.

It raises the question of whether intransigent evangelicals and militant atheists should both be sent to the naughty corner. Not to think about what they’ve done (even though both religious and atheist regimes have clocked up appalling body counts) but to consider how much they have in common.

Ostensibly opposites, hardline proselytisers and zealous pagans are like the political Left and Right in that the further they extend into extremism, the more they begin to resemble each other.

It’s the old false equivalency that journalists are so great at. Don’t like either side? Say they’re just the same.

I’m happy to allow that ‘militant religionists’ are more the exception than the rule, but if you’re comparing worst to worst, there’s nothing on the atheist side that compares to the worst of the religious side. Committed religionists kill people, oppress women, rape children. What do ‘militant atheists’ do? Write mean things on the Internet. It’s not an apt comparison.

Or:

But what if atheists were as bad as the religious? What would that look like?

It would look like this guy:

Except that the atheist guy was kind of funny. And you can bet that after this exchange, the atheist guy just took his bullhorn back to work and stopped bothering people, and the Christian guys went bothering people somewhere else.