The Secular Coalition for America now has the article [.PDF] on their website.
It seems good and fair, until you get to the disgusting ending. Paul Starobin ends the article by, to start, repeating the lie constantly stated by anti-atheist bigots: that atheists are “arrogant”, claiming to know all. This is ludicrous when it is in fact the religious who claim to have divine, incontrovertible knowledge. When taken at face value, religion causes thinking to stop when looking at the origin of the universe and life with the conversation stopper “god did it.”
Atheists, meanwhile, understand that there is still a lot we have yet to learn, of which we can only learn through the logic, reasoning, and evidence of science. Starobin attempts to prove his point with an uninformed claim about Darwin so ridiculous I can’t even bring myself to repeat it here. You can read it for yourself in the article. Basically, though, he attempts to (badly) refute a claim that atheists supposedly make about what Darwin said. The problem is that atheists never make such a claim. In fact, such a claim is exactly contrary to the way atheists who support science generally think. He can’t find any legitimate criticism of the atheists, so he resorts to ad hominem attacks.
Furthering his ad hominem criticisms, he claims that we have “disdain for the religious as captives to superstitions that only a cretin could accept.” This is a disgusting bigoted comment straight out of the anti-atheist quotebook. Even more importantly, it isn’t true. I have heard atheists levy some criticism on the religious, but I have never heard any atheist who is a good person call someone a “cretin” or anything close, simply due to the fact that they are religious. We would have to think a lot of people are cretins!
Furthermore, I seriously doubt Mr. Starobin ever heard a single atheist he interviewed ever use such an insulting word when referring to religious people. It came from his mind, no one else – from the bigotry ingrained in him by our culture that he, despite the strong points of the rest of the article, cannot avoid. Once again, we see the double standard: that it is okay for others to criticize atheists, as Starobin does in his ending, yet if atheists criticize others we are arrogant and insulting.
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