Atheists need a little woman to calm them down

Yes, we know it is a bit late in the day to be discovering Pharyngula but we did and there is nothing to be done but fall down and worship. No, we mean sit down and learn.

PZ Myers is a prolific, deservedly famous and notorious biologist, evolutionist and atheist.

“In 2006 the journal Nature listed Myers’s Pharyngula as the top-ranked blog by a scientist based on popularity. Myers received the American Humanist Association’s 2009 Humanist of the Year award.” 

Today amongst his many gems there are a couple of matching diamonds.

One,

about so-called ‘Atheism 3.0’, decries the tendency of conflict-averse atheists to seek refuge in niceness and conciliation, a sort of “don’t upset the nice godbotherers; give them the benefit of the doubt”.

The full-of-faith agree, of course. “Don’t be nasty to us! Respect our faith!”

(Why? And no!)

As PZ MYers says, “religion should be strong enough to stand against academic rudeness and mockery without this pathetic bleating for shelter from skepticism.”

“ We don’t care if you think religion is good for you, or if you love your faith, or if you think rituals are lovely, or if believers have done good in history, or if a lack of praise for Jesus irritates the Baptists. That’s not the issue. The central, fundamental question is whether anyone has any reasonable evidence for the existence of any gods, especially the gods that everyone is so busy propitiating. You haven’t got any? Then we’ll continue pointing out that you’re chasing leprechauns, no matter how annoying you find it. It’s the truth. Argue against that with evidence — anything else is fluff and noise.

The other,

‘we macho atheists need a little woman to calm us down’, is in response to an article decrying the lack of soft, less confrontationist, maybe less threatening, perhaps easier-to-dismiss, women atheists to counteract the nasty, hard men like Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris (and we suppose Myers).

The nakedly sexist nature of the article has caused something of a furore and Myers has tagged strident, combative atheist, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, to take Stephen Prothero on.

In doing this she has made, with this one paragraph, the clearest and cleanest case we have ever read against the believers and their simpering, atheist apologists:

“ Look, I think believers and atheists should practice tolerance and get along. Of course I do. But practicing tolerance doesn’t mean that you have to pretend that a truth claim isn’t a truth claim. As believers feel free to make claims about the way the universe works, then they should be challenged on it. That’s what happens when you make truth claims. That your claims are hard to back up is unfortunate, but that isn’t the fault of atheists, and calling atheists mean because this is true doesn’t change that. Having your arguments disproven isn’t assault, and using terms like “pummel” implies coercion that is not going on. You’re free to believe that the moon is made out of green cheese, but being free to believe that doesn’t require that other people coddle that delusion.

Hear, hear.