He speaks much sense:
You are living, dear reader, at a watershed in human history. This is the century during which, after 2,000 years of what has been a pretty bloody marriage, faith and reason must agree to part, citing irreconcilable differences. So block your ears to the cooing voices on Thought for the Day, and choose your side.
“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t. Mere language does no justice to my certainty about whether God might be waiting for the return to their Biblical lands of the Israelites, before arranging the Second Coming. He isn’t.
Shout it from the rooftops. Write it on walls. Carve it into rock. He didn’t. He isn’t. He won’t.
Is there suddenly a wave of sloppy thinking sweeping across atheism or something?Parris deploys exactly the same techniques as the fundamentalist religious people that he seeks to ridicule! Assuming he’s not thick, presumably he must know that this is what he’s doing.There’s nothing clever about misrepresenting an argument and then claiming that it isn’t true because I said so! (Not all religious people are into the “return to their Biblical lands of the Israelites”, and not all religious people are into a second coming.)This type of polemic, which wouldn’t be out of place on a drunken night out in the pub, does nobody any favours. It just drags atheism down to the level of the illogical thought systems it wishes to destroy.Maybe in next week’s column Matthew Parris will scream and scream until he’s sick.