I read this article today and had to laugh. It's an interesting piece of propaganda in the toy tossing contest between fundamentalist(1) atheists against fundamentalist Christians. This particular piece of propaganda uses attempts by the other side to produce propaganda (in this case buring effigies) to lampoon them and promote it's own side as the reasonable one.

It's a subtle effect. While never actually claiming to be the reasonable side, the article writer favourably quotes Dawkins. The way the quotes are put is interesting. He says Dawkins: "was especially enraged by creationists, whom he saw as victims of a preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood." But doesn't offer any qualification of that opinion, thereby suggesting that it is true, at least in the authors opinion.

Of course the article doesn't contain the authors actual opinion, so the implication is that Dawkins' opinion is correct.

The thing that really makes me laugh is this paragraph here:
More recently Dawkins has widened his range of fire, taking on religion in general. He argues that all religions, from Islam to Christianity, depend on a farrago of vacuous supernatural nonsense and it's not just harmless nonsense. He says religion can be lethally dangerous, as it gives believers unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness and teaches enmity toward other equally irrational faiths, leading to barbarous crusades, pogroms and jihads. Dawkins is contemptuous about all organised religion, which he compares to a brain disease.

It makes me laugh, because having read a fair part of The God Delusion (I haven't finished it yet, there is only so much "literary" screaming in ones face that one can take at a time) that the exact same attack can be directed at Dawkins in particular and Atheism in general.

To misquote: "Atheism can be lethally dangerous, as it give believers unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness and teaches emnity toward other equally irrational faiths, leading to barbarous crusades, pogroms and Jihads."

Okay, well maybe not Jihad's per se, but the millions persecuted under communism in Stalinist Russia and Communist China are not good poster children for atheism. And these are just the worst two offenders.

See the thing here is that is not theism that turns people in "barbarians". It's not atheism that turns people into "barbarians". However both theism and atheism have been used to justify barbarism. I think there is a lot of stuff that can be said for peoples psychology, people's willingness to embrace "barbarism" and then backwards tie it in to religious, cultural and philosophical justifications.

In fact, Christianity in particular has an excellent explanation for why this is so. But that's an aside here.

"Arguing" by pointing to excesses is simply not an argument at all. It's just name calling. And by doing it Dawkins, and Brockie, open themselves to being tarred with the same brush.

In the funde atheist vs the funde theist toy throwing contest I think the thing we can see most, especially in the writing of Dawkins in the God Delusion, is exactly the kind of rabid religious fervor that he accuses his opponents of (and that they are clearly guilty off in the effigy burnings(2)). And that is the delicious irony of it all. As they say, it's rather like the pot calling the kettle black.

And Bob Brockie, in his endorsement of Dawkin's rabid fundamentalist atheism merely casts himself in the same light that he tries to cast on the effigy burners.

And, as final word to the effigy burners. Shame on you. If you really followed Jesus you should know better.

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(1) I am not using the term fundamentalist in it's old positive term, of people who stripped away religious cruft and got back to the fundamentals of faith. I am using it in the modern pejorative sense of a "deranged fanatic."

(2) To be honest it sounds like fun if you remove all the religious nutters. Maybe the people should go to Burning Man ^_^