Thoughts in a Haystack

Heh!

There's nothing like cluelessness on parade!

And, as I've noted before, Terry Hurlbut, the "Creationism Examiner," can strut his ignorance down the middle of Broadway with the best of 'em.

His latest involves the big atheist shindig in Oz and the smaller Fundamentalist confab of creationist stupidity. Featured at the latter were Carl Wieland, Don Batten and Jonathan Sarfati of Creation Ministries International, which is the organization that broke away from Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis but did not breakaway from Ham's lack of respect for the truth.

You can read the usual gibberish at Hurlbut's place but what caught my eye was Hurlbut's citation to an article by an Oznian journalist, Andrew Bolt, who was somewhat appalled by the atheist's lack of respect for their opponents. After recording some atheist's insults and concluding that "if the Christian God really is dead, then there's not much to stop people here from being barbarians," Bolt goes on to say:

Yes, I know godlessness need not mean good-lessness. I'm agnostic myself, yet think myself morally serious.

But I'm certain both the Pope and [Family First Senator Steve] Fielding would feel their Christian faith prevented them from vilifying Dawkins as his fellow atheists freely vilified them.

So why do leading atheists, so sure of their superior morality, feel licensed to be meaner than leading Christians?

Is this what morally superior people do when God has gone? In that case, bring God back.

Hurlbut agrees with Bolt but then immediately says:

Bolt need not have gone to the Atheist Convention to learn that his fear of human barbarism in the absence of God was well-founded. As the film actor Maximilian Schell, in his role as the murderous Stanislaus Pilgrin in J. Lee Thompson's 1965 film Return from the Ashes, famously said:

If there is no God, no heaven, no devil, no hell, and no immortality, then anything is permissible.

Quite apart from the silliness of quoting a fictional character for a "well-founded" belief, comparing atheists to murders is at least as egregious as comparing the intelligence of creationist politicians to that of earthworms.

People (including myself) insult, denigrate and satirize people we strongly disagree with. Voltaire, one of the people in history farthest from being a barbarian, was famous for it. Neither faith nor morality is any deterrent. Bolt does not know what the Pope and Fielding are saying to their confidants and family. All he knows is what they say in public, which, it can be reasonably inferred, is influenced by their positions as politicians/bureaucrats in large organizations.

I'm fully aware of what I'm doing when I take off after creationists. Too bad Hurlbut doesn't seem to be.
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