Philosopher A. C. Grayling famously believes that the current upsurge in religious news coverage, protest, and renewed political assertion, is a symptom of decline: religion is in its “death throes”.
This week he twisted the knife, exploring the responses to the recent wave of successful secularist publishing (”Tome truths“). Basically, he makes a fairly convincing case that the backlash of protest doth protest too loudly.
Peter Hitchens today “reviewed” (Hitchens vs Hitchens) his brother Christopher Hitchen’s new book, God is Not Great, which is currently riding high on the secularist publishing wave.
The “review” barely focuses on the book, which he “enjoyed” and recommends “to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring.” Despite this, “I also think it is wrong”.
Is Google-aquisition YouTube censoring some videos that are critical of Islam? Slashdot notes that YouTube banned “popular atheist commentator Nick Gisburne” recently. Gisburne was Flagged as Inappropriate by users — by a “pressure group”, he speculates — in response to a video he posted consisting only of disagreeable quotes from the Qu’ran. This lead to the closure of his account. He opened a new account, and re-posted all his videos, but the Qu’ran-quoting video was again deleted by administrators. A very similarly formatted video of disagreeable quotes from the Bible was left in place. (The Qu’ran video can still be seen, mirrored by another user… for now? He talks about the account deletions here.)
In another emotional video response (”CENSORED again“) Gisburne thanks other YouTubers for re-posting his content, putting their own accounts on the line, but knows he cannot upload the video again or he will face the closure of his new account.
Jacksonville, Florida, settled out of court this week, with the American Atheists lobby group. American Atheists have been awarded $5000 damages plus costs. The suit was brought over a city-sponsored Day of Prayer. It was an anti-violence rally in response to a shooting, but the event was provactively subtitled “Arming Our Prayer Warriors”. The charge was that the city violated the First Amendment by funding a religious event with taxpayers’ money.
Flyers for the Day of Prayer had read: “Our faith is our greatest strength and our faith community our greatest asset. We invite members of every worship center and faith organization to join hands and take back our neighborhood.”
On a wave of recent high-profile secular publishing, France’s best-selling philosopher, Michel Onfray, is to have a translation of his 2005 tract, Traité d’athéologie, published in the new year as Atheist Manifesto. Traité d’athéologie has sold 230,000 copies in France alone.
The self-described hedonist, atheist, libertarian, and left-wing anarchist has received death threats for his view that religious beliefs are “children’s stories for comfort”. And in the book he rallies:
Against the rabbis, the preachers, the imams, ayatollahs and mullahs, I persist in preferring the philosopher. They are the ones that know there is only one world and that any promotion of an otherworld makes us lose the use and benefit of the only one that really exists. A truly deadly sin…
