Is Atheism Over?

Following on from my long winded diatribe yesterday, I was reading some more of the comments on the Times Online article about Richard Dawkins. I may have briefly touched on it yesterday, but one thing which intrigues me today is the assertion by several commenters (both Theist and Atheist if I am reading it correctly) that Atheism has had its day or words to that effect. Why didn’t I get the memo? How dare Atheism neglect to tell me it is over…

I talked about Joshua‘s barely sane comment yesterday where he says “Atheism is struggling for breath at the moment. It does not have the answers we seek. It has had its day, it’s a spent force and, for most of us, basically boring” and I mentioned that was news to me. It seems I am out in the wilderness on this topic. Now it seems a new poster, who writes comment so long it would embarrass even me!, has joined in. A poster called Jim Rodgers competes with War and Peace with his comment, but it has some interesting bits. Fortunately most of the good stuff is at the beginning 🙂 He starts with this: “I recently read Alistair Mcgrath’s book, The Twilight of Atheism, and enjoyed it.” Well, that pretty much stunned me! Each to their own I suppose. Next comes the odd bit:

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Juking the stats

The Wire (official “best tv series ever”) shows how the need to mess about with statistics distorts the nature of policing. It’s called something impenetrable like “juking the stats” (duking? jooking? dooking? On the basis of a brief Googling, I went with juking as it seems to mean “being deceptive”.)

The drive to constantly improve crime figures – numbers of crime and clear up rates – leads to several wrong-headed initiatitives, such as harrassing large numbers of people for petty misdemeanours in pointless swoops and attempting to ignore the existence of large numbers of bodies left by Stansfield’s crew.

As in art, so in life, to add yet another cliche to the “crimes against cliche use” tally in this blog’s statistics. British police are now protesting about the distortions created by the drive to improve statistics.
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