Sunk in post-holiday torpor, I somehow missed the full flowering of the avowed atheist’s (TM) atheism in the Guardian’s Comment is Free on 30 December.

Bear in mind Brendan O’Neill is someone who introduces his own blog with this blurb:

One of this country’s sharpest social commentators’ (Daily Telegraph)

What country are they talking about? (Although, the Daily Telegraph probably wouldn’t recognise sharp social commentary even if it was poked in the eye by it.)

In the blogpost I’m talking about, O’Neill pours even more scorn on public atheists than he bestowed on the Archbishop of Canterbury.  His victims are Dawkins, Hitchens et al.

The new atheism
There is more humanity in the ‘superhuman’ delusions of the devout than there is in the realism of the hectoring atheists

Blimey, can you plagiarise yourself? Weren’t these pretty well the exact words he used in the Spiked-Online article about Rowan Williams. (Well, except for the “monkeyman” bit. Maybe the Guardian found that too offensive for the subhead? ) He must be really really proud of these phrases.

I am as atheistic as it gets. But I will not be signing up to this shrill hectoring of the religious. The new atheists have given atheism a bad name. History’s greatest atheists, or the “old atheists” as we are now forced to call them, were humanistic and progressive, critical of religion because it expressed man’s sense of higher moral purpose in a deeply flawed fashion. The new atheists are screechy and intolerant; they see religion merely as an expression of mass ignorance and delusion. Their aim seems to be, not only to bring God crashing back down to earth, but also to downgrade mankind itself.

And so on. In so doing, he brings up Darwin and Marx, apparently “old atheists” – whose words must therefore provide the all-wise authority that this “atheistic as it gets” person apparently can’t live without.

Indeed (in the second article of his that I’ve decided to savage) he yet again takes Marx’s words completely out of context, to somehow derive a meaning that is the opposite of what the man was saying. All the same, it wouldn’t matter if O’Neill hadn’t got it wrong. If historic figure X believed the moon was made of paper, their success in another field wouldn’t make it true.

This doesn’t stop O’Neill referring often to Marx, as if some acknowledged wisdom in political philosophy made everything Marx said true. And, most bizarrely, as if Marx somehow agreed with O’Neill that Dawkins et al should just shut up.

For Marx, religion had to be abolished because it made man despicable; for new atheists religion exists precisely because man is despicable, little more than a monkey.
New atheists will continue to ridicule the religious in 2008. But there is more humanity in the “superhuman” delusions of the devout – in their yearning for a sense of purpose and greatness – than there is in the monkeyman realism of the hectoring atheists.

Oh, look, there’s the “monkeyman realism” stuff again. How odd that he hates the whole idea of evolution but seems to worship Darwin.
Here’s the “superhuman delusion” quote again. Again, ffs. Look, Brendan, it just wasn’t that good. Sorry.

And, surely, Marx didn’t believe religion “made man despicable”. Blimey, I doubt that even the allegedly “hectoring” Dawkins and Hitchens would go that far. IMAO, Marx (and other classical social scientists) saw religion largely in terms of its social role of providing ideas that support social relations. (Generally 19th century intellectuals tended to look at how things work in the real world.)

If this is what “being as atheist as it gets” looks like, can we have an atheist competition to see if its possible to get more atheist, please?