Latter Day Atheists get thumped.

Rational, punk-theist Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale, author of books and blog Vox Populi.

In his book The Irrational Atheist, Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, author Vox Day aka Theodore Beale takes a sharp scalpel to the bloated prose of those three preeminent, latter day atheists. (2008, ISBN 1-933771-36-4) These authors and others have it easy in the post Christian era, though. It would have taken genuine courage to slander belief and believers years ago. And it would have taken more intelligence and logic than demonstrated by these three to have crossed swords with Thomas Aquinas or Augustine. These three, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, are flayed in The Irrational Atheist. There is the old joke: "what is the difference between an onion and a Frenchman?" Answer: "no one cries when the Frenchman is cut up." Ditto for atheists. And no politician aspiring to high office will proclaim his or her atheism, either. (Even Nancy Pelosi who is either Roman Catholic or Argentine Jew will not divulge her true beliefs, and will certainly not proclaim her atheism.)

"On one side of the argument is a collection of godless academics with doctorates from the finest universities in England, France, and the United States. On the other is Irrational Atheist author Vox Day, armed with nothing more than historical and statistical facts. Presenting a compelling argument (but not for the side one might expect), Day strips away the pseudo-scientific pretensions of New Atheism with his intelligent application of logic, history, military science, political economy, and well-documented research. The arguments of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Onfray are methodically exposed and discredited as Day provides extensive evidence proving, among other things that:

More than 93 percent of all the wars in human history had no relation to religion.

The Spanish Inquisition had no jurisdiction over professing Jews, Muslims, or atheists; and executed fewer people on an annual basis than the state of Texas.

Atheists are 3.84 times more likely to be imprisoned than Christians.

"Red" state crime is primarily committed in "blue" counties (of those red states).

Sexually abused girls are 55 times more likely to commit suicide than girls raised Catholic.

In the twentieth century, atheistic regimes killed three times more people in peacetime than those killed in all the wars and individual crimes combined.

The Irrational Atheist provides the rational thinker with empirical proof that atheism's claims against religion are unfounded in logic, fact, and science."

This is from the publisher.


I read and enjoyed this book. The author is amazing and his logic is hard to refute. It is not an apologia for religion but is a reasoned analysis of the neoatheists' logic, data, and conclusions regarding religion's fallacies, crimes against humanity, and evil influence in our modern world.

Please read the book. I am not recommending other books of his, just this one.

Before the advent of our modern, pompous and fumbling neoatheists there was a genuine powerhouse critic of religion. I refer to Henry Louis Mencken, the sage of Baltimore. He loved to point out human foibles, and he did so in a classy way so unlike our present crop of neoatheists, those who are rudely hoisted with their own petards in Vox Day's book. Witness H. L. Mencken's s epitaph, a line from one of his many works: "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner, and wink your eye at some homely girl." Arguably H. L. Mencken's finest book, Treatise on the Gods, is still in print and makes for very enjoyable reading. Henry Louis Mencken is a giant to the Unholy Trinity pygmies. Here is a review of Treatise of the Gods by Keith Otis Edwards:

Whatever merit Treatise on the Gods has in the intelligent speculation and worthy scholarship shown thus far, I am of the opinion that the book’s real appeal lies in its final part which consists of one short section entitled, “Its State Today.” Here Mencken contradicts the goal of objectivity stated in the introduction as he takes off the soft gloves, grabs the subject by the neck and begins to handle it roughly.
He declares that religion is a vestige of that dark and frightened past when man had to dream up explanations for the world around. This manner of thinking is obsolete as we now have science to account for the details of our universe. Whatever effect prayer has as a treatment for disease has been displaced by the highly effective means of scientific medicine. The decline of Christianity began in the Renaissance which “was a reversion to the spacious paganism of Greece and Rome,” but it was not until the Seventeenth Century when enough facts and exact knowledge were able to convince intelligent men that “Christian theology was a farrago of absurdities.” Of course, the benefits of skepticism have not been limited to the modern era—in every society of every era human progress has not come from the faithful with their capacity to worship, but from those with a capacity to doubt and flout the gods. “Everything that we are we owe to Satan and his bootleg apples."
Why then is there usually a religious revival in progress? It is because the growth of scientific knowledge has been too rapid for “the ignorant and ignoble” to comprehend. And with the introduction of those of meager intelligence into the ring what began as a dispassionate examination of religion has turned into a battle royale with Mencken taking on all comers. Along with Christianity, censorship, Prohibition and American democracy each are pummeled, as according to Mencken they are not separate topics but merely different manifestations of the same disease: the mass of stupid and foolish people obstructing the freedom of those capable of independent thought.
This is classic Mencken at his most ferocious. Those who are unfamiliar with Mencken’s work and want to discover what he is all about will do well to look here.

Well, here you have it--Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens for today's brute force bludgeoning of religion; H. L. Mencken for yesteryear's witty but hard hitting critique of belief and believers, past and present; and Vox Day's data intensive, cool and logical dissection of neoatheism. The thinking believer might enjoy reading these arguments.

I intend to put my own analysis of religious belief into cyberspace. The crux of the problem of religious belief is that there undoubtedly was evolution in the production of Homo sapiens. There is no doubt of that. But evolution gets us to some forebear such as Homo erectus, and no farther. Something or someone "jump started" our further evolution from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens and gave us the many human faculties that separate us from our cousins the chimpanzee and the bonobo ape. There is the matter of six million missing years (of evolution). One possibility is that the someone who upraised us is the same person known to ancients and moderns as their God, or the gods. Gods, by which I mean beings of extraordinary learning, possessed of marvelous technology, of either terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin, certainly made a presence on this planet of ours. They are described in writings that are impossibly ancient and, in one instance, in a language (Sumerian) that bears no relationship to any other known tongue. These writings describe how they, the gods who came from space and counted the planets from farthest from the sun inward (terrestrials would count them from nearest the sun outward, at least as I see it), created the first humans. The individuals responsible for this feat of genetic engineering are named (Enki/Ea and Ninharsag). The process is described. Before our present knowledge of molecular biology and cloning techniques these ancient accounts would make no sense whatsoever. Sapienti sat. Now mankind is in a position to reevaluate these writings including our own bible accounts. But note that uplifting Homo erectus to Homo sapiens is not creating the universe with its billions of galaxies and too numerous to count stars and who knows how many planets--and life forms, some of them self-aware and intelligent.


This Creator of All was none of the above in the pantheon of the Twelve Great Gods. The Creator of All is alluded to by the gods themselves, but their own sometimes shockingly immoral behavior suggests that they were not closely supervised by their creator. The ancient writings also suggest that the lower case "g" gods violated a major rule when they created humans. And that the Creator of All seems to have sent a messenger to Enlil, head of the Council of Twelve, requiring the gods to leave humans to their own resources and "pack it in." This they did 2500 years ago. Or so the ancient writings tell us. As for the Creator of All, his messenger Galzu, what He has planned for us, if anything, and what present day religions have to tell us about all this, I haven't a clue. This is what I do know:


The Gods were not omniscient, omnipresent, all merciful, solitary, without face or form. They were embodied beings with great learning who possessed splendid technology. They taught our forebears, the black headed people of Sumer, astronomy, city planning, reading, irrigation, warfare, governance, commerce, engineering, and so much more. These splendid beings were either survivors from Atlantis that sank beneath the sea, or were from space. They were variably benevolent or destructive. Some of them liked humans and others detested them. Noah and the ark is our modern tale, fashioned likely in Babylon during the captivity of Judea. It is a recounting of a much older story describing a very distant event that marked the end of the most recent Ice Age. The being Enki/Ea who liked humans broke the code of silence imposed by his own High Council of Twelve Great Gods by instructing Ziusudra, a human and one of his staff, to make a great ark and prepare for a cataclysmic end to the age. The god of Egypt known as Ra was one of Enki/Ea's sons. For better or worse the God of the Jews was Enlil, half brother of Enki/Ea. And so forth and so on. We know so much about these beings who were known also to the Indus Valley civilization, the Akkadians, the Hittites, the Greeks, and the Romans. These same gods were present in the New World and were described by the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas. What happened to the Twelve Great Gods and lesser gods? Where are they today? Where will they be in the future?


Well, the answers to those questions make for a long story that deserves its own article. Suffice to say several of these gods died on earth--the story of Horus and his evil uncle Seth. Another was the Great God who was denied passage back home--Marduk. (He who was sought out by Alexander the Great because an oracle had told him that Marduk as Ra was his natural father, and that Ra was also the father of Hatshepsut, female pharoah of Egypt). When Alexander arrived in Babylon he requested an audience with the Great God Marduk. The priests in Marduk's temple told Alexander an audience was not possible. Alexander was persuasive, (in an age before water boarding, in a land where it has been helpful). Eventually the temple priests showed Alexander the dead body of Marduk, embalmed in oils and laid in a casket. The moon god Suen or Sin, after whom the Sinai is named, retired with his wife and servants to a home on the coast of the Red Sea. Some say he is Allah. (For the facts that he is the ancient god of the Arabian peninsula, and that the crescent moon above all mosques is his sign.)With a few exceptions--those who died, those who were exiled, and those who chose to retire to earth--the company of gods, Greater and Lesser, left this planet 2500 years ago. Promises to return are recorded in ancient legend and writings. Check your bible. Check this web log . . .