I find it an amusing property of modern theologians and their defenders: the more you let them talk, the less they actually say. So now their deity is responsible for the freedoms I enjoy. A convenient claim, I suppose, insofar as it’s reasonably unlikely to be overturned by some physicist or other in the next five years. And people do generally like freedom. I expect certain purveyors of windy bafflegab such as that your guest is now spinning are rather counting on this. Hoping, perhaps we might like therefore to keep them and their notions of a magical freedom-lovin’ deity around a bit longer.

Now once, of course, this god of theirs was responsible for rainbows and flowers and puppy dogs’ tails. This, clearly, is no longer credible, so this decade, it’s freedom. And never mind the very real human beings, believing and not, who fought for those freedoms and defended them and expanded them over the centuries. And never mind that this same deity once seemed to preside, oddly enough, happily over slavery and tyranny, the divine right of kings and the burning of heretics. No doubt this was simply our misunderstanding. Our god was always for freedom, see. Sadly, we just got the message recently.

But this, of course, is typical theology: if your superstition is criticized, and you cannot answer, move it somewhere else, and insist that’s always where it was. Your critics, you can then also insist, are ‘naive’ and ‘gullible’ to have given you grief in the first place. Yes, we believers, we’re for freedom, friends… and who could be against that? Unlike that nasty Hitchens man and those atheists, who are all so arrogant, so fond of bombing Iraqi children. And never mind that the Bush administration that actually prosecuted said war was loaded to the brim with believers. And never mind that militant bible verses were stenciled on the very reports of the military planners who saw to the dropping of those bombs.

Your guest tries to claim the ‘new atheists’, as he refers to them, are misguided in their criticisms. Always saw myself as an old atheist myself. But whatever you call me, let me be clear: I, for one, do not assume the clearing away of the vines of muddy old superstitions must necessarily lead to any kind of paradise. It’s just rather a gimme, to ask that people stop fooling themselves, and stop wasting their time with such charlatans as your guest and the theologians he defends, and with their muddled, obfuscatory dance of hazy, meaningless noise. And the more I hear such men speak, the more I think I should keep asking exactly that.

¹ETA: With, amusingly, thinking about it now, a rather different explanation as to why it was so urgent I had to keep coming back until their kids were done their grad degrees… First guy, as I recall, it was all about ‘misalignment’ he had to correct. Second guy was telling me about how my spine was getting dangerously coated in minerals, in imminent danger of fusing.