... the religiously incorrect.

Now THAT'S crazy.

This is just laughably crazy.

who want to pour pig blood on the doorsteps of mosques.

But he did take it down.

Here are a couple of funny responses:

well, religion gets all in a big huff....if they can't take it, they should not dish it out, they should not cast upon the waters what they don't want coming back to them in many days.
This is what I don't get. Religion is supposed to be able to insult everyone and everything and expects to get only good reviews from the people they insult. Hypocrisy served straight up.

Individually and legally?

I love your passion yet sometimes it seems to result in simplistic, broad brush assessments.

What's your take on religious or faith based allies? Do we write them off? Or, rather, how do we best collaborate on common goals?

Not very surprising.

That is all.

Are you a Dawkins fan? What do you think of his tweet?

pay attention.

comparison!

Hell, if I had to choose between a dead rat and Tim Stanley, there would be no comparison.

like this: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/richard-dawkins-wants-to-lovebomb-iran--with-erotica-10015488.html

Stanley has indeed written the article just to bash atheists. That's why he brought Stephen Fry into it too. He is offended by someone asking Fry a religious question, and Fry giving an atheist answer. He also thinks " the answer to Fry’s facile question" exists. No-one has come up with a decent answer to the problem of theodicy, in over 2000 years, and Stanley just appears to be embarrassed that he worships a god that is either cruel, uncaring or a logical imposiibility, but Stanley still wastes his time in the worship.

I didn't see anything right wing about this particular piece and I thought the criticism of Fry, who was also outrageous, worth noting.

Feel free to post the other one.

Dawkins' tweet was silly. Fry's comment was not (even if one disagrees with it). Stanley showed equally strong hostility and dismissiveness toward both.

Stanley is one of the few British commentators who likes Rick Santorum (see my other post); shouldn't this give rise to suspicion of his motives?

I did my research on Stanley before posting this but didn't see any particular political bent within this story at all.

Suspicious of his motives? What might they be politically in terms of this particular story?

Right.

He therefore wishes to attack prominent atheists.

Not that he likes the liberal tendencies of much of our established church any better. Santorum wouldn't much like our Archbishop of Canterbury; and neither does Stanley:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100206311/justin-welby-v-david-cameron-the-anglican-church-is-now-the-labour-party-at-prayer/

seems to support some atheists, just not the celebrity atheists.

At any rate, I appreciate your providing this information and I changed the source of the story.

and have probably already figured out how to access it.

Also, don't forget a lot of the foreign fighters are westerners so I doubt getting hold of porn is a big deal to them.

(In fact I'm willing to bet that religious people look at porn as much as everyone else).

Can't even he go off the edge to keep his sanity. My idea before the Iraq debacle was to make a computer image of "God" in the desert and tell these extremists to stop what they are doing.

It might at least scare them to death.

you could say something in a room to the people you are talking to in a tongue in cheek, wry kinda of way and it could be humorous.
But tweeting it out to everyone, it doesn't come across that way.
People, and Dawkins in this case, sometimes forget that Twitter isn't the intimate intercourse it seems at times.

so I think he does it on purpose. He likes the outrage because it results in attention, and that is what he thrives on.

He was "bewildered" by the response. Really? I'm not buying it.

that could earn him a nickname as "Dirty Dick."

OK, if you're not from the UK you probably don't, and lucky old you not to know! But as I posted a few months ago on a different forum:

He is a right-winger, a sympathetic biographer of Pat Buchanan, a Christian Right type, a sympathizer with RW Tories and now UKIP at home and with Republicans in the USA.

Almost all Torygraph bloggers are vile; he is one of the worst.

Recent Torygraph article titles by him include:

Dr. Who came out - as a pro-life Christian conservative


Why Ukip will win Clacton: Carswell and immigration


If you have to choose between being liberal and being Christian, choose Christian


Ruth Bader Ginsburg, population control and the things we don't admit about abortion



In 2012, he was very anti-Obama and preferred Romney, but clearly would really have liked Santorum:

http://timothystanley.co.uk/1/post/2012/02/why-i-quite-like-rick-santorum-even-if-many-catholics-dont.html

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100150054/rick-santorum-was-the-most-conservative-authentic-and-resilient-candidate-of-2012/

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100144143/rick-santorum-can-beat-barack-obama/


In other words, he represents the small but dangerous British Christian Right, and should NOT be taken as an authority on anything.


As for Dawkins, he is IMO like many celebrity academics, a little too fond of publicity for its own sake; but even his strongest critics could hardly regard him seriously as 'Britain's nuttiest professor'. I've come across SERIOUSLY nutty ones. Ever heard of the Ann Coulter-loving racist misogynist 'evolutionary psychologist' Satoshi Kanazawa of LSE, for example?

and saw that he was a former Labour party advocate who now supported the US republican party. Wiki didn't give much more information.

In light of this, I have changed the story to another source which I hope is more acceptable.

Because Fry's problem is pretty much the one brought up there, though his conclusion is different.

The problem of the existence of evil and of suffering is one of the key problems in theology, even if not everyone comes to the same conclusion about it; so Stanley's dismissiveness is totally inappropriate, whether you're a Christian or an atheist.

Does this hack columnist think Dostoevsky and Mark Twain were being "facile" in their respective masterpieces, The Brothers Karamozov and Letters From the Earth?

I lost my faith some time ago after witnessing too much senseless suffering and unmitigated evil. I suppose that makes me a walking cliché as well.

And despite the media's apparent desire to cast him as the archetypal atheist, he speaks for no one except Dawkins.

churches, people are leaving the flock to find something that is more reflective of who they are.