Dvir Abramovich, a gabble of atheists, and a gabble of excuses for an absent god, may she come back and explain herself sometime

(Above: a painting by that atheist Picasso. The point? Well surely the atheism and rampant satyrism helps explain all those squiggles).

Too often we forget that befuddled thinking about religion owes a lot to the Jewish faith, but fortunately - just as we spend too much time with the heresies of Jensenism and Pellism - along comes Dvir Abramovich to remind us, courtesy of Celebrity atheists expose their hypocrisy.

These days it's all too common to find the religiously inclined coat trailing along behind the likes of Hitchens, Harris, Onfray, Dennet, and Dawkins, who naturally get labelled as fundamentalists. You see, if you believe what you say to be true, you're naturally a fundamentalist, unlike those of a religious persuasion, who have weighed all the evidence in a balanced way, and come up with a dispassionate truth. Here's how it's done:

Works such as Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Sam Harris' End of Faith, Michel Onfray's The Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and Daniel Dennet's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon are bare-knuckled, no-holds barred tracts that sometimes resemble the declarations of fundamentalists who are absolutely convinced of their truth.

You see fundamentalists! Whereas any balanced believer in religion knows for at least half the day that what they believe in is nonsense, and thus they have a crisis of faith, out of which they return all the stronger for the experience.

What's even worse, these bare-knuckled fundamentalists, unlike any believer in god, are thriving, and angry:

Hitchens and Dawkins, who are the leaders of the New Atheism movement, have received the most media spotlight and are driving the growth of this industry. Hitchens presented recently at Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas and appeared on ABC TV's Q & A program. And Dawkins will headline next year's Atheist Convention in Melbourne.

These atheists are angry that religion has not gone away and is thriving in various parts of the world. After all, calling other peoples' belief a delusion is not exactly respectful. Indeed, distinguished doctor and broadcaster Lord Winston found Dawkins' attitude to religious faith patronising, insulting and counterproductive, noting that it "portrays science in a bad light".

Even worse, they build straw dogs and burn them. Like pagans. Like that deviant Tao Te Ching which said "heaven and earth are heatless, treating creatures like straw dogs". Next thing you know, we'll be in a Sam Peckinpah movie, with the rapes and the killings and the boiling oil and the man traps:

Hitchens and Dawkins build a straw man — they select the worst offences that have been done in the name of religion to prove that religion is a dangerous force and a kind of virus that infects the mind. At one point Hitchens writes, "Religious belief is not merely false but also actually harmful. But I think it is a mistake to condescend to those who claim 'faith'."

Employing a new name, Dawkins says atheists should refer to themselves as "brights" labelling the devout as "dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads" while Hitchens describes the religious mind as "literal and limited".

Oh so cruel. Fair, but really, bare knuckled creationist cruel.

According to Hitchens (who discovered two years ago that he is Jewish by way of his mother) the Jews could have been the "carriers of philosophy instead of arid monotheism". What about Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Isaiah Berlin, Derrida, Maimonides, Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Karl Popper, Walter Benjamin and Ayn Rand to name only a few. Does it seem like Judaism is bereft of philosophers? He writes of kosher dietary laws: "In microcosm, this apparently trivial fetish shows how religion and faith and superstition distort our whole picture of the world."

Ayn Rand to name only a few? Would that be the same Ayn Rand who in Atlas Shrugged wrote so, and then in a 1964 Playboy interview spake thus?

They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it “another dimension,” which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it “the future,” which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out. [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged]

(Playboy 1964): Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?

Rand: Qua religion, no—in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy.

Damn you constructivists, peddling your false views. How did you get into the list of Jewish philosophers? But back to the modern devils:

So, the bottom line for these athiests is this: we are free to believe in whatever as long as it's not God.

For Hitchens and co, religion does little good and secularism hardly any evil. Never mind that tyrants devoid of religion such as Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot perpetrated the worst atrocities in history. As H. Allen Orr, professor of biology at the University of Rochester, observed, the 20th century was an experiment in secularism that produced secular evil, responsible for the unprecedented murder of more than 100 million.

Yes, never mind that Hitler purported religion, so long as it suited his political purposes, and never mind the profound futility of arguing that secularism can outdo religion in perverted killings, when in reality World War 11 was dressed up as a holy war, and even these days some loons manage to conflate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with holy wars. Why next thing I bet the scientists will cop the blame:

Dawkins is mute on the terrors unleashed by science and technology, used by genocidal regimes such as Hitler's Germany, in a century that proved to be the worst tyranny mankind has ever seen. And what about weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear and biological bombs developed by scientists?

Yes indeed and what about jihads, and the current ongoing simmering feud between Jews and Arabs in the middle east, and the fact that Israel has - for purely secular reasons? - armed itself with nuclear weapons. Never mind, let's be even handed about this:

Does that mean that all atheists and scientists are evil? Of course not. The point is that fanatics can be found in both religion and atheism.

How can anyone argue that not a single human benefit has resulted from religious faith? There are millions who every day selflessly dedicate their lives to helping others all in the name of religious belief. The cruelty and viciousness of the past and the abuse of religion in the present cannot extinguish the solidarity and good-heartedness of people of faith.

Most would agree with the words of former atheist, Oxford University professor of historical theology Alister McGrath, who said: "There are some forms of religion that are pathological, that damage people. For every one of these atrocities, which must cause all of us deep concern, there are 10,000 unreported acts of kindness, generosity, and so forth arising from religious commitment."

Oh go tell that to the gays and the women ground down by assorted mad religious beliefs over the centuries.

You see the atheists just get religion and theology all muddled up, and what comes out of their mouths is a mess, much like today's civilization, which has the ring of the cult of the Baals about it:

True religious values are grounded in notions of community, charity, mercy and peace. All too often today we focus on individualism, greed and instant gratification.

Phew, we're deep in, I think I'll pause for a cup of string bag tea.

Oh yes, that kicked in, instant gratification. Am I greedy to buy them in 100 bag lots?

Anyone wishing to discredit theology should at least know some. The God Delusion contains very little examination of Jewish theology and dismisses the finest minds of Western thinkers and theologians who have written on sublime theological questions as "infantile".

No, no, never. I care as much as anyone how many angels you can fit on the head of a pin, and whether the number of grains of sand on a beach can conjure up the number of days we'll spend in heaven.

Hitchens cites the Binding of Isaac and "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" injunction as brutish and stupid. Yet, scholars have interpreted the binding as ending child sacrifice and the injunction as a caution against excessive vengeance. Hitchens says that the God of Moses never refers to compassion and human friendship, overlooking "love your neighbour as yourself".

Well indeed, just as my favorite book Leviticus ensures happy families, with the strict injunction that anyone cursing their mother or father shall surely be put to death, while it's always been a comfort to me that god put every first-born child of every family in Egypt to death, not to mention the odd command to kill off suckling infants or dash them upon the rocks (frolic here for more fun with children).

For his part, Dawkins is clearly out of his depth when it comes to Jewish teachings and ethics. He claims, for instance, that "love thy neighbour" meant only "love another Jew". He apparently is not aware that in the same chapter, Jews are commanded to love the stranger that lives in their land as they would themselves. When Jesus, himself a Jew, was asked "Who is my neighbour" he did not refer to other Jews, but to a Samaritan, considered at that time as heretical and unclean.

Above all, for Dawkins and his contemporaries, billions of people across the globe have accepted stupid and harmful ideas.

Okay, it's about now that we should roll out some scientists, don' you think, to put that Dawkins in his place for suggesting that belief in pie in the sky by and by is perhaps a tad optimistic.

Yet that iconic scientist Einstein, believed that God represented a great mind that sustained the laws of nature. We know for sure that he was not stupid or delusional. He famously remarked, "God doesn't play with the universe" and noted, when referring to the extraordinary intricacies of the universe: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Einstein believed that a humble, open-ended religious attitude to the cosmos was preferable to a completely non-religious approach.

Um, would that be the same Einstein that wrote:

I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
- Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism; quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic, Vol. 5, No. 2

Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment - an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections.
- Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (here).

Einstein didn't like to get into arguments with believers about god, even if he considered the notion of a personal god a childlike one. He didn't have the crusading spirit - perhaps having better science to fry - noting that fervent atheists tend to get more excited as part of the process of a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in their youth.

But please let's not chalk this kind of agnosticism as one up to religion.

Okay, moving along, who else have we got?

Consider also that in A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking ends his brilliant book (which sold more than 8 million copies) with the following: "If we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just by a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God."

Um, yes but Hawking isn't quite sure about the who or what of this god:

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self- contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

The best you can say for Hawking is that he's an agnostic or a deist, working to some kind of giant watch-maker logic which involves him working out how the creator got the mainspring working and so made the watch tick.

Um, perhaps we need to strip away any notion of literalism as an alternative argument:

Dawkins and Hitchens assume all believers accept the Bible literally, which in the case of the majority of Jews and other co-religionists, has never been true. Theologians have often questioned institutional religion and have criticised the use of rigid orthodoxy and demagoguery to instill fear and obedience. In fact, most who embrace religious faith at the same time also exercise a healthy dose of skepticism and do not defend the way religion is often manipulated and distorted. Very few follow religion blindly.

Yippee, well maybe then they wouldn't blindly try to include a few scientists in the debate by blindly trying to distort their points of view and beliefs. And they wouldn't come up with romantic, humanist stuff, long the turf of artists and philosophers who don't see the need of religion as a preferred explanation for life, love, pain and the whole damn thing:

The telescope and the microscope that Hitchens says has made religion redundant, does not answer for us why we are here and what is the purpose of human existence. Atoms and black holes leave little space for expounding on the measure of man, sin, holiness, dignity and the human spirit, sorrow, beauty, love, alienation and mortality.

Dr Owen Anderson, professor of philosophy at Arizona State University, says the problem with the argument promoted by Hitchens and Dawkins when he asks: "Can all reality be explained as atoms in motion? Is belief in something besides atoms mere superstition?"

Well if you're offering this up as a way of letting in a belief in theosophical theory, astrology, spiritualism, witchcraft, neo paganism, witchcraft, hippiedom, scientology, exorcism, ancestor worship, spectrology, parapsychology, reincarnation, naturism and the like, feel free, but be careful what you wish for.

Tina Beatie in her book The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War of Religion maintains that atheists are engaged in religious belief themselves because naturalists as authors such as Dawkins and Hitchens use their own beliefs to invest their life with meaning. Ironic, isn't it?

Well it'd be ironic to someone who thinks that beliefs are a way to invest life with meaning, and in a storm, any belief will do provided it doesn't just involve the contemplation of atoms in motion. Because of course if you only have humanity and a one way ticket to the grave (as opposed to a nice belief structure that offers you a glorious or perhaps problematic afterlife if you've been naughty), then it's hard not to get a little depressed sometime.

The usual way out of this impasse is to do a little light hand wringing in the Anglican style, and it's nice to see that the Jewish faith offers the same possibility of compromise, and worrying about the dangers of fundamentalism of any persuasion:

Lord Winston agrees: "Think there is a body of scientific opinion from my scientific colleagues who seem to believe that science is the absolute truth and that religious and spiritual values are to be discounted.

"Some people, both scientists and religious people, deal with uncertainty by being certain. That is dangerous in the fundamentalists and it is dangerous in the fundamentalist scientists."

Ah well, it's about time now for what we might call the Rebel Without a Cause moment, which took place when James Dean heads off to the planetarium at Griffith Observatory, and - confronted with the endless remote universe, and the eventual destruction of this planet by an expanding sun - Jimmie moos like a cow. What else to do?

One has to concede that a something inexplicably mysterious took place at the birth of the universe. I read that several years ago, astronomers working with NASA concluded that time began 13.7 billion years ago, a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. At that instant, the universe expanded from "submicroscopic to astronomical size in the blink of an eye". The great mystery is why it would want to do that. Thomas Nagel, the philosopher notes that even if we accept evolution and that the necessary seed material was present at the time of the Big Bang, there is no scientific theory as to why the material existed in the first place, and how did such material come into existence.

All we have done is to keep pushing the great question one step back. World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking put it best, "Why does the universe go to the bother of existing?"

Well indeedy, who knows, but imagine sticking to explanations conceived of thousands of years ago as the best we can manage. Which is why it's sad that we then have to resort to the truth and beauty argument.

Many would identify with the father who's compelled to believe in the divine when he notices the beauty and perfection of his daughter's ears. Hitchens mocks him, pointing out that ears always need a clean out, are mass-produced and cats have lovelier ears. A moment of pure love is missed.

Yes, but what's the beauty of ears or pure love got to do with an absent god, who long ago left the playing field and left humanity to its rather pitiful and poorly designed skills, never mind the shapeliness of an ear, an eye, a breast, or even dare one say it, a cock.

Okay, so we come to what is the usual attempt to reclaim the turf, often done in the form of questions designed to be unsettling:

Dawkins claims that religion is a form of child abuse since parents teach their kids to believe in certain religious creeds. Is it fair to compare real child abuse with parents instilling in their children religious morals and codes?

Since you ask, yes, teaching a child to believe in a talking snake and creationsim (or scientology for that matter) is a form of abuse. Physical abuse is one thing, mental abuse another, but both are forms of abuse.

Dawkins and Hitchens celebrate art over religion, forgetting that the wonder and mystery of the universe and God's role in it have provided inspiration for countless artists. Michelangelo's Creation of Adam paintings at the Sistine Chapel is only one such example.

And there are thousands of examples of art by atheists, agnostics and deists. Like the argument about whether religion or atheism is the best at devising killing machines, it's futile and silly and deeply irrelevant to the uses that art may be put to (after all, Eisenstein made films as a homage to communism until he discovered the madness of Ivan the Terrible made for fruitier drama).

Dawkins remarks that the human brain is a "design nightmare". Well, since we use that organ to contemplate these and other complex subjects, it can't be that badly designed.

Oh please! Can somebody bring me a new hard drive, and why not give the worthy Abramovich one while we're at it. If it's so bloody good, why haven't we worked out a solution to all that's wrong with the world. And where's god when we need her?

In his introduction to The God Delusion Dawkins states: "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put if down."

I wonder for how many readers this is true.

Who knows and who cares. It's just another day at the new badge the National Times, as they try to stir the pot and attract readers who will join in the fun.

But if this is the best Dr. Dvir Abramovich can come up with, I'm thinking that readers who will get to the end of it will likely as not be atheists by the time they put it down. In that sense, his shoddy arguments and patch work thinking create the ripe conditions for teenage rebellion which, as Einstein observed, often leads to eruptions of fundamentalist atheists.

So it goes ...

(Below: a quote and a painting by René Magritte, surrealist and one time communist, and fraudulent producer of fake paintings. Now pardon me if I put my head under a pillow case for a moment as I seek a modicum of elegance).

Progressive atheists and Fascist Catholics are not very interesting. While on the way to Antwerp yesterday, I passed near the camp at Breendonc [sic] (the Belgian Buchenwald), and the memories this camp brought back are far from being able to provide any rationale for the universe. As for the progressive atheists you mention, who dream of horsewhipping the whole world, they are obviously incapable of making anything but trouble. We don’t have to do anything about such "engagés" so long as they leave us more or less in peace. However, when "culture" is at stake, their titles—Catholics, Fascists, atheists, progressives, etc.—are reason enough for one to be disgusted at the prospect of collaborating with them. For them, it’s not enough to take a "quick turn round the floor with a modicum of elegance." They wouldn’t hesitate to stop you if it were necessary.

—Letter from René Magritte to G. Puel, May 22, 1955