Tim Dick, the study of ethics, militant atheism, intolerance, and blather for the love of blather

Tim Dick displays a marvelous fundamental level of incoherence - while writing about intolerant militant atheists - that should see a gig opening up for him should ever Christopher Pearson decide to retired from The Australian.

Here he is with It's the sanctimonious unbelievers who need to be more tolerant:

Take this week's row over forcing school kids who opt out of religious education to do nothing. It makes organised religion seem at once stupid and scared, petrified no one will go to scripture if they can do something other than watch a DVD. That a pilot program to teach ethics can't get up in NSW shows the miraculous continuing political power of the Anglican and Catholic churches.

Not since the Bill Henson art-porn debate has the Herald letters editor been so deluged in correspondence, and many held this view: how can anyone object to kids thinking about ethics rather than nothing at all? Hard to answer.

Well it almost goes without saying that Tim has the answer. Somehow this is profound evidence that it's hard line militant atheists that are the real problem:

Those who are not believers live in a time of unprecedented freedom, beyond mere tolerance. We should extend the same to those who are. And for god's sake, give those kids something better to do.

Yep, we've gone beyond mere tolerance into a time of unprecedented freedom, unless of course you happen to want to study ethics or perhaps indulge in gay marriage. Perhaps the worst thing about it all was the way the irrational militant atheists inundated the SMH with outraged correspondence. Haven't they got anything better to do with their time?

Oh I'm sorry, you're still trying to reconcile this magical new era of unprecedented freedom beyond tolerance, with the banal stupidity of kids not being able to study ethics in school, as a simple, easy way of making practical use of this new era of unprecedented freedom.

Well that means most likely you're just an irritating bloody militant atheist:

Atheists are beginning to display the worst trait we hate in religious fundamentalists - intolerance. Militant atheism's end game is a world without believers. Do we really want that?

Faith may well be a delusion but, in Australia, at least, it usually works for good rather than bad, despite the mad views of some clergy and followers who twist religious tenets for their own warped purposes.

Um Tim, protesting by writing letters to the editor about the stupidity of not being able to study ethics in school - thereby commenting on the continuing power of the Catholics and Anglicans in the education system - hardly constitutes intolerance. Unless of course you think it's intolerant to protest about intolerance. Or you think Christian intolerance is somehow goody two shoes while militant atheist intolerance is fiendish and horrible.

As for a world without believers, perhaps we can settle for a world without fruitloop terrorists who think after blowing themselves and others up, that'll give them a pass to paradise, and as well as passing go, they'll collect a couple of hundred bucks and 72 virgins. Or perhaps we might get rid of theocracies like Iran, or mad clergy who twist their religious tenets for their own mad purposes. If you want to believe in pie in the sky by and by, feel free, but why persecute a minority - militant atheists - while a bunch of militant religionists, still way in the majority - if they tell the truth to the census takers - are still running the show.

Um, Tim, I'm coming to think the column was actually just blather for the sake of blather. It isn't a good look, especially in the week Christopher Hitchens is in town seeking to challenge the best minds of the antipodes. 

When the militant atheists manage to get religion out of the state school system (and get all the religionistas funded by John Howard kicked out as well), maybe then it'll be the time to write about the persecution of the Christians. Meantime wasn't the lesson of the day the persecution of wanna be ethics learners?

Perhaps your real problem isn't militant atheists so much as a desire to generate copy based on monumental perversity, and it almost goes without saying, a profound indifference to logic 101. Gee churning out stuff for this new brand, the National Times, is a tough gig.

Sharpen up Tim. I'd send you off to ethics school for a little intensive contemplation, only bugger it, the militant Christians seem to have nobbled them ...

(Below: xkcd, more xkcd here).