Rampant militant atheists, Dawkins on the march, Sheehan in despair, Day in love with the feeding frenzy of sharks, and Burchell to hand for a sorbet

(Above: militant atheists on the march. How dare they call our own Steve Fielding more stupid than an earthworm. Not when you have the Australian cricket team to hand, and the rugby league season well into its first week).

What a perfect storm this Monday brings.

As feared by Barney Zwartz in By their fruit shall ye know them, the militant atheists are on the march, and show all the subtlety of a sledge hammer.

First comes news that Dawkins derides sainthood as Pythonesque, dubbing the creation of saints as pure Monty Puthon, and mocking the work of the Pope Nazi, as if the Church was some kind of medieval monstrosity when it's simply embracing the astute marketing principles of Hollywood. Worse, he's labelled Steve Fielding as more stupid than an earthworm, when in fact the honourable Senator has the brains and functionality of a gadfly. And who knows, they might be as handy as the study of gall wasps turned out to be for Alfred Kinsey.

Even more amazing, sociologists have flocked to marvel and examine the flock of atheists gathered in Melbourne, much as field workers marvel at the pilgrimages of bogong moths, and you can read about it here in Mysterious rituals of the atheists. Proving that you can dress up snide sniping as a frolicsome academic exercise, which nonetheless can carry doom laden messages of warming:

A 2006 study in the US, for example, revealed atheists to be the nation's most distrusted minority - well ahead of, say, Muslims, homosexuals and recent immigrants.

In the process, authors Stephen Bullivant and Lois Lee earn the dubious title of academic squibbers for the year, as they fling around all kinds of hints and innuendos, while cloaking themselves in the garb of academic objectivity:

So, while a couple of thousand assorted unbelievers crowded around South Wharf, basking in the approval of their new-found and like-minded friends, we few sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists will continue our work trying to make sense of it all. And we will not need to turn to the philosophical question of who is right or wrong to do it.

You know, because the last thing science should be is value-laden in its quaint observations of the mysterious ways of the lemmings:

The social sciences can make no comment on the existence or otherwise of God or any other supernatural phenomena. All they can do is demonstrate how humans perceive and relate themselves to such (real, imagined, or socially constructed) phenomena. But that doesn't mean that it isn't eminently interesting or worthwhile.

Which makes the use of value-laden terms as in ...

... book sales alone weren't responsible for the atmosphere of celebration - even, perhaps, self-congratulation.

... a marvel of restrained scientific observation. The authors should self-congratulate themselves for being so smugly objective.

(What's that you say, it's not the same Dr Stephen Bullivant who lingers in the faculty of theology at the University of Oxford, dressed up in the column's credits as a research fellow? Ah well, I guess co-author Lois Lee is keen, and they've done it before in Where do atheists come from?)

Meanwhile, in other news, this kind of sideshow will soon turn out to be completely irrelevant, as we head towards the economic rapture and end times.

This week, Paul Sheehan woke with the fear, a dire case of the Barnabys. We're all going to be rooned, no doubt about it, as the grumpy prophet bestrides the world and warns Batten down the hatches, the waters are still treacherous.

First he saw signs and portents in the local paper - the ominous word 'boom' came up in connection with property. Then more ominous language with talk of 'unstable dynamics'. Then alarums and warnings in the United States, and the debt burden, naturally all the fault of the Obama administration (George who?), and then of course there's the Europeans, and Greece, and Britian and a vulnerable pound, and Italy, and the PIGS disgruntled, and social discord in Greece ...

And don't you go on relying on China. It too will hit a second great wall - water shortages, but sssh, that's nothing to do with climate change - and it will stumble. And why as if to prove his point over in The Australian, Beijing warns of tough times, with Premier Wen Jiabao saying that the world risks sliding back into recession and China will face a difficult year maintaining growth.

Sheehan is so alarmed that he fails to remember it's all the fault of the Rudd government that we escaped the last recession by spending our way out of trouble right up to the last paragraph, and then he gets himself into such a dither when it comes back with a rush, that he goes all royal with his use of "we":

The Rudd government, as it has proved in every area of major policy, overspent. It threw money around with undisciplined panic when faced with the global economic crisis. We said the same thing at the peak of the storm.

Well here at loon pond, we too are concerned and worried, because Sheehan has shifted from raging denunciations and mild apoplexy to a pious, humble suggestion:

In May, when the next federal budget is presented, a debt-reduction and stimulus-reduction program would be the prudent course and help bolster the government's credibility in an election year.

What no great big new tax on business for Tony Abbott's grand maternity leave scheme?

Frankly, we don't think that Sheehan pays sufficient attention to the gravity of the situation, and so we are pleased to announce the suggestion that in Saturday's Herald, as a community service, Fairfax should provide a free cyanide pill of the kind favoured by Goebbels and his family, or failing that a deliciously flavoured Kool Aid, or failing that a free pistol with a loaded magazine and instructions for use.

It seems certain that as the atheists indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation we're all doomed.

Now having put the fear of an absent god into you, for a little light reading, surely you can do no better than Mark Day's valiant defence of media sharkery and shakedowns in Newsworthy or not, sometimes you're hot.

Reviewing the sordid story of the Herald Sun plundering Facebook for photos to illustrate a story about identity theft, Day displays all the sensitivity of a shark confronting a victim. Tough tittie, or in shark speak, tough shit. Facebook is just another resource, to be gouged at will, never mind all that blather by Chairman Rupert about intellectual property rights (yep, go ahead and steal all the photos and stories you like from News Ltd, and use them how you will, because you see it's all up on the intertubes, and as anyone will acknowledge, like Facebook, the intertubes is a public place).

But surely this takes the cake for direct blackmail and moral threat:

But this unpleasantness could have been avoided if McCabe continued on the path she began. She told her story and could have consented to a photograph which was, in my view, a thoroughly legitimate request.

If she had done that, her unasked and unwanted role as a newsmaker would have been over in a day without hostility.

I acknowledge that the media is a hungry beast.

That’s why, when you find yourself in its voracious path, it’s often best to feed it.

Yep, never mind what the victim might think. Just lie down and let the shark have a piece of you. Perhaps a leg or an arm, as a way of saving the rest of your body. Stick your bum in the air and forget the KY jelly.

And never ever tell it just to fuck off. But you know, I'm suddenly warming to the notion that telling Chairman Rupert's minions to fuck off, and then complaining about their behaviour to Media Watch, is a jolly good way forward ...

Now after all that high excitement, atheists, earthworms, the end of the economic world, and the feeding of sharks, you must be in the market for a tasty raspberry sorbet. And who better to provide it than long term favourite David Burchell in The same old waltz of prurience and prudery as he makes a heartfelt Tartuffian-inspired plea for tolerance, in what surely has to be the last last word on the Clarke and Bingle affair.

It seems the modern world is a torture of polarities, and never mind that Burchell himself, with his willingness to frolic in this tired old field, might be one of the unholy regiment of winking know-it-alls and gossip-mongers that he mocks. He has but kind words for these star-crossed lovers in this modern farce ...

But soft, the sun is already up, and the gentle mists sway and dance in the light refracted from the pond, and a new Monday is upon us, as Agamemnon once noted as he led an expedition of Achaean troops to Troy ... sheesh, I've been reading Burchell, and instead of slipping into the world of Moliere, I drifted into Homer.

Whatever, no complaints please. There's the fine sound of squawking as the city comes alive, and a world of entertainment awaits you ... which is just as well, because here at the pond, we know you're all doomed. Enjoy it while you can.

(Below: Moliere, Tartuffe. Note the startling resemblance to Lara Bingle and Michael Clarke. And note one of Chairman Rupert's minions lurking under the table, ready to steal from Facebook and report on the scene).