Madeleine Bunting, and yet another militant aggressive New Christian ranting and railing at atheists ...

(Above: believers in the United States taking a step back from science, and creationism, and instead offering up myth-making so they can earn praise from Madeleine Bunting ps the kids go for the dinosaurs).

It took The Sydney Morning Herald only a couple of days to dig up Madeleine Bunting's Atheists win a battle but may lose the war from The Guardian, and once disinterred, to offer it a special plot in their very own National Times section.

Perhaps they hoped a change of header from The Guardian's God is attracting more debate than ever would distract readers' attention from the faint hint of rigor mortis, but truth to tell, The Guardian's header is more useful than the SMH's completely useless effort, which takes a piece of militant gibberish from Bunting and turns the debate into a war.

Speaking of war, sometimes distracted subbies should just be taken out the back and shot.

Bunting's effort is otherwise an undistinguished affair, another attempt by the Herald to keep the new crusades and religious wars trotting along as a way of keeping their readers slavering and slobbering with indignation.

Her main flurry of floozies is to talk about New Atheists and New Atheism, which makes as much sense as talking about New Catholicism or New Anglicanism, or New with secret ingredients herbs and spices Chicken.

When underneath the feathers the chooks are still the same, and have been so for a very long time. Well maybe not the Anglicans, since they were a handy way for a king to score a divorce ...

Bunting also exhibits other peculiarities common to the domestic gallus gallus journalist, often known as New Journalists practising New Journalism (never mind that it was 1964 when Tom Wolfe first got his kandy-kolored tangerine-flake story into Esquire).

The usual habit of these barnyard fowls is to cluck around, scratching for a tasty worm or two, berating these suddenly omnipresent New Atheists for a lack of logic, while displaying sundry examples of a sterling lack of logic themselves.

Back to that piece of gibberish about a war going on, and someone winning, as if death is some kind of sweet victory.

After berating Dawkins for his rationalist complacency, invoking philosophers and Jonathan Swift, Bunting lets loose with this:

Perhaps New Atheism's publishing success is a case of winning a battle and losing the war - the main religions are currently experiencing massive expansion across most of the world. One of the biggest drivers of growth is China; by 2050 it could be the biggest Muslim nation, and the biggest Christian one.

Which proves what exactly? That might is right, and that truth can be arrived at by numbers, and that the country once ruled by Mao, in the tradition of the sons of Heaven, those divine rulers, is now heading off to a different kind of schizophrenia where Christians, Muslims and Falun Gong contest for the Chinese soul?

Assuming of course that there is a war, since I really don't give a toss what others believe in, no matter how deluded or crackpot, provided it doesn't get in the way of a civil, decently secular, religion separated from state society.

Then Bunting charges on to all the other third world countries that are leading the way to increased and intensified religiosity, and the future being very religious. Yippee, go Iran, go go, go go Iran. Oh joy of joys, militant Christians v militant Islamics. The new thousand year crusade.

Bunting is terribly worried about how atheists will deal with this rush to religiosity:

To the sceptical Westerner, this is a lonely and unintelligible prospect. So, which of the defences of God on my bookshelf are going to help explain this enduring appeal?

Unintelligible? You mean deluded crackpots drinking the kool aid in Jonestown is unintelligible? Or is it just the mystery of crackpots drinking wafers and wine and thinking they're munching a bit of Christ's flesh, followed by a nice chaser of blood. Cannibalism worthy of a New Guinea tribe anyone?

Never mind, then it's on with the myth-making to explain the enduring appeal:

Start with Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth: ''we are meaning-seeking creatures'' who ''invent stories to place our lives in a larger setting . . . and give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value''.

Uh huh. Well that explains Hollywood, and no doubt Cecil B. de Mille. But can it explain and forgive Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments?

That helps explain why the bestselling religious book in the US is The Purpose Driven Life. The faithful are not mugging up on critiques of reason for an argument with New Atheism, but turning to religion to offer meaning and purpose.

And who's stopping them? Provided these militant Christians and Islamics forsake their inquisitions (not to mention the bombings), and leave off the persecution of innocent, harmless, amiable atheists. They can have their meaning and purpose, I just need a mechanic who knows how to fix the computer in my car.

Then Bunting delivers up a doozy:

The great mistake the atheists made is to claim that religion started out as a clumsy stab at science - trying to explain how the world worked - and is now clearly redundant. That misses the point entirely: religion is not about explaining how an earthquake or flood happens; rather it offers meanings for such events. When someone is killed in a car accident, Western rationality is good at analysing how the brakes failed and the road curved, but has nothing to say about why, on that particular day, the brakes failed when it was you in the car: the sequence of random events that kill. This search for meaning is part of what drives the religious spirit.

Dear lord, where to start? As if the search for meaning somehow doesn't include the search for an explanation of how earthquakes and floods happen. As if religion isn't a clumsy stab at science, and creationists nee intelligent designers still keep clumsily stabbing away, as some try to explain how god overlooked dinosaurs in the text that explains everything.

Bunting doesn't even have a decent handle on mysticism, which might, in a zen Buddhist way, help her to understand how atheists can indeed have spiritual experiences, and sometimes be moved by inexplicably irrational forces like love (better get than in quick, in case the loved one is reading).

But if you thought that was a doozy, how about this assertion of a set of opinions:

The second mistake made by the atheists is the assumption that faith and belief are mental processes akin to opinion. Armstrong runs through the etymology to uncover original meanings: belief is a commitment not a proposition; faith, as in ''I have faith in you'', is an expression of confidence, not an assertion of the existence of something. Dogma is ''a truth which cannot easily be put into words and which can only be fully understood through long experience'' - rather like the love of a parent for their child growing into adulthood.

Where to start? As if original meanings and original etymologies mean that somehow the original meanings are valid?

Perhaps we can start with a wiki definition of dogma:

Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from. The term derives from Greek δόγμα "that which seems to one, opinion or belief" and that from δοκέω (dokeo), "to think, to suppose, to imagine". The plural is either dogmas or dogmata , from Greek δόγματα. (here)

Sob. It's so much easier to make with the Joseph Campbell George Lucas myth-making, but there's nothing in Bunting that leaves me to think that Christianity is superior to Star Wars in its explanation of life, the universe and 42. Come to think of it, is that why I'm ineluctably drawn to Scientology? Because of my experience in a past volcano?

But back to etymology, as if the loss of original meanings (whatever that might mean) somehow explains the way things are now, when in reality all language changes, and goes on changing. Does the great vowel shift explain how we can no longer write poetry like Shakespeare, or more to the point Chaucer?

The loss of the original meanings of all these words show how religious faith in the West came to be interpreted as a matter of the head and the intellect, and was bound up with the authority of an institution that expected submission: God was regarded as something to think about rather than do in large chunks of Western religious practice that, preoccupied with institutional power, ended up in this current cul de sac.

Which is the most peculiar interpretation of clerical history anyone might care to mount, as if the mystical tradition in all religions has been torn up and thrown away by the head and the intellect. So much for those bloody whirling dervishes and their constant whirling, or those chanting monks insisting on their Gregorian chants.

But of course it wouldn't do, having cocked up history, not to cock a snoot at these rampant new atheists:

Armstrong offers an important insight into the sheer aggressive intolerance of New Atheism when she argues that ''the history of religion shows that, once a myth ceases to give people intimations of transcendence, it becomes abhorrent''.

Hang on, just this easter we got another dose of sheer aggressive intolerance from the New Christians about the evils of atheism, and how they were the cause of the Nazis and likely as not the ruination of the world. The only difference is these days when confronted by intolerance and humbuggery from Militant New Christians old atheists can speak their minds, thanks to enlightened secularism.

Folks, do not try to exercise the right to diss Islam in Iran, or think about drinking a beer in Malaysia while denying god. And don't in a cheerful amiable way tell Christians that there won't be pie in the sky by and by, at least not in your home. They might aggressively hurl their cucumber sandwich at you ...

But back to Bunting as on she rambles:

The shift to monotheism provoked huge struggle among the Israelites, for example, and a deep contempt for anything that might be idolatry.

The paradox of New Atheism is that in its bid to make religion unacceptable, it has contributed to making it a subject that is worth talking about again.

Huh? So those bloody new atheists are worth something after all, and it's only the old atheists to whom we need pay no attention? As if atheists are wandering around, trying to convert people to their new religion? But it isn't a bloody religion ... how can you erect a religion around a derelict, absent, wayward, capricious, vicious god?

Never mind, let's get back to the number counting, as that seems to be the only thing to provide comfort, reassurance and confidence in New Christians and New Journalists:

In the US there are now hundreds of think tanks, institutes and courses dedicated to the subject; religion attracts a huge number of posts on opinion websites; literary festivals routinely offer several sessions on religion. Books are churned out. Admittedly, the exchanges can be horribly bad tempered, but God hasn't attracted this intensity of debate for decades.

Yep, seems like everybody's talking about god, and in writing this, I too am talking about god, but hey this is loon pond, where loons talk about all kinds of nonsensical propositions. Who knows, next week we might be spending our time with pagans celebrating a little witchcraft and voodoo.

And speaking of numbers, I see that 900,000 good souls have already ponied up the readies to take a trot through the creation museum in the good old USA. What a think tank that place is.

Why not visit there, and while you're at it, why not get a nice little dinosaur thingamajig as a souvenir of your visit. Just leave your scientific theories at the door, so you can get on with the myth-making: