Atheists are getting a lot more attention in the press these days, and not all of it good of course. Even articles which otherwise appear to be reasonably even-handed or positive can easily turn towards the negative or passive-aggressive by the end. This is at least a step forward, since in the past atheists were generally ignored, but I don't think it's too much to ask that someone who wants to write an article about atheism do at least a little bit of homework so they can avoid obvious and simple mistakes. Is it?

Via Island of Doubt, Brian Bethune writes in Macleans:

The polemicists' total rejection of faith makes the very existence of religious moderates a puzzle to them. (Dawkins, in particular, seems spiritually deaf to everything from the sense of wonder to the pull of family and community.) Except, perhaps, for Hitchens, who seems to be the only one who admits to having religious friends, the atheists' own dirty little secret -- their contempt for moderates -- is never far from the surface of their books. They assert that moderates enable fanatics by allowing religious arguments a privileged place...

As James Hrynyshyn points out at Island of Doubt, practically all of this is false — in particular is the absurd statement that Dawkins is "deaf" to things like wonder, family, and community. There's no way that Brian Bethune could have read Dawkins' books — Unweaving the Rainbow in particular — and come away with such an impression. Dawkins has also referenced the importance he places on his friendships — including friendships with Christians. This means that there's no way to excuse the statement as a simple misunderstanding; at best, it must be due to a complete lack of basic research.

What's bizarre, though, is how Brian Bethune tries to be critical of atheists who are critical of religious moderates, but then he turns around and provides support for the atheists' case:

...it was a liberal Catholic debating partner who told Hitchens that religious liberty demanded that mohels be allowed to carry out their ancient rite as they saw fit. "In a funny way," Dawkins said in an interview last fall in reference to one devout scientist, "I have more respect for a young creationist," referring to someone who proclaims that life on earth is only 6,000 years old.

The context for this comment about mohels is a background story Bethune related earlier in the article: A mohel (Jewish circumciser) in 2005 transmitted herpes to at least three infants through the use of a traditional but rare practice of using his mouth to remove the foreskin. One of the infants was killed and another suffered severe brain damage — but the New York City mayor Bloomberg refuse to follow the recommendations of his own health department to ban the practice in the name of religious freedom.

The atheist ideologues' stated purpose is to make all but the diehard "faith-heads" think (as well as to rally the already converted). Of course, what they disdain as the arrogance of faith, its claim that everything we ever needed to know was revealed from on high 3,500 years ago (or 2,000 years ago, or 1,300 years ago), is matched by their own.

Critics of atheists like to claim that atheists are too arrogant without really specifying what is so arrogant in their arguments, but Brian Bethune goes a step further in making a more specific claim: the arrogance of people like Dawkins "matches" the "arrogance of faith," as for example in the claims that everything we need to known was revealed in holy scriptures a few thousand years ago. If Bethune were a serious journalist, I think he'd provide some support for this statement — like for example some claim by Dawkins which "matches" the sorts of claims in question.

Let's review some of the ways in which the "arrogance of faith" is manifested in "people of faith." It is claimed that some sort of god definitely exist, that this god is primarily concerned with just human beings out of everything that exists in the universe, that certain human beings know exactly what this god wants from us (and what is forbidden), that a narrow group of people received revelations from this god at some point in history, etc. These are all very grand claims to make and, arguably, very arrogant as well.

What sort of claims could Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, or other atheists make that could possibly "match" such positions? Brian Bethune doesn't tell us — and I frankly don't think he can. I don’t believe that he's researched the topic well enough to have any idea what sorts of claims might even qualify, much less to know if he can find them among the writings of prominent atheists today. There are certainly many valid points of criticism which can be made against various atheist writers, but Bethune doesn't offer any of them; instead, he just makes many of the standard attacks without doing any of the work that might be required to support them. Bethune's piece seems to be little more than an example of lazy journalism employed to jump on the bandwagon of a popular topic.