Just because your blog has a reader doesn’t mean it has a fan. I learned that one a long time ago. Case in point, one of my readers named Grady has attacked my defense of my blurb for Loftus’ The End of Christianity, and he’s done so with spit and vinegar. While I already responded to most of his comment, I saved the best for last. So here’s my super-anti-fan, Grady:
And John talks about The END of Christianity, and even says he hopes to see it end by the end of this century.
Is he leaving something out?
Does that mean Christians will have to be eliminated?
His pal Avalos says, in Fighting Words, that religion must be removed from human society.
Its not as if that has not happened in countries where Atheists have obtained political power.
Or, are they all speaking metaphorically?
There are two issues here. The first is Loftus’ (and Avalos’) call for Christianity to end. The second is Grady’s suggestion of how he seems to believe they want to accomplish this feat. Let’s deal with the second issue first.
Grady seems to suggest that Loftus and Avalos are (or might be) sympathetic with pogroms against Christianity, a forcible repression of the religiously devout. He then refers to Avalos’ book Fighting Words for support. The fear is that when Atheists attain political power this planned pogrom will begin to unfold.
If Grady has some textual evidence that Loftus and Avalos actually support such a force repression of Christianity I’d be very interested to see it, not least because the very book that Grady refers to (Fighting Words) is, among other things, a sustained attack on ideologically driven violence as it appears in the Bible. So to think Avalos wrote this as a prolepsis to a planned cultural genocide would be, to say the least, ironic.
This brings me to the first point. Do Loftus and Avalos really want Christianity to end? Well yes, of course they do. And why shouldn’t they? After all they believe it is false and harmful. If I believe a worldview is false and harmful then I too want to see it end. That’s the way I feel about atheism, for example. I feel about atheism the way Loftus and Avalos feel about Christianity: false and harmful. And so I want to see atheism end as surely as they want to see Christianity end: because I value what I believe is true and I want others to come share my beliefs precisely because I believe them to be true.
So Loftus/Avalos and I both want the other’s worldview to end. Now how should we go about it? Should each side don our armor and take up our sword? Well I guess we could do that. But instead we have opted for the less bloody route of writing books. That way you are less likely to die on the battlefield, and you might even make some royalties while you’re at it.
