When I came in this morning, I was all set to spend a lot of time addressing John Gray‘s piece in Tuesday’s Guardian, “What scares the new atheists.” (Subtitle: “The vocal fervour of today’s missionary atheism conceals a panic that religion is not only refusing to decline – but in fact flourishing,”) And then, before I started writing, I saw these tw**ts from Sam Harris:

And the second one lifted a huge burden from my shoulders! Gray’s piece is not worth reading, is not important, and therefore is not worth analyzing. It’s not only too long and makes no new arguments, but is also terribly written. Gray has yet to master the art of writing lively (or even readable) prose, and thus he begins his piece like this—a lesson on how not to draw the reader into your article:

In 1929, the Thinker’s Library, a series established by the Rationalist Press Association to advance secular thinking and counter the influence of religion in Britain, published an English translation of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1899 book The Riddle of the Universe. Celebrated as “the German Darwin”, Haeckel was one of the most influential public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; The Riddle of the Universe sold half a million copies in Germany alone, and was translated into dozens of other languages.

Read the blasted thing yourself; I won’t waste much time on it. His points are that religion is on the upswing (??), that atheists are ignorant of atheist history (same old same old: we haven’t fully absorbed Nietzsche’s atheistic dolor), and that a disbelief in Gods doesn’t necessarily lead to a good, liberal state. The whole sodden mess can be summed up in one bit:

The answer that will be given is that religion is implicated in many human evils. Of course this is true. Among other things, Christianity brought with it a type of sexual repression unknown in pagan times. Other religions have their own distinctive flaws. But the fault is not with religion, any more than science is to blame for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or medicine and psychology for the refinement of techniques of torture. The fault is in the intractable human animal.

No, he’s wrong about the similarity of science and religion. Religion is more at fault than science, because, unlike science, religion often comes with both a tendency to missionize and with a moral code: a toxic combination that guarantees bad stuff.

You can see my history of differences with the atheist-bashing Gray by doing this search. But I’m tired of the man and find his pieces unspeakably boring. I’m so happy to write about other things today. Of course Gray has a new book to sell, which is why he wrote this over-long screed in the first place.