Those who are connoisseurs of below-the-line atheism on Comment is free will be delighted to see it very much above the line in this month's London Review of Books. Galen Strawson reviews two books on religion by Mark Johnston of Princeton University, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry and Surviving Death. In the process, he makes a number of statements that elsewhere might be called "trolling".

Under the headline "Religion is a sin", Strawson broadly commends Mark Johnston's approach, which is to seek a "religious" life beyond the bounds of traditional religion, which Johnston believes to be idolatrous. The idolatry comes from seeking God in what is supernatural. The Abrahamic faiths in particular, with their supernatural intervening God, are therefore (despite their stated efforts to the contrary) idolatrous.

"They want a 'personal God', a 'Cosmic Intervener who might confer special worldly advantages on his favourites'. They should be ashamed of themselves, at least if they've had any education; they're moral babies."

It's clear from the tone of that last sentence where Strawson stands. He goes on to opine that it's impossible – no exceptions – for the genuine spiritual or religious impulse to achieve full expression in religions that mandate belief in a supernatural personal God.

No exceptions, eh? But what's this in the very next sentence?

"There have been genuinely religious Abrahamists, but only because they've somehow maintained the forms of personal-God religions while having in fact abandoned any such belief."

The "No true Scotsman fallacy" is clearly alive and well. But what are we to make of another sweeping generalisation?

"If we take the term 'morally worse' as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those who have had some non-negligible degree of education, we find that people who have religious convictions are on the whole morally worse than people who lack them. Are the religious worse because they're religious, or are they religious because they're worse? The first direction of causation is well known, but it's the second that is more prominent in everyday life. The religious (sociologically speaking) tend to be religious because religious belief provides them with a framework in which they can handle certain unattractive elements in themselves. In converts – those who take up religion without having been brought up in it, or without having previously taken it seriously – the correlation between religious belief and relative moral badness in the strictly descriptive sense (which is not incompatible with charm) is particularly striking."

To respond to this sort of argument would surely be feeding the troll. So I won't. And anyway, I'm scared that if I did respond, I'd quickly be undone by Strawson's wordplay and rapier wit:

"Saving God and Surviving Death are a slap in the face for many who may be attracted by their titles: regular believers, supernaturalists, are likely to feel suckered rather than succoured. But really it's the other way round. They've already been suckered; the question is whether they can be succoured."

The answer, it would seem, is no: because if they're "a truly religious (hence non-whingeing) person" they wouldn't be "regular believers" in the first place.

I leave it to others below the line to read Strawson's essay (and Johnston's books) for themselves. What interests me, as I'm buffeted by his arguments, is a strange sense of deja vu. Educated Christians like me might well be "moral babies", and "morally worse" than our atheist friends, but we do know some history. And if we try, in our morally babyish, morally bad way, to repent of our sins, we often find ourselves contemplating the sins committed by Christians in the past.

In 1881, the Bampton Lectures in Oxford were given by a fellow of Brasenose – John Wordsworth, later bishop of Salisbury, the grand-nephew of William Wordsworth. The first of these lectures was on "The present unsettlement in religion", by which Wordsworth meant the growth of atheism and agnosticism. For Wordsworth, unbelief was essentially "sin". And the "moral causes" of unbelief were outlined in his lecture. They were: "(1) Prejudice; (2) Severe claims of religion; (3) Intellectual faults, especially indolence, coldness, recklessness and avarice."

The lecture was so outrageous that the wife of another Brasenose fellow attacked it in a locally distributed pamphlet: she was Mrs Humphry Ward, and the episode inspired her to write her great novel of Victorian doubt, Robert Elsmere. Nowadays – and to this successor in Wordsworth's shoes as chaplain of Brasenose – the lecture just seems crass, propagandistic, incendiary. In a word, "trolling".

It does Christianity no good to respond to critics in this way: ad hominem arguments rarely persuade their target. Ward recalled the lecture in her memoirs saying: "Every sceptical head received its due buffeting in a tone and fashion that now rarely survives." But of course that tone and fashion does survive, and is widespread. It survives in the worst of religious rhetoric around the world, as ignorant dogmatists try to comprehend modern unbelief. But it's also there in such liberal and reasonable places as the LRB. Only here, the historical roles seem to have been reversed.