Richard Dawkins thinks that if you believe religious things, you cannot be a journalist. (photo: Murdo Macleod)

Andrew Brown lays bare the hypocrisy of Richard Dawkins:

Richard Dawkins and Twitter make one of the world’s great pairings, like face and custard pie. But whereas more accomplished clowns ram custard pies into the faces of their enemies, Dawkins’ technique is to ram his own face into the custard pie, repeatedly. I suppose it saves time and it’s a lot of fun to watch. On Sunday afternoon he was at it again, wondering why the New Statesman employs an imaginative and believing Muslim:

“Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed [sic] flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist.”

But this is only half the fun. The real comedy comes when he lifts his face from the pie, dripping scorn and custard, to glare at the audience who can’t see how very rational he is. Because there are some people who don’t understand that everything Dawkins says illuminates the beauty of reason.

Read the rest: Richard Dawkins’ latest anti-Muslim Twitter spat lays bare his hypocrisy

So, by extension, no one who believes any religious creed is fit to be a journalist.

At HuffPo, Staks Rosch claims, “Let’s face it, religion is dying.” His reason, because religious people lack humility, imagination, and curiosity. I will say that those three traits — particularly the latter two — are characteristics that I strive for in my writing and blogging.

Rosch, of course, caricatures religious believers. And I’ve rarely seen those three characteristics displayed in the work of the New Atheists. Nevertheless, his points are worth considering.

As for imagination, atheists tend to be the ones imagining the vastness of our cosmos while religious believers are trapped within their holy book(s). Lawrence Krauss is imagining nothing, and even that takes more imagination than the limited concept of a personified deity.

And lastly, there is curiosity — This coming from religious believers who punctuate every question with, “God did it.” But don’t take my word for it; let’s look at the so called word of God. Perhaps the good Rabbi can remind us what happened in the story of Babel. Oh right, according to the story, people got curious and wanted to build a tower to Heaven and God knocked it down, scattered the people all over the planet, and scrambled up their language skills so that they couldn’t communicate with each other to try again. Fortunately for us, we have Google Translate now. Oh and we not only built towers high into the sky, but we also sent space shuttles to the moon. No Heaven was found.

via Staks Rosch: What Theism Lacks: Humility, Imagination, and Curiosity.