A couple of atheists defect

First, there is the gut-wrenchingly painful story of R.J. Stove, whose terribly painful and beautifully honest story of conversion moves me to pray for his poor parents and reminds me that Christianity is a faith that confronts rather than avoids the fact that we are a species in a desperate plight. Until we grasp why *that* awful sacrifice was what it took for God to save us, we are not really facing what it means to say that we are sinners.  The horror and despair that visited David Stove in his last days should fill us with pity.

Second there is this charming gent who seems to be a simple soul and an honest man who made an honest mistake and then, by the grace of God, discovered his mistake and rejoiced to find God, because he really was looking for truth, not for a prop for his irrational pride.  He has, naturally, been reviled by the fantastically close-minded bigots who worship the intellect and follow Richard Dawkins while proclaiming themselves “rational and anti-authoritarian thinkers”.  *Is* there anybody more utterly close-minded than an Evangelical Atheist?  If there is, I seldom have encountered it in cyberspace.  Minds like fundamentalists, sealed up tighter than a drum.  This gentleman shows that not all atheists are the hermetically-sealed rationalist materialist dogmatists of the Ditchkins variety.

Why can’t there be more cheerful, open-minded, intellectually curious, non-dogmatic, happy and likeable Leah Librescos and a lot fewer jerks like Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, and Jerry Coyne? Not for nothing did atheist Phil Plait have to tell this population that is abormally represented by “Napoleon Dynamite with a Mean Streak” types a simple truth summed up in a speech with a memorable title: “Don’t be a Dick”. The speech has, naturellement, been roundly reviled by this population of social and affective subnormals who attribute all such critiques from people capable of normal human interactions to their own brilliance and the stupidity of their critics.