Marc Barnes is like Ted Williams Hitting .400

And just as fun to watch. Take for instance this post he wrote yesterday, which has gone as viral as the Spanish Influenza, being seen by close to 37,000 people in a little more than 24 hours. Like Ted drinking a bottle of Moxie, Marc wades right in.

Oh dear. Matthew Inman of the marvelous web-comic, The Oatmeal, seems to have experienced that exquisite twitch all modern atheists are doomed to experience — the I-know-what’s-best-for-you-silly-religious-people-come-heed-me spasm. This particular train of thought requires the thinker ignore the vast majority of Christian belief — which is entrenched in reason — and focus solely on minority caricatures of the creationist or the wailing-out evangelical, caricatures firmly established and grounded in The Holy Internet Worldview. Having thus defined the term “religion”, the moral high ground is taken, the sneers are unleashed, and all religious people fear and tremble, for atheism has demonstrated itself as supremely reasonable, authoritative, scientific, and gosh-darnit it’s a wonder everyone just doesn’t convert on the spot. Check it out.

Now I know it’s an impossible task, rebutting with clunking prose what is claimed by fantastic comics, but someone’s got to try, if only for this reason: It’s no kindness to the atheist to let him forever believe that the religious have all the intellectual history of a WBC preacher. I mean goodness, what if he stumbles upon a Dominican? The shock would kill him. Thus and therefore and onwards then, in that frustrating step-by-step manner:

Read the whole, charitable, piece. It is a tour de force. Then share it with your friends, your teenagers, and your youth ministry folks in your parish. While you’re at it, share it with your priest and your RCIA leaders too. Let’s share it all the way to Pluto and back! You never know, but Marc’s treatment of this may even help Matthew Inman turn the corner and view Catholicism in a new light. Stranger things than that have happened.

Bravo Marc Barnes! Well done. Very well done, indeed.