A public bus rolls by with an atheist message on its side: “Millions of people are good without God.” Seconds later, a van follows bearing a riposte: “I still love you. — God,” with another line that says, “2.1 billion Christians are good with God.

More here at NY Times.

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Misotheism doesn’t accord with binary thinking about religious belief. We are accustomed to view people as either believers, who worship a divinity, or nonbelievers (atheists) or doubters (agnostics), for whom the deity is irrelevant. Misotheists are a category-defying species: They believe in God (hence they are not atheists), but they hate him (hence they are not theists).

From Chronicle of Higher Education.

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57 percent of U.S. respondents said they felt they would suffer at least minor social repercussions in the workplace if they came out as an atheist, compared to only 35 percent of respondents in Canada, 24 percent of Australians, 15 percent of residents of United Kingdom, and 12 percent of Western Europeans.

But this was new and news to me about Pat Tillman’s death.

In an interview with ESPN.com, Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, who led the second investigation into Tillman’s death, said the reason for the family’s dogged pursuit of the truth of his death was because they didn’t believe in God.

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Lifelong theists (“I have always believed in God”) are disproportionately from lower socio-economic groups while lifelong atheists (“I have never believed in God”) are disproportionately from higher socio-economic groups.

But then the surprise:

Converts to theism (“I believe in God now but have not always done so”) are disproportionately from upper and upper-middle-class social groups while converts to atheism (“I used to believe in God but I no longer do so”) are disproportionately from lower social groups. Since education strongly correlates with social standing, the study came across similar findings when education was examined.

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The prominent atheist faced a torrent of abuse from outraged fans after he announced that all further postings to the discussion forum on his website would be tightly moderated to ward off what he called “something rotten” in internet culture.

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The parable went like this. “Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, ‘It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.’ The other disagrees…They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer…insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The sceptic doesn’t agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all.”

Gottleib does a smashing job surveying the battleground: we’ve got the “New Atheists”, e.g., Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, on one side and the “New Apologists” (my term, not his), e.g., Karen Armstrong, on the other. Where’s Wittgenstein’s philosopher of religion who relates what he sees but leaves things as they are? Or do we throw our hands up in the air and give up? Maybe Gottlieb takes up the latter as the last sentence below suggests to me anyway.

One trenchant critic of the New Atheists is Terry Eagleton, a leading literary critic (and Catholic), who defines God as “what sustains all things in being by his love, and…is the reason why there is something instead of nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.” Some find it comforting or inspiring to utter such statements. But unless they can explain what those ideas mean and how one might tell whether they are right (which Eagleton never does), this is a self-deluding comfort. A wiser response to the apparent inexpressibility of statements about God may be simply not to express them, and just get on with the gardening.

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Reading the first sentence of Terry Eagleton’s review of The God Delusion in the October 2006 edition of the London Review of Books was not unlike watching a gunfighter kicking over a table of cards in an otherwise well-ordered saloon. “Imagine,” fired Eagleton, “someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

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