Ridiculing the Ridiculous

 FOR A GOOD LAUGH nothing is quite like an evangelical Christian radio "personality" trying to be serious, pretending to be an intellectual, acting  like a guru, leading the masses to the truth, to the sacred place of God. If you're lucky, you might catch  one of them is a rare moment of lucidity, when he is not ranting or raving incoherently. Rarely will you actually do this. Almost invariably they remain firmly ensconced within their cocoon of sanctimonious oblivion,  smug, condescending, superior, handing down truth from their lofty perch above.One in particular tried to impose what he thought passed for logic upon Richard Dawkins, but only revealed his inability to use logic, unaware of his failure. Dawkins, noted evolutionary biologist, atheist, and author of "The Selfish Gene" among other scholarly works, is tempting but dangerous prey for the sanctimonious pseudo Christian. Heaven forbid that a devout christian would ever consider being tolerant and accepting of religious freedom, freedom which they so cherish for themselves, and paranoically believe is threatened by secular American society. Like fellow atheist Thomas Paine did in revolutionary era America,  in his famous essay "The Age of Reason" Dawkins has noted that the Biblical God behaves like a diabolical, pathologically ill genocidal monster. Its hard not to notice this, unless blinded by religious devotion. Dawkins further asserts that good and evil are human made concepts, and have nothing to do with the actual force which created the universe.In swoops our evangelical intellectual light weight, thinking he has trapped Dawkins. How could Dawkins believe that God behaves badly, is evil, if he doesn't even believe in God? How can he discuss God at all? The obvious answer, of course, is that to Dawkins, and to intelligent, educated people, the biblical God is a fictional character in a work of fiction based loosely upon historical events. Dawkins believed that the universe was created, and that we are free to call the creation of it "God". what he does not believe in is the anthropomorphic deity of the Bible, or of any other religion of human invention. There is no law of man nor nature which says than an atheist cannot comment on or express an opinion about a fictional God described in a book, and to consider it evil when it kills thousands of innocent people or tortures a person who believes in him by testing his belief, as he did with Abraham. To make negative comments about the God of evangelical Christians, it is only necessary for an atheist to be a book reader and a literary critic, not a believe in the reality of the fictional God within the work of literature.