Michael Coren, Dipshit Extraordinaire

In light of my policy on accuracy in juvenile insults against people who don’t deserve adult invective, I would like to clarify that Michael Coren is not a big fat idiot. He’s a skinny, bald idiot.

One major fact before I tackle his screed – he’s morally bankrupt. His past idiocies include comparisons of homosexuality with necrophilia and bestiality and advocating nuclear strikes on Iran, although he later retracted the latter position. He claims his “faith” led him to reconsider. I’m sure we all believe him and that the ensuing shit-storm had absolutely nothing to do with it.

So: on to the idiocy, and h/t to the SecWeb NewsWire.

I suppose it’s the greatest joke of all. Deliciously ironic as well. My Christian faith has been profoundly encouraged by those most eager to smother it.

Actually, I think you’ll find that hardline religionists are the ones who really want to smother it. We’ll stay put with telling you how wrong you are.

Put simply, I was helped along the road from indifference to belief by the banality of atheism.

Hooray! Our first fallacy – a subjective value judgement packaged as an objective fact. OK, let’s test this one: what’s the commonly-accepted, workaday definition of banal? Commonplace, predictable and trite. Atheism isn’t any of those things – the simple fact is that there is more variation packed into the small community of Atheists in North America than in any denomination of Christians, for the elementary reason that we have only one common characteristic.

Since reaching the age of reason,

This assumes you have reached that age. Unfortunately, it seems that you, not unlike your religion, remain stuck in the Dark Ages.

I’ve had the usual old regulars thrown at me. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why doesn’t He make Himself more obvious? Why is evil committed in the name of religion? Throw in the Inquisition, the Crusades and some lies about Papal culpability during the Holocaust and you have the standard God-hating manifesto.

Moronic. If you don’t believe in something’s existence, you can’t hate it. And while you may call the argument from evil a regular, I notice that you didn’t actually ever refute it.

The tiniest seeds of my Christianity were planted, I think, much earlier and by an Oxford professor who happened to be one of the finest children’s writers of all time. I was six-years-old when C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was read to be me by Miss Power — I assume I was also in love with her, and yes my wife does know –at Redbridge School in Essex, England.

Another value judgement presented as a fact! This may become a theme. What’s so great about Lewis? The transparent and rather inept Christian allegory? The obvious and abhorrent racism? Actually, that may well appeal to Coren. How about the absurd muscular Christianity on display, in which all non-Christians are presented as weak, morally infirm or evil? Yeah, let’s promote racism and intolerance to kids! Go morality!

Part of Lewis’s gift is that he strokes rather than grabs.

Both of which are problems in your own Catholicism, Mr C; not necessarily something to promote.

As a child from a working-class, secular, part-Jewish family, I had no idea then that Lewis was writing about Christ.

Awww… How keeyoot! He must be leading up to a teen Damascus moment.

Leave the beauty and the story to stew for a few years, expose the child to the natural-law certainties given by God that permeate the human condition and then send him out into a series of great universities where atheism is as predicable as self-indulgent moans about tuition fees. To quote the philosopher Pat Benatar: “hit me with your best shot.” So they did.

Yay! I was right! Apparently, he’s now about to start listing the best arguments by Atheists. It’s a shame he’s such a transparent strawman fanatic and liar.

If God were good, He would make Himself obvious. Not really. God makes himself just sufficiently evident to allow us freedom. If He were easy to find, we’d all believe and thus have no real choice. If He were almost impossible to find, it would be cruel and unfair. He chooses the middle path. He’s there if we seek to look, but not so if we don’t care. He’s the great lover, not the satanic rapist. He desperately wants us to love Him and return to Him, but we have to make that decision ourselves.

Straw! Not to mention logically inconsistent – the free will argument doesn’t work in the face of claimed omnipotence. Never has, never will. Some idiot claiming it does won’t change that. Also, does anyone else find it just a little creepy when this guy describes his god a great lover? Mental masturbation is rather disturbing at the best of times.

Yes, but even people who believe in Him often suffer. And look at all the pain in the world. Bad things happen to good people because, well, bad things happen to good people. The teachings of Christ do not guarantee a good life but a perfect eternity. These 70 or 80 years on Earth are merely time spent in the land of shadows and, anyway, human suffering is more an indictment of humans than of God. Also, if life has no ultimate meaning and people are often absolute swine, why does any of this matter in the first place?

So much for this omnipotent, all-loving god of yours. So much for the value of human life. And please don’t put words in our mouths, Mikey. Knocking down a strawman version of Atheism doesn’t make you big or clever. Atheism does not equal no values at all – that’s a false dilemma bad enough to have come from your hero Lewis.

But Christians are sometimes hypocrites and awful things have been done in the name of Christianity.

Like your article.

Yes, yes, yes! Christians can occasionally not live up to the teachings of Christ. Whoopee. People failing as Christians is not the same as Christianity being untrue, any more than people voting for a poor government is the same as democracy being a failure. As for crimes in the name of Christ — of course. Crimes in the name of atheism, freedom, love, Canada, everything. It’s human nature. Which is precisely why the supernatural is so important. In fact, Christ Himself tells us that His name will be exploited.

Nice get out clause, isn’t it? It’s almost as if there should be a name for it… Something like No True Something… Hmmm…

You’re weak, God is a crutch invented by scared and threatened people and the more we know the less we believe.
Could be. Sure, God could be an invention. Then again, absence of God could be an invention — by scared and threatened people who are too weak to follow His laws and are terrified of judgement.

Ah, that’s nice – Mr C is following in the footsteps of Dinesh D’Souza. Apparently this is all the rage amongst a certain variety of apologist now – they can’t refute logical criticism, so they set up a strawman faux-moralist version which they knock down.

Be careful with the notion that knowledge means wisdom. 1930s Germany was one of the most educated and sophisticated cultures in human history. There are twits who do not believe, geniuses who do, and vice versa. It signifies nothing. It was popular among rationalist thinkers in the late 19th century to assume that advances in textual analysis, archaeological discovery and scientific breakthrough would disprove the Bible. Not quite. Virtually every time we find out something new in these fields it supports rather than challenges Scripture.

No, it doesn’t. How about you show us some of that evidence? Shall we try biology, if “Scripture” is so infallible? I’m sure someone will be along any moment now to provide evidence for Genesis. How about historical verification of Jesus? Got anything there? No? Shame.

What became apparent to me was that the opposition to faith was as unappealing and bland as faith was appealing and thrilling. I read, prayed and thought myself into faith more than 20 years ago. It was gradual but inevitable. Miracles occurred but they need not have. I do not need a miracle to remind me that water quenches my thirst. Christ was there in my life, with me and in me and around me. Atheists showed me the way. God bless the little devils.

Ah, that’s nice. You have an imaginary friend to make up for the absence of real ones. Again, subjective value judgements about the excitement of faith don’t translate to truthfulness – LOTR is exciting, but I don’t see anyone arguing that it’s evidence for the existence of Hobbits.

Then, just recently, the tarnished old arguments from the flimsy and trendy were re-published in new editions by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and we were all supposed to run away and hide. So I read them. Then began to laugh. It’s the emperor and his new clothes. Naked, quite naked.

So old and tarnished that you can’t refute a single one. I’m so impressed. Atheist arguments against gods were formulated a long time ago, it’s true –and do you know why? Because you people haven’t come up with anything new in centuries. Our position is one of challenging your beliefs based on what you say, and if you can’t come up with anything new, well…

Nothing new here. Nothing clever or challenging, either. Busting with errors, hysterical, clumsy, nasty and obviously incredibly frightened.

Really? So why can’t you refute a single one, Mr C? And if responding equates to being frightened, well, look at you! You must be bricking it.

Suddenly, I realize what’s going on. It’s that God again, helping to strengthen my faith. “The best they can do,” He’s saying, “is blast you with the same old nonsense they threw at you when you first thought of coming my way.”

You may need medication, if you’re hearing voices. And besides, if your god was really talking to you, don’t you think he might have given you some meaningful answers to the arguments?

Clever old God. Must remember to thank Him next time on my knees. Thanks for the non-believers, the God-haters, the atheists and all of their kind. Yes, the greatest joke of all.

You’re only saying that because you’re an Allah-hater. Oh? You don’t believe in Allah, so you can’t hate him? Yeah, there you go!

What a moronic little dipshit Coren is.