+Richard on the new atheists

Don’t miss Richard Holloway’s  book review on The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas. Here’s the full link.

And here is a highlight:

That said, this book is fun, especially if you read it as a prospectus for a complex and varied religious position. The comedians in it – and there are too many of them – all sound like clergy on Thought for the Day trying to lure your attention with terrible jokes and really annoying word-play. Of course, no book of this sort would be complete without a contribution from the Apostle to the Godless himself, the Venerable Richard Dawkins, and you will not be disappointed. When, after his birth, the Good Fairy visited Richard in the manger where they laid him, she showered upon him almost every gift a man could desire: physical beauty; a voice as bewitching as the tone of a silver flute; a prodigious intellect; a Napoleonic capacity for hard work; and wit as sharp and darting as a rapier. But in order to save him from the fate that befell that other great Angel of Light, she deprived him of a sense of humour – without which it is impossible to understand religion, the joke the universe has played on humanity, with a punch-line that can’t be delivered until the end of time.