+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.

There is probably no God…

There is a report in today’s Evening News suggesting that atheists in Edinburgh are looking into the possibility of buying advertising space on Edinburgh’s buses. This is apparently following the lead of Richard Dawkins who is sponsoring such ads in London.

I remember that when I was in TISEC, we had a speaker who was thinking about putting ads for his church (a prominent one which stands at one end of Princes St) on every bus in town. The slogan that he had devised was dusted with brilliance. It was: ‘We Still Have Matins!’

Now, which slogan would cheer you most?

‘We Still have Matins!’
or
‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”