Congratulations on your acceptance to the International School of Highly Emotive Knee-Jerk Reactionary Hissy Fits and welcome to your first seminar, Criticizing Atheism 101! Today we will be talking about the most successful, tried-and-occasionally-true techniques for criticizing the “New Atheism” as deployed by such renowned reactionary hissy fit-throwers as David Berlinski, Scott Hahn, Alister McGrath, and others! All of the important information for this course has been compiled below into a list of seven key points, which can easily be adapted for any critic of atheism to use in his or her particular tempter tantrum:

1. Ride those coattails. Remember, the New Atheists may be evil and hell-bound, but they are also your ticket to fame! Just make sure you drop all the right names in the title of your book and you are on the road to a career in reactionary tantrums. It’s easy: just reuse their names or their book titles for your own profit and you’re good to go; whether you’re Alister McGrath (”Dawkins’ God,” “The Dawkins Delusion?“), Scott Hahn (”Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case Against God“), David Berlinski (”The Devil’s Delusion“), Thomas Crean (”God is No Delusion“), or anyone of similar integrity and contributive value, you’ll remember that your own name is obviously insufficient to sell books, so what better solution than to just use your opponent’s names? If you’re particularly desperate for sales/clever like John F. Haught, you’ll manage to squeeze several of the New Atheists’ names in (”God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens“) at once!

2. Snub them for not taking time to disprove God’s existence, ignoring your own failure to prove God’s existence. Several reviews of and responses to Hitchens in particular, as well as Harris and Dennett, contained some snide little attack about how none of these three atheists took the time out to properly address the arguments for the existence of Zeus/Demeter/Allah/Republican-Jesus/God. Now remember, even though popular religious books all the way from the bestselling populist The Purpose-Driven Life up through Charles Taylor’s highbrow A Secular Age spend not one word even trying to prove that God actually exists, who cares? If you’re religious enough to be writing on this subject in the first place, you threw away internal consistency a long time ago. As Dinesh D’Souza thundered during a debate with Dan Barker, “Harris refutes Anselm with a paragraph!” Who cares that you refuted Russell with zero paragraphs? Whatever it takes to make the New Atheists look lazy or uninformed. Which brings me to my next point…

3. Remember, the New Atheists failed to write a multi-volume complete summary of the entire history of Western theology, so they’re “ignorant of the finer points of religion.” One frequent criticism of the New Atheists is that, even if they claim to be targeting religious belief, they are avoiding the totally relevant and politically impotent/important field of highbrow theological writing. Because, unlike you, the New Atheists have not taken the decades of study required to lodge yourself in an obscure niche of your religion’s ivory tower to which nobody listens except the others trapped in the same nitch, you are understandably infuriated that Hitchens never once mentions Eric Rust’s clever interpretation of Tillich’s commentary on the epistemology of empiricism as applied to the miraculous, or that Harris never even bothers to set himself against every single sentence of The City of God. Sure, nobody cares about what theologians have to say, and their commentary is wholly irrelevant if there isn’t a God in the first place, but so what? You’re a religious writer; what do you need with honesty? Just make those atheists look unlettered, and don’t forget to end every chapter with a snippet of Bonhoeffer or Averroes or whoever it takes to confuse your reader into thinking you’re smart.

4. Alternately claim that science is just a hypothesis and so can’t be proven, and that proven science has been on your side all along. If you’re a particularly talented anti-atheism writer, you can sometimes manage to make both of these tactics work within the same exact book! For example, in Dinesh D’Souza’s famously whiny screed What’s So Great About Christianity?, chapter 8 tells us that science cannot exist apart from the (Christian theological) assumption of an ordered and logical universe, chapters 11-14 are dedicated to showing how science independent of Christian theology has arrived at the existence of God in the first place! Remember, not only has science demonstrated that the universe is irreducibly complex, science is also a faith-based assumption that the universe is ordered and rational. Who cares that scientists only concluded the universe to be rational upon empirical observation that effects tend to follow causes? Who cares that you’re whoring out your intellect to whichever side of the same bad argument you wish to make by routinely deploying two contradictory arguments to the same end? This isn’t about integrity, this is about religion!

5. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. Irrelevant ad hominem that does nothing to show the truth or falsehood of the idea of atheism, but who cares? As long as the reader’s attention is diverted away from the bloody history of your own religion. And when doing body counts, only count wars and Inquisitions, not things like the deaths from religious resistance to vaccines and medicines, religious opposition to condoms even in high HIV-risk parts of the world, day-by-day violence and discord within families over homosexuality and apostasy, etc. Also never mention that Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin might have had other motives for their actions than their atheism.

6. Always point out that atheism is a faith just like any other. Atheism is the faith-based assumption that there is no Zeus, or whichever god you are apologizing for. This is one of those arguments that has been recycled over and over and over again in anti-atheism books marketwide, so it must be a good one. Do not worry about talking about whether or not your own lack of belief in the thousands of other extinct religions is also a faith, as this is likely to lead you into unChristian thought.

7. And if all else fails, you can always say that atheists “just don’t get it.” They haven’t had the divine, transcendent experiences you’ve had about Jesus, or Mohammed, or the Buddha, or David Koresh, or Sai Baba, or the UFO hiding behind the comet, or whatever. They just can’t get it because they’re too close-minded to see the truth and thanks to personal religious experience we know that those close-minded atheists are wrong without even doing any investigation! As long as your own mind is open to the possibility that your personal, local, favorite tribalism is the One True Way, and the atheists’ minds are closed to the idea that they are too blind and stupid to see that your personal theological suppositions must be accepted or else you’ll burn in Hell forever, you win. I mean, when you accuse the atheists of being too close-minded to accept Jesus as their personal savior out of fear of the scriptural, doctrinal, strictly unobserved reality of Hell, what are they going to say? That you’re the close-minded one?

Well, that is your lesson for today. I look forward to seeing your book right alongside the likes of the brilliantly untalented McGrath, Berlinski, and others: rotting in bargain bins next to old astrology guides and full-color atlases of Denmark, ten thousand ranks below The God Delusion on Amazon, or sitting on the shelf of some smarmy theology student who agreed with you before he ever even heard of you.