Hi all,

So I've been reading The Irrational Atheist by Vox Day.  I haven't finished it yet but I'm almost there.  My general take is that the book is very confused.  Day sets out that he's going to take apart the reasoning of his Unholy Trinity (Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens) but very quickly devolves into dropping Dennet in and out of his arguments, and continuous promotion/depromotion of Hitchens as a serious threat all in the opening chapter.  While that doesn't take away from any future arguments to be made it does make the direction of the book seem a little wayward.

Once we actually get into the book itself Day takes the time to make some new definitions on atheism and science.  Specifically he splits atheists into "High Church" and "Low Church" atheists - High Church atheists being strong atheists with high levels of academic qualification and standing (generally), while Low Church members are the Joe Average characters of the piece.  he also splits science into three secions - the body of knowledge, the method, and the profession.  From here he then takes a look at the statistics of prison populations and uses various numbers to show that there are more non-believers in jail than christians, therefore non-believers are more immoral.  Specifically the argument seems to be that statistics based on atheist v christian populations never take into account the people that don't believe but haven't described themselves as atheists.  Only once this is done does he really move onto the challenge of tackling his Trinity.

If I were to unfairly sum up his arguments against the three main targets I would say this:

Harris - poor reasoning and maths, not enough recognition of the evil of science in his extinctino formula

Dawkins - no empirical evidence for claims of memes etc., childish refutal of criticism that should make scientists blush

Hitchens - only a journalist and so his vociferous defense of science is uneducated and clumsy.

If I were to be fair I would say that, at times, Day does present some interesting arguments.  I've never read Harris but some of the refutations presented by Day seem plausible enough.  His argumentation for religion accounting for only a small fraction of the world's wars is reasonable and looks well-researched, although it has encouraged me to read his source material to make my own judgment.  All in all I would say the book is an interesting read that made me ponder a few things and is generally worth it if you have some time to spare.  However, I do have one or two problems...

First off there is this:

"This idea may explain why the following pair of definitions have
proven to be useful in distinguishing between the High Church atheist
and the agnostic.

agnostic: I don’t believe there is a God. Because I haven’t seen the
evidence.

atheist: There is no God. Because I’m an asshole."

This appears at the end of a section detailing a possible link between atheism and high scoring on the Asperger's quotient.  Day's seeming point that atheism may be tied to certain autistic qualities could have led to somewhere if he hadn't finished off with this cheap shot.  I'm sure he may try and pass it off as a joke but the association is made "atheist = asshole".  This is continued throughout the book with language constantly coloured to equate atheism with death and (more consistently) communism.  Vox Day is clearly an educated man and refers to many sources througout so it is rather shaming to continually rely on the evil of communist dictatorships, without ever really referring to the root causes of those societies.  If you couple this with attacks on with marital status, relevancy of qualifications, personal qualities and the very weak "he isn't the first to say it..." argument [ref coming] then what we begin to see is a book that has some potentially thought provoking ideas which begin to get lost in a mire of insult, implication and mockery.  Not quite the reasoned tome advertised.

These are only my initial impressions and I will try to give a more detailed review later.  Has anyone else read this?  Any thoughts?

michael