The NYT's Charlie Warzel takes CarpeDonktum's silly Biden-massaging-Biden video and turns it into something aggressive, chaotic, toxic, and dark.

I'm reading "Meet the Man Behind Trump’s Biden Tweet/A stay-at-home dad in Kansas reveals how the lines have blurred between viral trolling and the business of politics," a NYT article by "Opinion writer at large" Charlie Warzel. That is, the NYT acknowledges and tries to deal with this:

WELCOME BACK JOE! pic.twitter.com/b2NbBSX3sx

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 4, 2019

Warzel got an interview with the "memesmith"* who calls himself Carpe Donktum, who seems like a perfectly nice man, so I felt queasy about the way Warzel undercut him:

Yep, a grainy, edited parody clip of the former vice president... [is] a perfectly unbelievable and dispiriting artifact of our fractured and chaotic political media ecosystem, where politicking is conducted through viral memes and retweets.

Chaotic? Dispiriting? It was brilliantly funny, lightweight, sweet and doesn't seem to take any position on how we ought to feel about Joe Biden. It was absurd — and hardly political at all. I think it's positively healing. Why is Warzel getting so heated up about it?

The entire event is at once silly, trivial, offensive and, thanks to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, something we’re now begrudgingly made to pay attention to.

Oh, spare me. You're already paying complete attention to Donald Trump’s Twitter feed.  Warzel seems to hate the idea that CarpeDonktum may have "an indirect line to the Oval Office." Yes, isn't it terrible that an ordinary person, somewhere in flyover country, can just say something or show something, and the President might see it and take 10 seconds of his time to acknowledge that it exists and is funny? It's easy to imagine how wonderfully cool the same behavior would be if Obama, while President, had done the same thing with a video that made cute fun of Dick Cheney.

And his elevation — from a Kansas City keyboard warrior to right-wing internet fame as the president’s unofficial meme maker — is a telling example of how the internet has fully blurred the lines between meme posting and business of politics.

MSM wants a strong border between the professional media and social media. They're overwrought about the cacophony of illegitimate voices in the discourse. Their entire way of life is threatened. If only there could be some kind of wall to protect them from the chaos of the invasion of the horde.

“It’s definitely an organic process,” CarpeDonktum told me over the phone shortly after Mr. Trump tweeted his video. “[White House director of social media] Dan Scavino follows me on Twitter, but there’s no formal relationship there between me and the president. If there’s something I want to make sure [Scavino] sees, I’ll wait for him to post a tweet and try to be the first to reply, linking to what I want to show.” He said that he doesn’t get paid for any of his videos (other than his Patreon crowdfunding account and occasional YouTube ad revenue) and has no relationships to outside politicians....

It's a simple process, and CarpeDonktum nicely shared a tip.

[CarpeDonktum] tailors [videos] to an older generation of internet users. The elaborate memes feature footage from old Looney Tunes cartoons or depict Mr. Trump as a cowboy from an old John Wayne-style Western, slapping a man with a CNN or MSNBC logo across its head. “It’s boomer humor,” he said of his style of videos. “I’m not a boomer. But that brand of humor is most easily shareable by lots of people. So, I stay away from real violence, or overly sexualized stuff so it appeals to the largest amount of people.”

"Boomer humor" — by a younger guy who sees its value. Gee, thanks. I hear him saying that he wants something more sweet and silly, but Warzel wants to use him to show that everything's spinning out of control.

The videos share extremely well among an aging Trump supporter contingent who are prolific and aggressive posters of misinformation and hyperpartisan content on platforms like Facebook.

There's no misinformation or hyperpartisan content in that Biden video. I wonder how old Warzel is. Based on his photograph, he's Gen X or millennial. But he doesn't share CarpeDonktum's affection for the aging Boomers, at least those of us who don't accept instruction from mainstream media. Our laughter at a silly meme feels "aggressive" to him — "chaotic" and "dispiriting."

“Sean Hannity is going to play the video tonight,” [CarpeDonktum] told me... “Some kids that are 18 can retweet it and so can some grandma in Wisconsin. It’s slightly edgy but universal.”

See? CarpeDonktum thinks he's having fun and reaching everybody.

Though his videos are dressed up using cartoons or slapstick humor, all of them center on the incendiary, offensive and hyperpartisan themes of Mr. Trump’s politics (the wall, anti-media sentiment, making fun of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats). 

The Biden one doesn't. Warzel seems to be injecting his own political emotion without regard to the substance. Ironically, this is what professional journalism shouldn't do. And it just seems really mean to get an interview with what seems to be a perfectly civil good guy who's being nice and funny and sharing his tips and to call what he does merely dress-up. Dressed-up what? Suddenly a video has a surface —which might be cute and funny — and a core — which in CarpeDonktum's case is "incendiary, offensive and hyperpartisan." But the Biden video isn't incendiary, offensive and hyperpartisan. It's retweetable by some grandma in Wisconsin!

And CarpeDonktum, who described himself as “an entertainer” who “wants to make people laugh,” is not above engaging in all-caps Trumpian politics (which includes angrily tweeting at liberal politicians).

What's the evidence of his "angrily tweeting"? The NYT puts a link on those words and it goes to a search of his Twitter feed for the word "fuck"! Turns out CarpeDonktum sometimes says things like "Respectfully, you don't know what the Fuck you are talking about." To someone who did something that risked violence to another person he said, "What the fuck is wrong with you?" And he'll even say "Fuck you." Who would he say that to? Look:

John,
When faced with the reality that the people of the United States might elect a president that would not be under your thumb, you threw a temper tantrum that resulted in acts of treason.

You betrayed your country and its people.

Fuck You John https://t.co/etbuNM6TjE

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) March 20, 2019

Back to Warzel's hit piece:

[CarpeDonktum's] desire not to reveal his name suggests that he’s aware that those outside Trumpland find his content toxic.

Pseudonymity is a complex topic, but Warzel chooses the interpretation that says what he wants: CarpeDonktum knows his memes are regarded as "toxic." Another way to put this is: CarpeDonktum is afraid Trump haters might try to destroy his family's life.

“I’m not shy about this stuff but I don’t advertise it,” he said. “If I were to go to a party I wouldn’t introduce myself as the ‘Trump meme guy from Twitter.’”

And that's in Kansas.

That CarpeDonktum’s online musings or personal life should be picked apart is controversial in its own right. 

What? Who's picking apart his personal life? Is Warzel engaging in NYT musing about whether he should pick apart CarpeDonktum’s personal life?

At first glance, it feels silly, maybe even wrong, to elevate him. 

Elevate him? You sound like you want to destroy him.

He’s not a politician. He’s a Reddit user wielding far-right “Dad humor.” He’s not a public figure, save a few Infowars appearances and Persicope live stream videos where he films himself talking while he makes lunch for his children.

Ugh! Don't even mention the children! And look at the next thing he says:

But at a time when our politics is programmed by what’s viral on Twitter, CarpeDonktum appears — stupefyingly as it might seem — to have something approaching power in MAGAland. It appears he senses it, too.

Did Warzel contemplate the ideation that a crazy Trump hater might get from that?

“All of the memes and stuff like that.” he said. “That’s the future of political advertising. The 30 second spots on TV aren’t the way to market anymore. The stuff online that people dismiss as memes — that’s the way to motivate people,” he added. “It’s the viral political marketing of the future.”

In theory, his story is a perfect realization of the utopian understanding of the utopian promise of the internet: a truly democratic system of communication where anyone, anywhere can create things and get them seen by important people — even the president!

Yes, that's the story I see here, but that's not how the article ends. There are 2 more sentences:

But in keeping with our current political moment, that utopian vision is used for vapid, divisive ends. The reality, as we should all know by now, is darker and a whole lot dumber.

Gone are the days when the NYT could tell us there's something "we should all know by now" and we would scurry to get up to speed with what all the right people think. Warzel decries what is "divisive," but he jumped off from a completely non-divisive video and — after speaking to a nice man in Kansas — went as "dark" as he could. Ridiculous!
___________________________________

* I think "memesmith" is the NYT's word. I'm still trying to adjust to the use of the word "meme" to refer to individual items — videos or graphics — that are merely intended to be shared frequently. I accept that the word grew out of the original Richard Dawkins idea (from "The Selfish Gene" (1976)):

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme... It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.

It became something that didn't require imitation and copying with variations, if they acquired virality — if people really did share it compulsively. Now, the word applies to any damn thing someone makes with the hope that it will inspire massive sharing and even if it fails. So the Russians threw together thousands of dumb graphics and we're told they made 3,000 memes. Where was the virality?

Well, ultimately there was a kind virality, as Trump resisters used them in their misguided, ridiculous effort to oust the President America elected, but mostly we've heard only references to the "memes," and we're not looking at these stupid things. The only one I remember seeing is Jesus arm-wrestling with Satan. I don't think the actual graphics were compulsively shared, so they were not viral, and I don't like calling them "memes."

But if these items are to be called "memes" at the point of their creation and before any virality is achieved, I accept the word "memesmith." The ending "-smith" refers to someone, like a blacksmith, who manufactures something.

"Richard Dawkins' Berkeley event cancelled for 'Islamophobia.'"

BBC reports.

[KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California], which is not affiliated with the University of California, said in a letter - which Mr Dawkins published online - that it does not support "hurtful" or "abusive speech."...

[Dawkins] said harsh statements he has made in the past have been directed at "IslamISM" - apparently referring to those who use the religion for political objectives - and not adherents of the faith.

"I have criticised the appalling misogyny and homophobia of Islam, I have criticised the murdering of apostates for no crime other than their disbelief," Professor Dawkins writes. He also pointed out that he has been a "frequent critic of Christianity but have never been de-platformed for that"...

Should there be any discussion of whether Ahmed Mohamed actually "invented" his clock and what his true motives might have been?

I've avoided that discussion because I think the authorities, by egregiously overreacting to what was at worst a minor disciplinary problem, have drawn the exclusive focus on themselves.

At some point, I'm willing to criticize other adults for using a child to further their own political agendas, even as they celebrate the boy. The moral lodestar here is the welfare of the child.

I'm posting to explain my position because I'm seeing the famous know-it-all Richard Dawkins losing his bearings:

In a tweet, the scientist linked to a YouTube video entitled Ahmed Mohammed [sic] Clock is a FRAUD, in which user Thomas Talbot alleges Mohamed’s clock “is in fact not an invention. The ‘clock’ is a commercial bedside alarm clock removed from its casing”.

In his tweet, Dawkins said: “If this is true, what was his motive? Whether or not he wanted the police to arrest him, they shouldn’t have done so.” His next tweet said of the video: “This man seems to know what he’s talking about.”...

Dawkins eventually retreated.... “Sorry if I go a bit over the top in my passion for truth. Not just over a boy’s alleged ‘invention’ but also media lies about J[eremy] Corbyn.”

Dawkins seems awfully emotional in his posturing over his love for truth, so let me proclaim a greater love for truth. Here are 2 truths for which Dawkins showed insufficient passion:

1.  The question whether the clock was an "invention" should be recognized as a debate about the meaning of a word. It's ridiculous to badger a 14-year-old about a linguistic point.

2. The annoyance at calling the clock an "invention" should be recognized as a dispute with the adults who overplayed their enthusiasm over the child's brilliance and technological prowess. A child whose self-esteem is not perfectly aligned with the level of his accomplishments might have a problem, but, if so, it's nothing for strangers to be sticking their nose into.

"Since the Enlightenment, one mode of science has always been dominant, the top metaphor that educated people use to talk about experience."

"In most of the twentieth century, physics played the role of super-science, and physics is, by its nature, accommodating of God: the theories of physics are so cosmic that the language of physics can persist without actively insulting the language of faith. It’s all big stuff, way out there, or unbelievably tiny stuff, down here, and, either way, it’s strange and spooky. Einstein’s 'God,' who does not play dice with the universe, is not really the theologian’s God, but he is close enough to be tolerated. With the great breakthroughs in understanding that followed the genomic revolution, evo-bio has become, insensibly, the model science, the one that so many of the pop books are about—and biology makes specific claims about people, and encounters much coarser religious objections. It’s significant that the New Atheism gathered around Richard Dawkins. The details of the new evolutionary theory are fairly irrelevant to the New Atheism (Lamarckian ideas of evolution could be accepted tomorrow, and not bring God back with them), but the two have become twinned in the Self-Making mind. Their perpetual invocation is a perpetual insult to Super-Naturalism, and to the right of faith to claim its truths."

From Adam Gopnik's excellent essay "Bigger than Phil/When did faith start to fade?"

"Why is the Nobel Prize in Literature almost always given to a novelist, never a scientist?"

"Why should we prefer our literature to be about things that didn’t happen? Wouldn’t, say, Steven Pinker be a good candidate for the literature prize?"

Good idea. (An idea in the form of 3 questions.)

This is related to my strong belief that schools should teach reading through nonfiction literature. This opinion was surprisingly controversial, and it heightened my suspicion of those who become adamant about the lofty regard that belongs writing in the fictional mode. It's funny that what's not true must control the highest position.

The 3 questions above are from the famously atheist Richard Dawkins, and my statement that begins with "It's funny" feels like an invitation to atheists to say something about religion.

And in my mind, I hear — though there is no sound — religionists and fiction lovers alike clamoring to talk about greater truths.

"If a possum takes up residence in your shed, grab a barbecue brush to coax him out. If he doesn't leave..."

"... brush him for twenty minutes and let him stay. Let a dog (or two or three) share your bed. Say the rosary while you walk them. Go to church with a chicken sandwich in your purse. Cry at the consecration, every time. Give the chicken sandwich to your homeless friend after mass.... Put picky-eating children in the box at the bottom of the laundry chute, tell them they are hungry lions in a cage, and feed them veggies through the slats. Correspond with the imprisoned and have lunch with the cognitively challenged. Do the Jumble every morning."

Tips from Pink — of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin — made public via obituary by her 6 children and 17 grandchildren.

She was 85, so the Richard Dawkins approach to thinking about child abuse applies (if you've got any inclination to condemn that "hungry lions" method of getting kids to eat vegetables).

Could you assemble a similarly charming list of tips from the quirkiest things your mother did? Consider the potential for matching the love these children and grandchildren showed and the alternative: Indict mom for child abuse.

The other day, when Meade and I were traipsing around in that Wisconsin landscape (the photo of which sat at the top of this blog for 18 hours), we were talking about stories people tell about the hardships they endured as children and, in mockery, we started listing the worst things that were done to us, some of which would, I think, be regarded as criminal child abuse today. For example: In the summer, I was taken to Ocean City, New Jersey for a thorough, painful sunburning. (And, no, it did not "turn into a tan," as some people used to say — and Meade still says — about the way their skin functions.)

"Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism..."

"... I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild paedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today."

Said the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, drawing fire and drawing attention as he comes out with a new book, a memoir (in which he reveals himself to have been the victim of child abuse).

The book is "An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist."

"The toothbrush moustache (also called Hitler moustache, Charlie Chaplin moustache, 1/3 moustache, philtrum moustache, the postage stamp, or soul (mou)stache)..."

"... is a moustache, shaved at the edges, except for three to five centimeters above the centre of the lip. The sides of the moustache are vertical rather than tapered."

I found this Wikipedia article — "Toothbrush moustache" — last night after asserting that Hitler adopted the Hilter mustache to emulate Charlie Chaplin. The topic came up in connection with the array of photographs — Obama/Hitler/Stalin — that we're talking about in the previous post. Meade didn't believe me, and my belief — even if it's wrong — is at least common enough that I could easily do the research. (A couple weeks ago, the roles were reversed: Meade asserted a misconception common enough to have a Snopes article declaring it false.)

"It's no accident that religions around the world have used unison singing and chanting, because unison singing and chanting is itself a mechanism for high fidelity."

Says Daniel Dennett, in a discussion with Richard Dawkins. Both atheists, they're talking about the way religion evolves.

I was interested in the quote beyond that context, because I've had to listen to so much political singing and chanting here in Wisconsin over the past year or so. Political chanting troubles me. See, e.g.:

"Occupy Wall Street, Occupy State Street, Occupy Everything and Never Give It Back!"

"Wisconsin 'Singalong' Protesters Confront Workers and Chant About Boycotting Their Employer."

"Do you really want to use rote chanting to train kids to protest against authority?"

"We know there must be thousands of clergy out there who have secretly abandoned their faith but have nowhere to turn."

“Now they do have a place to meet, a true sanctuary, a congregation of those of us who have replaced faith and dogma with reason and human well-being.”

Said Dan Barker, a former preacher, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, about the Clergy Project. Richard Dawkins — the atheism proselytizer — is also involved in this project. He writes:

"If a farmer tires of the outdoor life and wants to become an accountant or a teacher or a shopkeeper, he faces difficulties, to be sure. He must learn new skills, raise money, move to another area perhaps. But he doesn't risk losing all his friends, being cast out by his family, being ostracized by his whole community...

"Clergy who lose their faith suffer double jeopardy. It's as though they lose their job and their marriage and their children on the same day."

A farmer who "tires of the outdoor life" is not a fraud, is not deceiving the people he cares about telling the truth to. It's funny that Dawkins didn't put that problem first. That says something about Dawkins, no?

Anyway, it really is an awful problem, to believe you're called into the ministry and then to feel that's nothing at all. And yet, isn't that part of training for the ministry, struggling with "the dark night of the soul" and so forth?

Rebecca Watson says she had "a weird time on Bloggingheads" with me.

I enjoyed the conversation and tried to keep it interesting and enjoyable, and I had the impression that she was enjoying talking too. We went 10 minutes over an hour, and afterwards we talked, and she said she enjoyed it. So it's weird for me to read this.

Things didn’t go as I planned, though. While Althouse agreed with me that Dawkins was out of line and my sentiments were fair, she kept saying things that required me to unpack a lot of stuff before moving on. 

Wow! That sounds like good conversation to me. I would love it if someone would talk to me in a way that invited me to go places where I hadn't planned.

For instance, she agreed that Dawkins was smug, but aren’t all atheists smug and that’s kind of the problem? 

Actually, the discussion of the smugness of atheists came long before there was anything about Dawkins. And I never said Dawkins was smug. I was interested in talking about the way Dawkins turned something relatively minor and light into an viral internet event. It was, in fact, Rebecca who introduced the idea that atheists are smug. It was in response to my question why atheists congregate:



See? I just laughed when she said it. A little later, when she's talking about wanting to teach the convention atheists about their sexism, I asked a somewhat elaborate question that includes a reference to the smugness she had mentioned. That was in the context of saying that maybe atheists feel particularly advanced intellectually and might imagine that they can be a little edgy on the subject of gender without deserving (like lesser folk) to be thought of as sexist:



Her response, as you can hear in that clip is to switch to attacking religious people as more smug. As she says at her blog post:

So I had to back up and explain that no, atheists are not all smug just because they think they know the truth. Religious people, I tried to explain, think they know the truth and further many think that others who don’t know the truth are going to burn in Hell when they die. I would have gone on to explain how these same people believe this entire Universe was created especially for them, and what’s more smug than that, but Althouse kept interrupting me.

Okay, I do cut in, but I think I do it gently, trying to bring her back to the question, which wasn't who's smugger, atheists or religious folk, but whether possibly atheists feel less constrained in talking about gender matters. I could have been much more forceful in pointing out that she changed the subject and ran away from looking deeply into the minds of the atheists, instead preferring to drag in a convenient punching bag: those terrible religionists who think other people are going to hell. But I thought I was serving up pretty rich opportunities for her to show her stuff as an excellent spontaneous thinker and speaker (which is what I'm always trying to find for Bloggingheads).

This reminds me. I forgot to ask her a question I wanted to ask about the atheist in the elevator — the man who asked her if she'd like to come to his room for coffee. I wanted to know what she said to him at the time. We know that later, she slammed him in a blog post. And now, here I am, slammed in a blog post of hers days after the encounter. So I'm kind of empathizing with the elevator guy.

Email me, elevator guy!

"Richard Dawkins Gets into a Comments War with Feminists."

Drama!

This last comment finally pulled [Rebecca] Watson in. "This weekend when I read Dawkins' comments, I was, briefly, without hope. I had already seen the future of this movement dismissing these concerns, and now I was seeing the present do the same." She urges readers to protest Dawkins's work, declaring that "this person who I always admired for his intelligence and compassion does not care about my experience as an atheist woman and therefore will no longer be rewarded with my money, my praise, or my attention. I will no longer recommend his books to others, buy them as presents, or buy them for my own library," she writes.

And now is it more or less likely that you believe in God?

Let's look at arch-atheist Richard Dawkins and charming young actress Emma Watson, side by side:

[Image removed because it was screwing around with some browsers. You can still find it over at Unreality.]

Reassess your belief in God.
	It's more likely that there's a God.
	Less likely.
	My faith is ironclad. It remains the same no matter what.
	I respond to evidence, and this isn't.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: What is the extent of the Photoshopping? An emailer hints:



The odd thing is, I look like Bjork! Thanks for making me reflect upon my unelfinness.

"His maleness resounds from every monomaniacal sentence," said Germaine Greer about Malcolm Gladwell (Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, etc.).

"There is no answer to everything, and only a deluded male would spend his life trying to find it." Oh, so she's dissing men when she asks why women don't write large!

Women, she said, are too sensible to try to write such broad-sweep theses. "They are more interested in understanding than explaining, in describing rather than accounting for."

In praise of detail work. Which Greer is not doing.

Do fantasy stories undermine rationality in children?

Richard Dawkins might want you kids to stop reading Harry Potter, fairy tales, and the like.

"I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know"...

"I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious [e]ffect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research."

And he doesn't think much of the "Judeo-Christian myth".

He went on: "I plan to look at mythical accounts of various things and also the scientific account of the same thing. And the mythical account that I look at will be several different myths, of which the Judeo-Christian one will just be one of many.

"And the scientific one will be substantiated, but appeal to children to think for themselves; to look at the evidence. Always look at the evidence."

The funny thing is, talking like that, Dawkins sounds like a villainous character in a children's book. But he's quite serious, especially about children and religion:

"Do not ever call a child a Muslim child or a Christian child – that is a form of child abuse because a young child is too young to know what its views are about the cosmos or morality.

"It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child. I think labelling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue, for example, about teaching about hell and torturing their minds with hell.

"It's a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse. I wouldn't want to teach a young child, a terrifyingly young child, about hell when he dies, as it's as bad as many forms of physical abuse."

Why are those terrible anti-religionists so contemptuous?

Damon Linker, at TNR, offers some unsolicited advice to the highly successful anti-religionists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher. He signals a little cluelessness right away:

[T]o his credit, Maher hilariously exposes astonishing levels of ignorance and parochialism among the earnestly pious Americans he encounters in his travels around the country. (Maher's brief visits to other parts of the world are less amusing because the believers he interviews in Europe and the Middle East aren't as boorish.)

Aw, come on. I haven't seen the movie, but really... American believers are more boorish? I'll bet the folks in the Middle East weren't prodded with the same sort of questions and edited with the same vicious hostility. I've seen enough Maher on TV to know he finds comedy in being very cruel to Americans. It's a comic stance that he's built his career on. Attacking foreigners can be hilarious, but it's not in style and it's not Maher's thing.

Yet Maher has loftier ambitions than laughs. He wants to save the world from the idiocy he unearths in the American heartland, and he believes the best way to fulfill this aim is to mercilessly attack religion and all those who adhere to it. And that's why the film, like so much written by critics of religion in recent years, must ultimately be judged a failure.

It's only a failure if the purpose is what you say: to save people from religion. Maybe it's to sell books and movie tickets, to make those in-the-know laugh and feel superior, and to propagate the idea that the hip, smart people are atheists.

Like [Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens], Maher harbors so much contempt for religion that he would rather score easy points than explore the messy reality of humanity's complicated--often sordid, but sometimes noble--religious impulses and experiences. That's why Maher takes on simpletons and extremists instead of seeking out theologians and other thoughtful believers to explain and defend their beliefs. That's also why moderate believers simply don't exist in Maher's America, which aside from the 16 percent of the country* that explicitly rejects institutional religion, seems to be populated only by fundamentalists awaiting (and perhaps even itching to hasten) the apocalypse. How else to explain the absurdly paranoid peroration with which he concludes the film? Over ominous music and images of mushroom clouds, Maher informs us that religious belief is a "neurological disorder" that must be eradicated for the sake of human survival. "Grow up or die," he warns, as if those were our only options.

Only contempt explains it? In any case, why can't a comedian or a polemicist deal in contempt?

It's not the only approach, but it's an approach. (And I don't think "contempt" is at all the right word for Dawkins, whose "God Delusion" I've read. It fits Hitchens -- and I've read "God Is Not Great." I haven't read the Harris book, but I don't think it's contemptuous.)

Instead of hurling insults and indiscriminate denunciations at religion-in-general, Maher and his fellow atheists could do far more good by encouraging the growth and flourishing of open-minded belief--the kind of belief that lives in productive tension with modern science and cultural pluralism.

Comedians as do-gooders? What good will that do?

"It is unclear whether Flew has lost the desire to reason effectively or whether he no longer cares what is published in his name."

Atheists wonder how believers can believe such things, but when atheists themselves turn into believers, can you believe them? When Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are raking in so much money writing about their atheism, what's an old atheist to do? Where's the publishing niche? Ah, there! I love that key clues are the words “beverages,” “vacation,” and “candy.”