Ophelia Benson has been on a tear lately—first she rips into Ruse, then she cheers on Dawkins, and now she castigates a particularly flaky atheist who has written a column in the Guardian praising religion.

He hawks that old canard that "no other atheist has done more for the cause of religion than Richard Dawkins", which is just silly. Dawkins has done a marvelous job of making the religious intensely uncomfortable and angry; the only people who thinks that helps the religious are those who think the proper attitude for us atheists is to keep quiet except to occasionally offer paeans of propitiation to the godly. I'm sorry, but that's just wrong. We need more outspoken atheists to stand up, point to these clowns, and call them idiots: I mean, how can anyone criticize Richard Dawkins when Pat Robertson is taken seriously? We could use a few million clones of Dawkins here in the US, right now.

This fellow Dylan Evans does a fine job of sucking up to religion, though.

But I do think there is one respect in which religion is more truthful than science - in its depiction of the longing for transcendent meaning that lies in man's heart. No scientific theory has ever done justice to this longing, and in this respect religions paint more faithful pictures of the human mind.

Bullshit.

This is a product of selective memory. Let's ignore all the hateful, evil, wretched bits of religion (the aforementioned Pat Robertson is a symbol of transcendant meaning? How about Rev. Phelps? The Crusades?), and let's pretend that science is a collection of soulless drones who have no appreciation of beauty…and let's just forget that Evans has just mentioned Dawkins, but apparently has never read him, since the search for meaning has been discussed quite a bit by that guy.

Let's also forget that religion is a collection of dogmatic lies, old superstitions, and muddled legends, while science is a search for truth about the natural world. Dishonest representations of the human mind as the product of a divine father-figure in the sky, destined for immortality or damnation, are not more faithful pictures.

Our aspirations and our art and our morality are products of our humanity, not our religion. Religion has done a fine job of confusing humanity with superstitious dogma, however, to the point where even some atheists think we wouldn't have transcendant meaning without that old grab-bag of lies.

Atheists who attack religions for painting a false picture of the world are as unsophisticated and immature as religious believers, who mistake the picture for reality. The only mature attitude to religion is to see it for what it is - a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality, and which only a child would reject for being false.

Grrrr. This is unreal. Evans has this idea that religion is a kind of symbolic art, and that atheists are criticizing it as a bad painting, while all the good religious people are sharing his view of it as an elaborate metaphor for life. That is false. Atheists can appreciate the religious music of Bach, the quality of some of the books of the Bible—I even have a favorite book—and that the concentration of wealth in the religious hierarchy has supported a lot of great art and literature and thought. Most atheists are not interested in taking a flamethrower to the next choir singing Handel's Messiah. Likewise, it is ludicrous to imply that religious people are largely sensible of the metaphorical nature of religion and share his view of it. Face it: most religious people in the western world believe that god is real. Heaven and hell are real. Jesus is god. Etc., etc., etc. They do mistake the art of religion for reality, and as he condescendingly puts it, must be "only a child".