I think I've got them frightened. Denyse O'Leary objects to criticism in her latest.

In a column that is, generally, about attempts to strip Christmas, and society in general, of religious content, Canadian columnist Mark Steyn mentions that he is one of the latest targets of P.Z. Myers, a Darwin Street heavy who recently went after Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.

"Targets"? "Went after"? A "Darwin Street heavy"? You'd think I'd sent over a couple of goons to rough them up instead of writing a couple of blog posts that took apart their ideas. They are delicate flowers, this new breed of creationist; only a brute would trouble himself to criticize their confabulations, which really ought to be left to waft in the delicate breezes produced by sighs and coos of their admirers. Facts and reality are so callous, so antagonistic to their muse.

It's true that I "went after" Mark Steyn. He wrote a ridiculous column that I rebutted way back in September—so he really isn't my "latest target". I've been baying at many other targets since, and really, all I had done was give him a stink-eyed sideways glance once. I'm gratified that he found it so memorable that he had to return to it many months later, but let's have some proper perspective here.

Since Steyn mentions me in his latest column (but no link, no hint about where to find the actual text of my criticism), I suppose I should follow suit and rebut him again. It's hard, though; his column is remarkably incoherent, flitting from the usual "atheists are bad, just look at Marx" to "John Lennon sucks" to "religion is morally superior because atheists have nothing to keep them in line" to "uh, well, except if that religion is Islam, and we need good Christian soldiers to fight them" to "Europe sucks and is doomed" to whining about me to "get used to living in a Texas/Utah style Christian dominion".

Conservatives don't actually pay any attention to this guy, do they?

Anyway, let's just focus on the bit where Steyn replies to my argument. Here's a fragment that I thought was particularly revealing. In his original column from several months ago, he said this:

Some geneticist had pointed out that man (and woman, oops) is 89% identical to the pumpkin. If that's so, then clearly it's the 11% difference that's key, not the 89% similarity.

My rebuttal pointed out some outright errors of fact in his argument, in particular that his numbers are wacky.

We aren't 89% identical to a pumpkin. If you use a very loose determination of homology (so loose, that mice and people are nearly 100% identical, having the same suite of genes), we're about 20-25% homologous to plants.

Here's the cute thing. In his latest, Steyn basically reuses his old article with no recognition of the corrections, except this:

I'd just been told that not only does man share 98.5 per cent of his genetic code with the chimp but he shares 75 per cent of it with the pumpkin.

He has fudged his numbers down from 89% to 75%, but both numbers are still wrong; and it's not as if he has just erred in his recollection, because he's citing my post, which includes the quote from his original article.

I think we can safely say at this point that Steyn is just pulling "facts" out of his ass. He's just making it up as he goes. In my reality-based part of the universe, that is one of those things that pretty well says we could just ignore everything he writes.

And really, the rest of his argument, besides being a sloppy hodge-podge, is just as fallacious. He points to the differences between organisms as somehow supporting his point of the intrinsic and unquestionable superiority of humankind. He doesn't seem to recognize the symmetry of the differences: if I am 1.5% different from a chimpanzee, the chimpanzee is also 1.5% different from me. All science can measure here is a difference, not whether one is "superior" to another…and if anything, since we're all equally children of a long history of evolution, we'd have to say that each are roughly equally fit to their role in nature.

He also doesn't seem to understand that my earlier argument against his blind and dangerous human-centric vision was not a claim that people should value flatworms more than other people; it was that we are dependent on all these other organisms on the planet.

All I was doing was making a simple point about the scale of man's domination, and all Professor Myers's demolition does is confirm it. My intestinal bacteria may indeed be doing a swell job, but living in my gut isn't exactly a beach house at Malibu. Yes, I've got wooden furniture. I live in the Great North Woods and the house and practically everything in it is made from those woods. But I sit on the chair, the chair doesn't sit on me. And as for my excreta and the hard-working nematode, who gets the better end of that deal?

All he sees is that he has bent some tiny pieces of nature to his will—he can have a tree chopped down and shaped into a cradle for his selfish butt, so he is the master. He doesn't realize that his comfort is dependent on the existence of a whole complex ecology, a forest, and that his "dominion" is actually a reliance on this elaborate other world to which he closes his eyes. As for his gut flora, I'd be surprised if he has never experienced a situation in which they stop doing their "swell job"; heaving bowels and explosive diarrhea are just the thing to stir up a little more respect for the buggers. The food he eats, the air he breathes are all products of the biological world, not just human effort.

Somehow, from there he abruptly segues into a strangely cynical pro-religion tirade. This must be what pleased Denyse O'Leary so much.

In the same way, assume that there was no baby in the manger, no virgin birth, no resurrection. A rationalist ought still to be able to conclude that, as a societal model, Christianity is more rational than Eutopian secularism. If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John cooked the whole racket up, it's nevertheless a stroke of genius to anchor the whole phony-baloney rigmarole in the birth of a child and his triumph over death. Whether or not there is a hereafter, new life is our triumph over death here on Earth. A religiosity centred on eternal life will by definition be a more efficient organising principle for an enduring society than a secularism focused on the here and now, with 'no other place yet to come', as Polly Toynbee puts it. The intestinal bacteria might as well pack up and go home.

There's a peculiar notion, the idea that mooning about over an afterlife that doesn't exist is by definition more efficient than a secular society. How? Why should I believe that? Does Steyn also believe that a planned central economy is more efficient by definition than capitalism, and does that mean it is more efficient in practice? Secularism has a history of working very, very well, as the United States and Canada and modern Europe show. Where is this highly efficient religious state that we should admire and model ourselves after?

Oh. It's Texas and Utah.

What's so rational about putting yourself out of business? On both sides of the Atlantic, the godly will inherit the Earth: in the United States, blue-state birthrates mean that in 20 years America will look a lot less like John Kerry's Massachusetts and a lot more like Texas and Utah; Europe will look a lot less like an Amsterdam sex club and a lot more like Clichy-sous-Bois. Post-Christian Europe will also be post-European. If you're cool with that, fine. If you're not, you might want to rethink the lazy slurs about America's 'neo-fascist' religiosity. Merry Christmas. Happy Eid.

No, I don't want to live in Bible-belt Texas or Mormon Utah. But I better not say so, because if I were to suggest that I disliked their neo-fascist religiosity, when they take over they'll…what? Exercise their nonexistent neo-fascist religiosity on me? Steyn has a real talent for self-contradiction and inconsistency. It's a mystery how he gets paid for it—I wouldn't have thought stupidity was a commodity of any value at all, it's so common.