Screwtape and the Global Atheist Convention 2012

Demonmail file services: ‘Screwtape reviews Global Atheist Convention 2012

From: Screwtape, on behalf of the infernal father

To: Wormwood

Subject: GAC 2012.

My dear Wormwood,

I acknowledge receipt of your report on the recent GAC and the attached expense claim.

What were you thinking?

It was a mistake to allow GAC to be held just near Crown Casino. It was too visible a reminder that there are more losers than winners in the cosmic lottery that is all we can offer in an accidental universe.

How could you allow people who are consistent atheists and clear communicators to be on stage? The last thing we want is for people to actually understand the truth of our position. I remind you than our infernal father rejoices to be the father of all lies and master of underhand ways. We want speakers who disguise our grim message in lamb’s wool.

The following were among your mistakes with speakers:

·       ‘Life has no purpose’ said by Dan Barker, a former pastor. Don’t you realise that will make people ask whether life does have a purpose? It is not a question that helps us! And then you let Dan go over the top and pillory the enemy as someone keeping a torture chamber to which he sent his son so that others don’t have to go there. Such overstatements draw sympathy for the enemy and prompt sensitive people to go and read what he actually says in his book. I remind you that we want people to think that we are the reasonable and harmless ones.

·       ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ was asked by Lawrence Krauss. You should know that this too is a dangerous question because it easily leads to the enemy. But then you also allowed him to say: ‘ ... cosmology tells us that we are far far more insignificant than we thought’. And again: ‘it is all an accident’. And then his all-to-honest conclusion that people are to create their own meaning in life. I sometimes wonder whose side Krauss is really on.

·       Why did you allow Richard Dawkins on stage with his aggressive call for ethics and intelligent design to be taken back by our forces and then to pillory the enemy with his foolish remark about the ‘odious doctrine of redemption’?  Dawkins is one we need to control - once he slips the leash he is too stridently honest about our real position.

·       And why did you let Sam Harris change topics to talk about an atheist view of death?

That’s a topic that we try and avoid (the distractions of the casino are a good ally here). Sure, he said that Christianity was untrue in its message of hope, but then you let him talk about the comfort that religion gives in death and suffering. But worse was to come. This was a convention that extolled thought and reason, but then you allowed him to give an atheistic suggestion that people suspend all thought and give themselves to some meditative mindfulness to relieve death’s pain. Did you really mean to give such a thoughtless exposure of atheism’s emptiness?

Surely you could manage a foul-up with the sound system when such things were being said?

Another blunder concerned the Islamists. How could allow their noisy protest on the Sunday and which included announcements of hellfire on Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Yes, I know that you thought that would make all religions look venomous. But it gave an opening for our enemy to be well spoken of. Hirsi Ali had already noted how it was conservative Christians not atheists who stood up for persecuted Islamic women but then some of our speakers conceded that Christianity was more friendly to science than Islam. My blood pressure was diabolical when I heard about this.

Between that and Eugenie Scott’s remark about some Christians doing evidence-based science, I wondered whose convention it really was.

It was always a risk allowing the atheist convention to go ahead, for it exposed our cause far too openly. Our only consolation is that the Victorian and Melbourne government authorities helped defray some of our costs.

Your expense claim is refused!

(This is a slightly varied version of an article to be published in New Life, Australia’s online Christian newspaper (www.nlife.com.au), on 1 May.