Gurdur reacts to what I wrote about PZ Myers:
I’ld say you guys (clergy and other believer bloggers) really have problems understanding what someone like PZ Myers is really like, or how he thinks, judging from many of the comments I’ve seen about PZ Myers recently. It seems an inability to understand where a general member of the public is coming from.
Various points:
– I wouldn’t in your place over-estimate "factions" among atheists. There is only one split among atheists that really matters, and because by and largely atheists are not formally organized, and atheism is largely a very loose mass phenomenon and not an organization, that essential split is often concealed by all sorts of things. Nonetheless, the split does not affect much of the overall atheist critique of religion, though it does affect very much what one wants to do about religion.
– PZ Myers doesn’t really "hate". He sneers, gets defensive, has a bit of an inferiority complex hidden away there, and in my very personal opinion after knowing him for over 10 years, he’s more than a fair bit of a twit. Nonetheless, he doesn’t (usually) "hate". He despises, grandstands, trivializes, postures, etc., and sometimes on rare occasions he actually shows some genuine feeling (and gets almost likeable on those occasions). But he by and large does not "hate", and the atheists making comments about him hating on atheists this time round are far more betraying their own agitprop angle and their own inferioity complexes than saying anything real about PZ.
– yes, a lot of it is ego. But it wouldn’t be successful unless it was tapping into a general public mood. And dealing with that public mood genuinely is essential for clergy and believers such as yourself; but that precisely is what will not happen for the most part.
Fair enough. You know him. I don’t. But it was Myers who was making a big deal about Atheist factions.