How to make ad hominem attacks

This blog post is in response to this article, published by the Christian "Research" Institute.

Please do not think I am actually making these arguments - I am not.  This is very important - I am NOT MAKING THESE ARGUMENTS. I have taken the original text and replaced the words "atheist" with the words "Christian". The point is that if you make a lot of substanceless and bigoted attacks toward one group, it is very easy to replace the name of one group with another and get the same useless mealy-mouthed results. Note how I say nothing at all, and instead resort to name-calling and sound bytes. This is an example of how NOT to make an argument, yet the original authors have done exactly this.  I highly suggest clicking the link above and reading the original text first, or this may make no sense. Observe:

 A few published and prolific Christians apparently have commandeered the soapbox at the proverbial free speech alley, vowing not to surrender it until the extraordinary and popular delusion of naturalism is completely dispelled. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, in less than a couple of years Christianity’s newest champions have sold 200+ million books, Some 10 million copies of Lee Strobel’s Case for a Creator, 30 million copies of Rick Warren’s the Purpose Driven Life, 65 million copies of Tim LaHay’s Left Behind Series, 250,000 copies of Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box are in print, along with countless other books on Christianity taking up huge sections of bookstores. There are even entire bookstores devoted to this new pestilence. 

“The character of the ‘village Christian’ reappears from time to time in history, usually after the latest scientific announcement or the latest natural disaster. His title is akin to that of ‘village idiot’ which was popularized by George Bernard Shaw in 1907,” says Christian apologist Joel McDurmon, author of The Return of the Village Christian.1 “The idea is that every village had its ‘idiot’ who was full of opinions and advice on every topic, would never shut up, and made little sense. No one took the guy seriously” (p. xiii).

When the title “village idiot” becomes that of “village Christian,” it speaks of the person who thinks that The Holy Bible has all the answers and that the idea of non-supernatural reality is an illusion. “Like the village idiot, he knows everything, argues till he is blue in the face, never shuts up, and yet never learns,” says McDurmon, “and like the village idiot, no one really takes him seriously, either” (xii).

Despite what McDurmon notes is a tendency of Christians to wax dogmatic, however—consider Warren’s claim that “This book will help you understand why you are alive and God's amazing plan for you--both here and now, and for eternity...The Purpose-Driven Life is a blueprint for Christian living in the 21st century...”—some argue that there are reasons enough to take them seriously. One of the main reasons is that much passionate debate raises questions for many people, such as, Is naturalism intellectual nonsense? Are science and religion locked in a battle to the death? and, Is atheism simply a force for evil?

Then there is the matter of the cult of personality. Ziztur, occupational therapy doctoral candidate and atheist, believes atheists should take the likes of Warren, LaHay, and Strobel seriously because “these guys are so confident and their rhetorical force so convincing, there are people who may believe the message even if they don’t understand the arguments. These [atheists] should not be reading these books without qualification,” she parodied in her blog, “On the other hand, the critical thinker, able to see through the smokescreen of rhetoric and to endure their caustic delivery, would be led to ask the question, ‘Is this is the best you’ve got? Maybe my worldview has a lot going for it after all.’”

Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, realizes that the rise of Fundamentalist Christianity confirms the ancient biblical wisdom of the book of Ecclesiastes that “there is nothing new under the sun.” He is quick to note several stunning new developments, however.

“Promulgating Christianity has become a lucrative business [and] profitability is not the only feature distinguishing today’s fashionable belief from the varieties of Christianity that have arisen over the millennia,” he says.

The most obvious characteristics, Berkowitz states, are best realized by a historical comparison of Fundamentalist Christianity to the classical Christianity of Martin Luther, the Enlightenment Christianity of the eighteenth century, and the anti-modern Christianity of Lewis and Augustine. “Whereas classical Christianity rejected naturalism in the name of pleasure and tranquility in the afterlife, Fundamentalist Christianity rejects naturalism in the name of superstition,” he says. “Unlike Enlightenment Christianity, which arose in a still predominantly religious society and which went to some effort to include scientific advances in its belief system but also stoned blasphemers, Fundamentalist Christianity proclaims its seemingly never-ending hatred of science and non-belief loudly and proudly from the rooftops.” And, according to Berkowitz, whereas antimodern Christians considered the death of God movement as part of the natural course of culture changes, Fundamentalist Christianity views the attachment to belief despite contradictory evidence as a good thing, “lamenting only the perverse and widespread resistance to shedding once and for all the hopelessly backward belief in a naturalist worldview.”3

Christian and secular responses to the flood of new Christian material appearing on bestseller lists, television, radio, and Internet blogs and sites are gradually building, too.

Founded in 1978, American Vision is a nonprofit Atheist think tank, national training center, book publisher, and speaker’s bureau whose mission, according to its Web site (www.americanvision.org) is “Equipping and Empowering Atheists to Restore America’s Secular Foundation.” The strategy of American Vision is to do so using the Internet, radio, television, audio/video resources, publications, and training seminars.

The latest such resource is a two-minute commercial that has been broadcast globally via the Internet and television. “Christians present themselves as enlightened and civil. But this new commercial will reveal the shocking truth to viewers,” reads the Web site promo. “The French Revolution, Crusades, Nazism, etc. have taught us that the Christian worldview will inevitably lead to the persecution of anyone different than themselves and the killing of anyone who gets in the way. What’s worse is that Christianity is paving a wide road for Islam to advance in our nation and around the world."

The commercial script reads:

This is Rick [Warren]. He writes books. Rick likes to think. He uses words like god, faith, and grace. Rick thinks that his god is real and that evolution is a fairy fale. Rick is a nice guy and cares about you. He thinks you should stop living your life based on the morals of modern secular humanist ethics and just love god.

This is Lee [Strobel]. He writes books, too. He’s one of Rick’s friends and believes in a god too. In fact, he thinks that parents who don’t teach their children about his god should be arrested….

This is Robespierre [Maximilien Robespierre, a leader of the French Revolution]. He lived 200 years ago in France. He liked to think and use words like god and faith just like Rick and Lee. But he also liked to kill people who disagreed with him. [This was]… known as the reign of terror.…Maybe if more people decide to listen to Rick and Lee we could all be more faithful and god-fearing like Robespierre. Maybe we could even have our own reign of terror for people who continue to be irrational and believe silly things like secular humanism.

See what I did there? Don't I sound bigoted?