No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Quote of the day

If Alister McGrath & co. think Richard Dawkins is mean and nasty to them, they should be on their knees thanking Jesus that they weren't around at the same time as H.L. Mencken. Here's a choice excerpt from Mencken's reporting of the Scopes Trial:

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us.

This was published in the Baltimore Evening Sun on September 14, 1925. Can you imagine anything remotely similar being published in a mainstream media outlet today? Dawkins and Hitchens are milquetoasts by comparison.

When you compare the fearless denunciations of religious stupidity by Mencken and Mark Twain, or Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, with the pusillanimous bowing and scraping that today's media renders unto the religiocrats, you have to conclude that the US as a nation has gone badly backwards.