Why won’t it stop? I had no intention of raising religion this frequently, but right now being an atheist in Australia is like being locked in a room with a TV blaring out Religious Big Brother 24 hours a day that you can’t turn off or turn down.

Yet another mental contortionist speaking in the name of religion has gone and got himself a prominent column, this time in the Australian Literary Review magazine. Simon Caterson has a whole double-page spread all to himself to review the latest books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Michael Onfray. I am not going to reply at length. It will suffice to show a few examples of the flimflam Dr Caterson spins.

One: a stupid argument

In clinical terms, religious faith is one kind of necessary delusion that, as Cordelia Fine wittily writes in A Mind of its Own (Icon Books, 2005), is essential to our mental health. “There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed.”

Essential to our mental health. So everyone who rejects religion is mentally unwell. And the clinically depressed are more balanced and more self-aware, even the ones who have delusions that their bodies are already dead or infested with insects. Let’s call this what it is: bullshit. Wittiness can’t save it. I also wonder if the intelligent and articulate Cordelia Fine approves of the way her words have been used here.

Two: pathetic research

Research recently reported in New Scientist…

Memo Dr Caterson: New Scientist is not a research journal, and neither was Fine’s book for that matter. While NS is an excellent popular science magazine, drawing on it as a primary source is intellectual laziness, no different to referring to Time magazine as a source on mediaeval history. There’s nothing wrong with getting a first inkling from New Scientist or Time, but anyone with serious intent would then dig up the original research to check that it has been accurately reported and if it fits with other related studies before quoting it as established fact.

Three: a dash of hypocrisy

It is perhaps no coincidence that all four authors are affiliated with universities and thus qualify as what has been dubbed the secular clerisy.

Secular clerisy? In what manner are any of the aforementioned authors, or indeed academic university staff, acting as priests? Not by any honest definition. This is is especially pernicious coming from a writer who is, unless I am mistaken, a Senior Tutor at Mannix College, Monash University. Mannix College, by the way, is a Catholic residential college named after the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 to 1963. Secular clerisy, wealthy pauper, tiny giant, bright black, honest lie.

Four: selective apologism

In 1996, Pope John Paul II wrote in a letter to Catholics to inform them that the result of research carried out independently throughout the world “leads us to recognise in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis.” When you think about it, that is quite a concession.

What? Waiting 137 years to admit that evolution is “more than a hypothesis” is quite a concession? I guess it looks generous in comparison to the 359 years it took the church to apologise for its treatment of Galileo. Meanwhile the new Pope has been chipping away at John Paul’s concession as fast as he can get away with it and has supported Cardinal Shoenborn, who claimed that John Paul’s letter was “rather vague and unimportant” and would not deter him from furthering the anti-evolution cause. Some concession.

Five: deceptive quoting

He (Hitchens) is prepared to debate his adversaries publicly, unlike Dawkins, who says his presence at such events only gives them a profile they don’t deserve.

Richard Dawkins was a keynote speaker at the Beyond Belief conference in November 2006, a convocation of believers and unbelievers thrashing their views out. And on March 28 this year, Dawkins teamed up with Hitchens and A.C. Grayling to debate the affirmative that “We’d be better off without religion” against the team of Baroness Julia Neuberger, Roger Scruton, and Nigel Spivey for the negative. This debate took place in the very public Westminster Central Hall and was widely reported. Dawkins has always been happy to debate adversaries. The people he won’t debate are creationists, and the reason he won’t debate them is that they are lying parasites who set up “debates” that are really evangelical meetings designed to deflect scientific process and misrepresent evidence and who have, among other things, gained admittance to Dawkins’s home under a false pretext and repeatedly taken his quotes out of context or edited them to be deceptive. Rather like substituting “creationists” for “adversaries” to give a false meaning, actually.

Frankly I’m sick of it. If you don’t like anti-religious arguments, fine. Feel free to make counter-arguments. But at least try to make them intelligent and honest. I can’t imagine taking the opportunity of a double-page spread in a newspaper with a circulation of around 130,000 and filling it with tripe based on a skimming of popular science books and magazines. Why do so many people* think religion gives them the undiluted right to spout bullshit? And why do editors allow it?

*Pre-emptive note: this category neither includes all people with religious belief nor excludes all atheists and agnostics.